Researchers David G. Rand, Mohsen Mosleh, and Jennifer Allen examined about 11 million public posts from January 2024 with the goal of understanding how news quality and political slant shape engagement across seven major social media platforms. Their findings, which were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on 30 October 2025, revealed that low-quality news links, regardless of political slant, drew higher engagement.
Why Unreliable Posts Keep Beating Trustworthy Reporting Online
A sweeping analysis of 11 million posts reveals an uncomfortable truth. Unreliable news links consistently earn more attention across seven major platforms.
Background
The researchers built on earlier studies on false information by exploring how engagement patterns operate across multiple communities rather than one site. They wanted to see whether lower-quality news continued to attract disproportionate attention in a more fragmented landscape filled with contrasting design features and user cultures and subcultures.
Note that a low-quality news link is a post containing a URL from a news source that has been evaluated and scored as low quality in an expert-based rating system. These include links pointing to hyper-partisan sites that twist facts to fit a political agenda, propaganda and conspiracy theory outlets, clickbait factories, and ad-farm websites.
About 11 million public posts containing news links from January 2024 across seven social media platforms were assembled. The platforms assessed were X, Mastodon, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Truth Social, Gab, and Gettr. The researchers then matched each link to domain reliability ratings from a 2023 expert assessment covering over 11000 news sites.
Main Findings
The researchers noted that controlling for user-level factors allowed them to isolate content effects. They discovered that lower quality news links repeatedly earned more engagement per post, regardless of platform ideology or algorithmic design, pointing toward user-driven amplification rather than automated boosting. Take note of the following:
• Notable Quality Effects
Links to the lowest-rated news domains generated roughly 7 percent more engagement per post compared with links from the highest-rated domains. This effect held consistently across all seven platforms included in the January 2024 dataset.
• Ideology and Platform Averages
Platforms with conservative-leaning communities like Truth Social and Gab shared lower average quality news compared with liberal or mixed platforms. LinkedIn, Bluesky, and some areas of X displayed higher reliability in overall link sharing.
• Ideology and Engagement Variation
The relationship between political leaning and engagement differed widely across sites. Some communities interacted more heavily with conservative links. Others favored liberal ones. Platform cultures shape attention patterns in unpredictable ways.
• Algorithm Independence
Mastodon was a natural comparison because it uses a chronological feed. Low-quality links were also popular there. This showed that the pattern does not require recommendation algorithms and is strongly influenced by user choices and interests.
• Total Versus Per Post Engagement
High-quality outlets accumulated more total engagement due to more frequent sharing. But individual low-quality posts attracted more engagement per appearance. Unreliable material can exert a strong influence even when shared less often.
Implications
One major implication of the findings is that platforms built around engagement metrics may accidentally encourage attention toward unreliable material. Since lower-quality links earn more engagement per post, adjustments to algorithmic ranking alone will likely fall short. The broader design environment influences how users reward content online.
Another takeaway concerns media literacy. Audiences need clear reminders that popularity and accuracy do not move together. Educators and public institutions can help readers recognize that emotional headlines and dramatic framing can inflate engagement without providing informational value. This is especially true in fast-moving online environments.
The research also underscores the importance of assessing multiple platforms at once. The findings showed that social ecosystems differ widely, yet lower-quality engagement advantages appear everywhere. Effective policy responses consider platform-specific cultures while acknowledging the universal behavioral tendencies revealed by this research.
FURTHER READING AND REFERENCE
- Mosleh, M., Allen, J., and Rand, D. G. 2025. “Divergent Patterns of Engagement with Partisan and Low-quality News Across Seven Social Media Platforms.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 122(44). DOI: 1073/pnas.2425739122