A look at the debate over the kind of news Facebook users are reading, after Facebook released more data on top performing link posts in the US
What kind of news does the news feed feed when the news feed does feed news? — Since July, New York Times journalist Kevin Roose … Tweets: @willoremus . Thanks: @dlberes See also Mediagazer Tweets: Will Oremus / @willoremus : I wrote about what news people are actually reading on Facebook, how @FacebooksTop10 goaded the company into releasing the kind of data we need, and why it still isn't nearly enough. https://rsci.app.link/... Thanks: @dlberes See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Since July, New York Times journalist Kevin Roose has used his @FacebooksTop10 account to tweet the most-engaged stories on Facebook via CrowdTangle — tweets that, per sources, worried the News Feed team enough that they privately dismissed them as inaccurate. Facebook releasing official data on top-performing US link posts is a direct concession to that pressure.
The release matters because outside researchers otherwise have to reconstruct the feed themselves: a later survey sampling feeds from 173 adult US users found 54% saw no news at all in their first ten posts, underscoring how little visibility anyone has into what Facebook actually surfaces.
First-order effects
- Journalists like Roose gain a company-sourced baseline for what performs on Facebook, but one they can no longer be accused of distorting — while Facebook's News Feed team loses its private rebuttal that third-party CrowdTangle tallies were inaccurate.
Second-order effects
- Publishers and researchers now have a template to demand: if Facebook can release top-link data once, selective disclosure becomes negotiable rather than a favor, raising the cost of future refusals to share engagement data.
Third-order effects
- The standoff points toward a durable conflict over who measures the feed — Facebook's own position, later visible in [[a:972953|internal documents defending algorithmic ranking on the grounds that it knows what users want better than they do]], means platform self-reporting will keep colliding with independent audit demands unless regulators or data-access mandates settle the question.
The trend: Social platforms are being forced from ad-hoc transparency gestures toward contested, recurring disclosure of engagement and ranking data as journalists and researchers build independent measurement practices.