Facebook’s Changes Brought Back a Partisan News Feed

The Markup monitored what happened when Facebook reversed its political ad ban ahead of the Georgia Senate runoffs.

“While Facebook’s controls were in place, we found that links to traditional news sites were present in almost all election-related posts that appeared on our Georgia panelists’ feeds. After Dec. 16, however, when Facebook flipped the switch to turn on political advertising for the Georgia election, we noticed that partisan content quickly elbowed out news sites, replacing a significant proportion of mentions of the election in our users’ feeds.”