Facebook’s news feed takes a right turn
Meta’s social platform keeps shifting what users see in their feed, but data shows an interesting postelection tilt.
We all know deep down that Meta’s Facebook is not the cultural hub it once was. Thanks to growth-hacking influencers, AI slop, and a generational shift away from social networks toward entertainment-focused apps like TikTok, the big blue app has lost a bit of its oomph. Its algorithm has also taken a step back from the cultural conversation, deprioritizing politics and news over the last few years, even as the platform maintains about 3 billion monthly users.
While news content doesn’t get the same kind of engagement it once did, users are still sharing it. In November, we wrote that The New York Times had beaten Facebook’s algorithm to become the most popular source for news on the site, though the former leader in the category, Catholic Fundamentalism, doesn’t post what anyone would qualify as news.
In the months since the Times’ reemergence, news publishers have once again dominated Facebook, only this time they’re ideologically far different from the Gray Lady. Over the last four months, right-wing news sites — ranging from Fox News to Breitbart — have come roaring back. So much so that it’s worth asking not just why, but how?
Facebook was once so important for news that changes to the platform’s algorithms, like its infamous 2015 “pivot to video,” completely reshaped the field of journalism. But less than a decade later, the platform seems to be actively avoiding making any decisions about the content it promotes.
In January of this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the platform would be ending its entire third-party content moderation programs, citing “political bias” and planning to replace the service with user-submitted community notes similar to X. Zuckerberg also announced that Instagram and Threads would show users political news more frequently, a reversal of Meta’s February 2024 statement that it wouldn’t proactively recommend political posts.
In the wake of Meta’s new, political ecosystem, February 2025 suddenly became Fox News’ best month on Facebook in years. Data from Newswhip shows that Fox News became one of the five biggest pages on the site in February. Meanwhile, general Facebook interactions on posts that link Fox News articles have improved 30% from January to February and 44% from their preelection average.
But it’s not just Fox News. A range of other conservative news outlets has seen just as much traffic since Election Day. In February, Breitbart News, the blog-turned-news-outlet-turned-far-right-mouthpiece that was catapulted to prominence thanks to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, had its best month on Facebook in years, with an average interaction rate that approached The New York Times’. And this change didn’t just start this month. Per Facebook’s Widely Viewed Content Report, the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post has jumped from No. 13 to the No. 9 most popular linked site on Facebook between Q3 and Q4 2024, ahead of sources like TMZ and USA Today.
But the top news articles from these right-wing sources aren’t as directly political as you might expect. Fox News’ most popular story since the election was published on February 25, when network mainstay Kat Timpf announced she had been diagnosed with breast cancer during the birth of her child. Links to the story on Facebook saw over 1.4 million interactions in three days, making it Fox’s best-performing story on the site in years. Meanwhile, the Times’ best-performing story since the election was a review of the Netflix war movie “The Six Triple Eight,” with 1.7 million interactions. Other sources that saw surges in Facebook traffic were similarly removed from the election. According to Facebook itself, the most popular news article of December was an article in People about Mark Wahlberg’s Christmas card, which it says has been viewed over 18 million times.
These heartwarming, celebrity-focused stories are consistent with what’s always done well on Facebook. Last year’s presidential election drew attention to heavier political news from places like the Times. But that’s been the exception, not the rule — and that may be why Fox News has been enjoying so much popularity.
As big as these news organizations are, Facebook is just another platform for them. The decline in Facebook traffic is a relatively minor consideration; despite Fox’s huge month on the platform, overall traffic to its website declined by 6% in February, Press Gazette reported.
But Facebook is still deeply important for smaller, web-only news platforms — which tend to skew further right. Sites like Breitbart and The Daily Wire depend on Facebook for readers, and saw huge drops in overall traffic after the site changed its recommendation algorithms in May 2023. In a hostile environment, they’ve had to adapt to survive: The Daily Wire still regularly gets several times more average engagement per Facebook post than any other news site.
This suggests Fox News could be uniquely suited to take advantage of this environment. It has the size and history to look like a serious, legacy media source, but the direct connections to the rest of the right-wing media ecosystem to be able to capitalize on Facebook users’ desire for serious news in the second Trump era.
But there may be two larger trends also happening with Facebook right now.
First: it’s possible that Facebook, even with its 3 billion users, about 250 million of which are American, is simply not the mirror of the zeitgeist it once was. The users that are still active on there and actually share content are older, more conservative, and now excitedly flooding their feeds with Fox News content at a rate other platforms don’t see.
But second, it’s also worth asking exactly how organic a shift this was, especially considering Meta’s $1 million donation to President Trump’s campaign and the fact that in January the company added Trump’s close friend, UFC head Dana White, to its board.
This brings us to a question that has hung over Facebook since its inception: are the popular posts that show up on your feed actually popular, or are they popular because they’re put in a favorable position to show up on your feed?
Garbage Day is an award-winning newsletter that focuses on web culture and technology, covering a mix of memes, trends, and internet drama. We also run a program called Garbage Intelligence, a monthly report tracking the rise and fall of creators and accounts across every major platform on the web. We’ll be sharing some of our findings here on Sherwood News. You can subscribe to Garbage Day here.
