Facebook has been criticized for exposing its users to low-quality and harmful information, including fake news, hate speech, and politically one-sided content. In December 2013 and again in August 2014, the platform updated its news feed algorithm to increase user exposure to quality content of news publishers, while curbing the proliferation of non-informative posts. This paper uses a sample of German newspapers to investigate the conjecture that these modifications raised the incentives to publish quality news stories on the platform, focusing on the number and diversity of news story posts about substantive political issues. Using the newspapers’ print editions as a counterfactual, our results indicate an increase in the amount of substantive political news on Facebook by approximately 30%. This expansion occurred in a politically balanced way, except that the outlets disproportionately increased their Facebook coverage of the formerly underrepresented Linke (Left Party). Consequently, the within-outlet concentration of political viewpoints decreased by about one half of the standard deviation of our concentration indices.

Facebook 因其让用户接触低质量和有害信息（包括假新闻、仇恨言论和政治片面内容）而受到批评。2013 年 12 月和 2014 年 8 月，该平台更新了其新闻推送算法，以增加用户对新闻发布者优质内容的曝光率，同时遏制非信息性帖子的扩散。本文使用德国报纸样本来调查这些修改提高了在平台上发布高质量新闻报道的动机的猜想，重点关注关于实质性政治问题的新闻报道帖子的数量和多样性。使用报纸的印刷版作为反事实，我们的结果表明 Facebook 上实质性政治新闻的数量增加了大约 30%。这种扩张以政治上平衡的方式发生，除了媒体不成比例地增加了他们在 Facebook 上对以前代表性不足的 Linke（左翼党）的报道。因此，政治观点的内部集中度降低了集中度指数标准差的一半左右。