How The New York Times beat the algorithm and became Facebook’s top publisher

As America surveys the aftermath of Donald Trump’s reelection, questions continue to swirl about what could have driven such a tremendous share of the vote toward a man who barely won the electoral vote, lost the popular vote in 2016, and lost both in 2020. But Democrats, desperate for answers, can scratch one possible culprit off their list of who to blame: Facebook. 

According to Garbage Day data, Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign trounced Trump on Facebook. And the top publisher on the world’s largest social network in the lead-up to the big vote wasn’t some far-right disinformation operation, nor was it even a right-wing tabloid. For the first time in years, the leading news outlet on Facebook was The New York Times.

Times articles have been among the platform’s most popular shared links since August. The standout articles have included election reporting, like their August article about Black men supporting Harris, as well as more general stories, like coverage of the US Open. In October, 7 of the 10 most popular articles on Facebook came from the Gray Lady. Leading the pack was the single most-shared article in more than a year since Garbage Day started tracking: the website’s ongoing coverage of Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, which included multiple references to Harris’ reaction. 

The only outgoing link shared more times all year, in fact, was the donation page for the pro-Democrat PAC ActBlue. Across Facebook, the link was shared just under 2 million times after Harris announced her candidacy in July, including 1.4 million times in the first 10 days. For comparison, the most popular Trump donation link peaked at 174,000 shares in October.

That figure is perplexing compared to actual voting results, but the emergence of the Times as the top publisher on Facebook last month is even stranger — especially when you consider the sites that have occupied that spot all year. Between November 2023 and July 2024, the most popular news articles on the platform were all from a blog called Catholic Fundamentalism. Only obituaries for beloved cultural figures like Matthew Perry and Shannen Doherty came close to breaking its run.

Making The Times’ dominance even more of an anomaly is the fact that parent company Meta has made big changes to the way Facebook’s news feed works to diminish the scale of news content. Last year, algorithmic changes were blamed for a precipitous decline in news readership. The worst of it came last May 2023, when a report with data from over 2,000 news publishers found that total traffic from Facebook had dropped by more than 50% over a single month. 

This anti-news strategy isn’t limited to Facebook. This February, Meta announced it would limit recommendations for all political content on Instagram and Threads, which would naturally include any election coverage.

But from what we can tell, Facebook users were so interested in the election that even the algorithm couldn’t stop them from reading about it. Data from Newswhip shows that the two most popular destinations for outgoing links after The Times were Fox News and The Daily Wire. But the Times remained comfortably in first place, with more than double the total clicks of the other two between August 1 and October 31. 

It’s important to put these numbers in context, though. Garbage Day data confirms that news engagement on Facebook has cratered since early last year. The Times’ popularity has sent it higher than it’s been in a while, but even still, it’s less than half of where it was in early 2023.

There are a few ways to look at this. The first and most obvious takeaway is that Facebook users, regardless of how prevalent news content is on their feeds, are still invested in current events. But if you look at The Times’ top stories on the platform last month, there weren’t any meaningful signals that readers were more or less interested in Harris or Trump. (Another reason for the Times’ supremacy could be that it has a less aggressive paywall than its closest competitor, The Washington Post.)

All of this raises some fascinating questions about this election, as well as Facebook’s cultural relevance. Even though Facebook traffic surged toward Harris in the final weeks and months before the election, many internet users seemed to not even know Joe Biden had dropped out of the race. In a reversal from 2016 and 2020, maybe this time Facebook users were actually the most well-informed news consumers of all. 

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. You can subscribe to Garbage Day here.