Cracking Open the European Newsfeed

Abstract

This paper contributes to the ongoing effort to describe and quantify the quality of information that is shared on large social media platforms. We do this by complementing existing research that provided a first quantitative assessment of the quality of the information circulating on Facebook among US users. Leveraging an updated version of the same data source — Meta's URL Shares Dataset — and replicating much of the methodology, we quantify the trustworthy and untrustworthy links to external websites that have been shared on Facebook in the period between 2019 and 2022 in three major European countries (Germany, France, and Italy). We observe a clear decline in the number of URLs present in the dataset and an increase in the URLs from untrustworthy domains as a percentage of the total URLs shared in a year. This increase seems to be higher in electoral years (in Germany and in Italy) but it does not translate into an increase of Views received from untrustworthy sources.