Rossi, L., Giglietto, F., & Marino, G. (2023). Cracking Open the European Newsfeed. Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media. https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2023.020
Summary
This paper extends Guess et al.’s (2021) US-based analysis of Facebook news quality to Germany, France, and Italy from 2019–2022, using Meta’s URL Shares Dataset paired with NewsGuard domain ratings. The authors find that while the overall volume of URLs shared on Facebook declined across all three countries, the share of URLs from untrustworthy domains rose in Germany and Italy — peaking in national election years — even as the proportion of Views from untrustworthy sources remained relatively stable. As in the US, older cohorts dominate both exposure to and sharing of low-quality content. The paper doubles as a methodological reflection on the limits of privacy-protected platform datasets and third-party trust ratings for cross-national research.
Key Contributions
- First systematic cross-national quantitative description of trustworthy vs. untrustworthy news circulation on Facebook in France, Germany, and Italy.
- Temporal (through 2022) and geographic (EU) extension of Guess et al. (2021).
- Methodological critique of Meta’s URL Shares Dataset (especially the 100-share threshold) and of using NewsGuard ratings longitudinally, with explicit stability checks.
- Empirical documentation of age-skewed engagement with untrustworthy content in European contexts.
- Framing of findings against forthcoming EU Digital Services Act transparency and researcher access obligations.
Methods
The authors replicate and adapt Guess et al. (2021), filtering Meta’s URL Shares Dataset v10.1 by top_country for DE, FR, IT (and US for comparison). Domains are classified as trustworthy (≥60) or untrustworthy (<60) using an October 2022 NewsGuard snapshot of 8,506 rated domains, applied retrospectively after verifying that only ~1–3% of domains changed category over 2019–2022. NewsGuard coverage is benchmarked against the Lasser-Rupp list, Media Bias/Fact Check, and Grinberg et al. (2019). Confidence intervals account for differential privacy noise (σ=14 for shares, σ=2,228 for views), and Views/Shares are disaggregated across six age cohorts.
Findings
- URL volumes on Facebook declined steadily 2019–2022 in all three countries; France leads in volume, Germany trails (consistent with lower Facebook news use).
- Untrustworthy URL shares started around 13–14% across countries in 2019 but diverged by 2022: France ~11%, Germany ~21% (peak 2021), Italy 22% (peak 2022) — peaks aligning with election years.
- Absolute Views and Shares of untrustworthy URLs peaked in 2020 before declining with the overall volume.
- The proportion of Views from untrustworthy sources stayed stable or slightly declined despite rising untrustworthy URL shares, suggesting platform-level dampening of exposure.
- Sharing of untrustworthy content skews older than exposure: 65+ dominates in France (28%), 55–64 in Germany (36%), 45–54 in Italy (33%); under-34 users play a marginal role.
- US data show a stronger correlation between untrustworthy-domain coverage in NewsGuard and untrustworthy URLs in the dataset than European data — a key reason to restrict comparative analysis to the EU.
Connections
This paper is a direct European extension of the Guess et al. replication tradition and shares infrastructure and framing with other work using Meta’s URL Shares Dataset and Social Science One-era partnerships, notably Gonzalez-Bailon2024-rq and the broader exposure-measurement agenda in Budak2024-ef. Its age-cohort findings resonate with US work on the outsized role of older users in low-quality news diffusion, connecting to Allen2025-ot and Freelon2024-sc. The methodological reflections on platform data access and DSA-era transparency link it to Rieder2025-ju, Rieder2026-pp, and Bechmann2026-dr, while its Italian-electoral framing sits alongside Giglietto2022-b30e8b4e and Giglietto2026-632ef967.