Survey of post samples from 173 adult US Facebook users' feeds during October 2020 found that 54% of users saw no news within the first 10 posts of their feeds
What do people see in their Facebook feeds? How much news do they encounter there — from legitimate outlets or from those known for sowing misinformation? Tweets: @froomkin , @marklittlenews , @phmai , @niemanlab , @laurahazardowen , @laurahazardowen , @nikkiusher , @drewtewksbury , @benjamintoff , and @bostonabrams Tweets: Dan Froomkin / @froomkin : I have long suspected that the top-10 lists and aggregate numbers exaggerated the actual intake of fake news on FB's “News” feed. Maybe I was right. https://www.niemanlab.org/... https://twitter.com/... Mark Little / @marklittlenews : Wow! Majority of Americans in this study saw no political news on FB in month leading up to election (apparently “Irish court rules subway bread is not bread” was a notable exception) https://www.niemanlab.org/... Philip Mai / @phmai : How much political news do people see on Facebook? Very little... ~8%, based on a small sample of 173 users. It's inline with what FB execs hav intimated in the past. It explains their willingness to remove news links from people's feed in Australia. https://www.niemanlab.org/... @niemanlab : As journalists, we know that October 2020 was the wildest month for news in decades. But the Facebook newsfeeds of regular people tell a different story: https://www.niemanlab.org/... Laura Hazard Owen / @laurahazardowen : How much political news do people see on Facebook? In October — one of the most chaotic news months in U.S. history — I went inside 173 people's News Feeds to find out [THREAD]. https://www.niemanlab.org/... Laura Hazard Owen / @laurahazardowen : My list falls somewhere between @kevinroose's @FacebooksTop10 (which is based on @crowdtangle engagement data) and Facebook's reach-based top 10, which is based on internal data ( https://about.fb.com/...). https://twitter.com/... Nikki Usher / @nikkiusher : If we were able to do this at scale, it would be super helpful as a response to FB's data sharing issues. Two takeaways: right wing partisan news isn't fake enough to be labeled as such, and it might be that we need to deal with it; this infodemic/moral panic is... overrated Drew Tewksbury / @drewtewksbury : Interesting insights into how Facebook can flip a switch and change how our content is consumed. We saw this in the social media swandive of 2016, and watching some election coverage fall flat on Facebook (but totally thrive on Twitter) this year was a reminder to diversify. https://twitter.com/... Benjamin Toff / @benjamintoff : This is very cool. Relatively small MTurk sample, but love the initiative... We really need to know more about what people see in their news feeds. Passive tracking click-through data may only tell part of the story (and to be fair, same for CrowdTangle interaction data). https://twitter.com/... Joel Abrams / @bostonabrams : Interesting look here at the distinction between ‘most popular’ on Facebbok and what people actually see (which is not news, at least for this small sample) https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This study lands in the middle of a two-year fight over how to measure news on Facebook at all. Aggregate engagement numbers — like Kevin Roose's CrowdTangle-based rankings of the most-engaged stories — kept painting Facebook as a news-dominated hellscape, while an earlier Facebook internal report claimed users were reading more 'higher-quality' COVID-19 sources. Both sides argued from totals; this survey samples actual user feeds and finds most people encounter no news at all near the top.
Days before this published, Facebook had released its own top-link data and reignited the debate over what kind of news users really read. The Nieman finding reframes it: the argument may be about a minority experience, since a majority of sampled feeds showed no news in their first ten posts.
First-order effects
- Engagement-based framings — including Roose's CrowdTangle rankings and Facebook's own publisher totals — take a direct hit: they measure what a vocal slice engages with, not what typical users actually see, as Dan Froomkin's reaction notes.
- Publishers relying on Facebook referral traffic face a smaller effective audience than link-level totals imply, since over half of sampled users scroll past no news items early in their feeds.
Second-order effects
- Researchers and journalists are pushed toward feed-level sampling designs like this MTurk-based one instead of CrowdTangle aggregates, weakening the dataset that drove both the critical coverage and Facebook's rebuttals.
- Misinformation-exposure claims built on total engagement get harder to defend — echoing Froomkin's suspicion that top-lists exaggerated fake-news intake — forcing the 2020-era debate onto per-user evidence.
Third-order effects
- If most users' feeds contain little news at the top, Facebook's structural role as America's primary news distributor is smaller than either critics or the company claimed, with consequences for how policymakers weigh regulating it as a media gatekeeper.
- The gap between what platforms publish (aggregates, top-links) and what independent researchers can verify (sampled feeds) points toward pressure for researcher access to individual-level feed data — a tension later studies with Meta cooperation would inherit.
The trend: Measuring news on social platforms is shifting from engagement aggregates toward individual feed sampling, shrinking the apparent size of Facebook's news audience.