Facebook internal report: US users are reading more COVID-19 content from “higher-quality” sources based on its ranking of top publishers adopted last year
> Is Facebook really a “news powerhouse” again, thanks to coronavirus? (No more than it was before) https://www.niemanlab.org/... Tom Gara / @tomgara : The top four news publishers on Facebook right now are The Daily Mirror, The Daily Mail, The Daily Wire and GoFundMe https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/... Kevin Roose / @kevinroose : New by me and @gabrieldance: As the coronavirus crisis deepens, news on Facebook is booming. More than half the news being consumed in the US is about the virus, according to an internal report we obtained. https://www.nytimes.com/... Kara Swisher / @karaswisher : Now you know it's bad if @waltmossberg is back on FB https://twitter.com/... @niemanlab : “I wanted to point this out because publishers are always making decisions about how many resources and how much emphasis to put on various social platforms or audience development efforts.” @jbenton on @nytimes calling @Facebook a “news powerhouse” again. https://www.niemanlab.org/... https://twitter.com/... Zach Seward / @zseward : Everyone is seeing a lot more traffic (more than double for us), but Facebook is its usual cesspool. The Times story in question says the top two publishers on Facebook right now are the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail. Breitbart beats MSNBC. It's the same shit as always. https://twitter.com/... Walt Mossberg / @waltmossberg : As many know, I deactivated my Facebook & Instagram accounts in 2018 because of the company's policies. But, with this pandemic, I need to keep in touch with friends & family who simply aren't on Twitter. So I'm reactivating those accounts for the duration. Then I'll quit again. Walt Mossberg / @waltmossberg : Note: I am not temporarily returning to Facebook's properties in search of reliable Coronavirus information. And I haven't changed my mind about the company's policies and actions. I just want to stay in touch with as many friends as possible. Eric Schultz / @ericschultz : “Last week, a Medium post written by a tech marketer that played down the virus's seriousness was shared on Facebook more than 50,000 times, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned data platform.” https://www.nytimes.com/... Tara McGowan / @taraemcg : “More than half the articles being consumed on @Facebook in the US were related to the coronavirus.. Overall US traffic from Facebook to other websites also increased by more than 50% last week from the week before..owing to intense interest in the virus” https://www.nytimes.com/... @niemanlab : The @nytimes claimed coronavirus is making Facebook a “news powerhouse” again. 🧐https://www.niemanlab.org/ ... Andy Kroll / @andykroll : Sure would love to know more details about what goes into Facebook's “news ecosystem quality” score... https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/... Patrick R. Johnson / @pr_johnson : The fact that Facebook is seeing such a jump in news consumption related to the virus is important. Not because people are consuming it, but because of how varying the consumption is. We need a more media literate population to combat misinformation. https://www.nytimes.com/... Zeynep Tufekci / @zeynep : One reason I highlight media failures in my article is that I watched with great frustration in February as people asked in local Facebook groups if they should travel—to Disneyland, to conferences—and decided to go as people shared these “worry about the flu, instead” articles. Deepa Seetharaman / @dseetharaman : “At times, Facebook itself seemed unsure which news sources users would turn to in a crisis, with Mr. Subramanian noting that ‘fortunately’ many people were clicking on links from publishers that the company considers high-quality.” https://twitter.com/... David Herrmann / @herrmanndigital : This is why your CPMs on cold traffic are under $5 https://twitter.com/... Joanna Stern / @joannastern : More evidence of what I wrote in my column over the weekend: People are flocking (back) to Facebook right now. https://twitter.com/... @tristanharris : Social media use soars w/ 2 billion people's insatiable appetite for coronavirus news, isolated @ home. Social media's role transitions from: 🗣 Communication tool - where we share ⬇️⬇️ 🏡 Social habitats - places we live Even more reason why tech must serve public interest. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's internal report lands mid-pandemic with a familiar claim: its publisher-ranking system, adopted the year before, is steering US readers toward 'higher-quality' sources just as coronavirus consumes more than half of all news read on the platform and outbound traffic jumps over 50% week-over-week. The catch is in Facebook's own numbers — the top four publishers are The Daily Mirror, The Daily Mail, The Daily Wire and GoFundMe, with Breitbart ahead of MSNBC, and a Medium post downplaying the virus cleared 50,000-plus shares per CrowdTangle.
That gap between 'quality' branding and the actual leaderboard is the story's engine. It foreshadows the measurement fights to come: Kevin Roose's CrowdTangle-based engagement rankings later so worried the News Feed team that they privately disputed their accuracy, and by October 2020 a feed survey found most users saw no news at all in their first ten posts — complicating the 'news powerhouse' framing.
First-order effects
- Publishers riding the surge — including tabloids like the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail and the right-leaning Daily Wire — gain pandemic-scale reach under a system Facebook itself labels 'higher-quality,' while Breitbart's rank above MSNBC hands it mainstream-cover positioning.
- Public-health messaging competes inside the same feed: the Medium post minimizing the virus shows that high sharing volume and source quality are decoupled in practice, whatever the ranking says.
Second-order effects
- CrowdTangle data becomes the battleground for legitimacy — as with Kevin Roose's engagement-ranking tweets that the News Feed team pushed back on as inaccurate — forcing Facebook to defend which metrics define 'top' content.
- Rivals and regulators get an evidentiary baseline: every future claim Facebook makes about surfacing authoritative information will be checked against leaderboards like this one, raising the cost of self-grading.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward a durable split between Facebook's internal quality narrative and independently measured outcomes — visible later in the October 2020 feed survey showing half of users saw no news at all — meaning 'news powerhouse' status depends entirely on whose measurement wins.
- Moderation policy becomes the binding constraint on any quality ranking: Facebook's refusal to remove posts absent 'imminent harm' left ranked-but-harmful COVID content live, a stance it only reversed in February 2021 after the damage was documented.
The trend: Platform self-assessments of content quality during crises are increasingly contradicted by independent engagement and feed-level measurements, making third-party data tools like CrowdTangle the de facto arbiters of what social networks actually amplify.