A landmark study of how Facebook shaped the news users saw in the run-up to the 2020 election has found the platform resulted in “significant ideological segregation” in regard to political news exposure — specifically with conservative users who researchers found were more walled off and encountered far more misinformation than their liberal counterparts. 

Looking at aggregated data from 208 million U.S. users, researchers found “untrustworthy” news sources were favored by conservative audiences and almost all (97%) of the political news webpages rated as false by Meta’s third-party fact-checkers were seen by more conservatives than liberals.

Overall, the research, led by Sandra González-Bailón, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, found that Facebook’s pages and groups, more than users’ friends, contributed more to this ideological segregation and polarization. In general, it concluded that conservative sources dominated Facebook’s news ecosystem.