Cracking Open the European Newsfeed

Summary

This paper extends Guess et al.’s (2021) US analysis of Facebook news quality to the three largest European Facebook markets — France, Germany, and Italy — between 2019 and 2022. Using Meta’s URL Shares Dataset combined with NewsGuard domain ratings, the authors document a steady decline in total URL volume, a rising share of untrustworthy URLs in electoral years (notably Germany 2021 and Italy 2022), yet a striking stability in the proportion of Views from untrustworthy domains. The paper also confirms in the European context that older cohorts dominate both exposure and sharing of low-quality news, while users under 34 play a marginal role. It doubles as a methodological critique of the URL Shares Dataset and NewsGuard as instruments for cross-national longitudinal research.

Key Contributions

• First systematic quantitative mapping of trustworthy vs. untrustworthy news circulation on Facebook in France, Germany, and Italy using Meta’s privacy-protected URL Shares Dataset.
• Geographic and temporal extension of Guess et al. (2021) through 2022, enabling intra-European comparison.
• Methodological critique of the URL Shares Dataset (especially the 100-share inclusion threshold) and of using NewsGuard ratings longitudinally, with explicit stability checks.
• Cross-national evidence on age-based asymmetries in misinformation engagement in Europe.
• Framing of results as relevant to forthcoming Digital Services Act transparency and data-access obligations.

Methods

The authors replicate and adapt Guess et al.’s (2021) pipeline (via Aslett’s 2022 public code) on Meta’s URL Shares Dataset v10.1, filtering by top_country for FR/DE/IT (and the 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 volume on Facebook declined steadily 2019–2022 across all three countries; France leads, Italy follows, and Germany has roughly half of France’s volume — consistent with Germans’ lower Facebook news use.
• Untrustworthy URL shares were ~13–14% across all three countries in 2019 but diverged sharply by 2022: France 11%, Germany ~21% (peak 2021), Italy 22% (peak 2022) — peaks aligning with national elections.
• Absolute Views and Shares of untrustworthy URLs peaked in 2020 then declined alongside the overall URL drop.
• Despite rising shares of untrustworthy URLs, the percentage of Views from untrustworthy sources stayed flat or slightly declined, suggesting platform-level dampening of exposure.
• Sharing skews older than exposure: 65+ dominate untrustworthy sharing in France (28%), 55–64 in Germany (36%), and 45–54 in Italy (33%); under-34s are marginal.
• The correlation between NewsGuard’s domain-pool composition and observed untrustworthy URLs is much stronger in US than EU data, motivating an EU-only comparative scope.

Connections

This paper sits alongside other work probing the affordances and limits of Meta’s URL Shares Dataset and Social Science One-style partnerships, particularly Gonzalez-Bailon2024-rq on exposure measurement and Bouchaud2026-lr on European platform data. Its age-cohort findings on untrustworthy sharing echo and extend US-centric results discussed in Budak2024-ef and Freelon2024-sc, while its methodological reflections on NewsGuard and threshold-induced bias connect to broader critiques of misinformation measurement in Bak-Coleman2025-pm and Allen2025-ot. The DSA-oriented framing links it to ongoing platform-governance and data-access debates represented by Rieder2025-ju and Helmond2026-ll.