Hinweis: Ganz am Ende des Artikel findet ihr einen Chatraum und könnt über den Artikel diskutieren. Ihr seht auch rechts, falls ihr bereits Mitglied seid, einen schwebenden Chat-Button. Jeder kann mitdiskutieren in Echtzeit, ohne Registrierung.
Ein Daumen tippt auf „Teilen“. Der Artikel dahinter bleibt ungeöffnet. Die Überschrift reist allein weiter, zu Freunden und in fremde Gruppen, mit einer Behauptung, deren Beleg niemand angesehen hat. Der Beweis liegt einen Fingerbreit entfernt, hinter einem einzigen Klick, und niemand hebt ihn auf. Auf Facebook genügt das. Dort ist die Überschrift bereits die ganze Welt.
A thumb taps "Share." The article behind it stays unopened. The headline travels on by itself, to friends and into other groups, carrying a claim whose evidence nobody has even looked at. The proof is sitting one fingertip away, behind a single click, and nobody picks it up. On Facebook, that's enough. There, the headline is already the whole world.
Researchers have counted how often this happens. S. Shyam Sundar of Pennsylvania State University and Eugene Cho Snyder of the New Jersey Institute of Technology presented a study on it. Mengqi Liao of the University of Georgia and other researchers were also part of the team. The work appeared in 2025 in the journal Nature Human Behaviour and analyzed more than 35 million public Facebook posts. Around 75 percent of shared news links were passed along without users ever clicking on the article first. Extreme and politically agreeable content was especially likely to travel unread. Among 2,969 links rated as false, conservative users accounted for 76.94 percent of the sharing, liberals for 14.25 percent. A large share of those false reports came from conservative sources, the authors stress. That is how you get a political public where the headline wins before anybody has read the first sentence.
Read also our article: Facebook trains people to hand over their sense of direction - a gift to right-wing populism
Which side feeds off this system has been measured. Jingyuan Yu and Emese Domahidi of Ilmenau University of Technology studied it. They worked with Duccio Gamannossi degl’Innocenti of the University of Padua and Fabiana Zollo of Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Their 2026 study covers more than 400,000 posts from 3,277 politicians. They came from Germany and Italy, along with the United Kingdom and the United States. In Germany, 8.2 percent of links shared by AfD politicians led to misinformation. For the Left Party, it was 0.2 percent, for CDU/CSU 0.1 percent. Republican politicians in the United States came in at 4.6 percent, Democrats at 1.0 percent. The highest figures were found among far-right and conservative lawmakers in countries with intense political polarization. An opinion about right-wing communication would be easy to argue with. These numbers were counted.
Link to the NBC article: How Mark Zuckerberg Shifted Meta to the Right
Mohsen Mosleh and Qi Yang reached the same finding in a large analysis published in Nature. Tauhid Zaman and Gordon Pennycook were also involved. David Rand and other researchers were part of the team as well. They first analyzed around 9,000 politically active Twitter users around the 2020 U.S. election. Then they tested the result against 7 additional datasets from a total of 16 countries. The data came from Twitter and Facebook, along with survey experiments. Conservative or Republican-leaning users consistently shared significantly more links to often low-quality news sources than liberal or Democratic-leaning users. Alongside experts, politically balanced groups of ordinary people also rated the quality of the sources. As a test, even groups made up entirely of Republican laypeople evaluated them. The gap remained. For the platforms themselves, that is still pretty hard to explain away. The authors caution against treating these users as representative of the entire population, but sharing Democratic reports, or reports warning about what is happening, has ended up down in the basement. Reading them, sure. Much more than that, usually not.
Then there is the mechanics of reach. Joe Watson and Sander van der Linden measured it. Together with Michael Watson and David Stillwell, they examined 95,282 news articles and more than 579 million posts on Facebook and Twitter. Users shared links to negatively framed articles 1.91 times as often as links to less negatively framed ones. Anger and fear start with a built-in advantage. Enemy images even more so. Careful reporting that provides context and leaves room for doubt is competing against content whose emotional construction already fits the logic of social networks better.
Link to the study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-71263-z
Facebook has trained millions of people not to go looking for news anymore, but to wait for it to come to them. Earlier studies already showed that more than 62 percent of Facebook news users mostly came across information there by accident. Today, not even half of users say news is a reason they visit Facebook at all, yet they still run into it constantly in the feed. Anyone who barely understands the algorithm is handing over a huge part of their own selection to it. A 2025 study by An Hu and Min Ou showed that people only start actively searching for news more often once they become more aware of how the platform sorts things in advance.
The studies come from different years and different teams. They still arrive at the same place. The platform favors what triggers people quickly, and right-wing senders provide more of that than average. Trump and his political allies benefit from an information environment where emotional and extreme content travels structurally more easily than time-consuming reporting. Simplified material gets through faster too. Meta, meanwhile, uses its recommendation and reach systems to decide what billions of people see more often and what they do not, regardless of whether an individual user actually wants or marked that information. People see what they are shown and take it for what is happening.
The Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford looks at the same development from the other side. According to its Digital News Report 2026, traditional media continue to lose reach in many countries. Social networks and video platforms are gaining influence and, for the first time, have become the most widely used source of news worldwide. 54 percent use them for news, while media outlets' own websites and apps reach 51 percent. The same applies to political figures and other players outside traditional newsrooms. The institute describes a further move away from direct news consumption toward platforms where professional media compete for attention with online personalities and other providers. Particularly striking: 12 percent now get their news exclusively through social networks and video platforms, twice as many as in 2020. Facebook remains the single biggest platform for news at 43 percent. Passive consumption is especially troubling. The Reuters Institute also writes that most people on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok do not actively look for news. They come across it while they are there for something completely different. That means the recommendation system increasingly decides which news item even appears in front of them.
Link to the study: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2026
Even where disinformation online reaches fewer people overall than major news outlets, Facebook shows an ugly exception. In France and Italy, the institute found individual misinformation sites that matched or exceeded established news brands in Facebook interactions. One single site studied in France generated an average of more than 11 million interactions a month, around 5 times as many as more established news outlets in that comparison. Outside Facebook, its reach was significantly smaller. The interaction count there says more about the platform itself than anything else. It says very little about how much people outside it actually care. A dwarf casts the shadow of a giant there.
Read also our article: The Judge Opens the Door, Trump Takes CNN’s Seat on Air Force One - Far-Right Outlets Broadcast State Visit
America has reached yet another absolute low: A state visit is now being broadcast live across the country by the far-right outlets Real America’s Voice and Steve Bannon’s WarRoom, while established news organizations have to fight for access to the president.
America has reached yet another absolute low: A state visit is being broadcast live across the country by the far-right networks Real America's Voice and Steve Bannon's WarRoom, while established newsrooms have to fight for access to the president.
Trump's administration is aggressively pushing the expansion of AI and data centers, while Zuckerberg benefits directly from it. That is another point where the shared economic interests of the two men are becoming more important.
Reporters Without Borders has been warning for years about this development at Meta. At the same time, the organization speaks of systematic attacks by Trump on press freedom and lays the two developments side by side. On one side are Trump's attacks on critical media. On the other is Meta's retreat from fact-checking, tied to reduced visibility for journalistic content. Then there is a course Zuckerberg himself sells as free speech. It is hard to get more grotesque than that. As early as the beginning of 2025, Reporters Without Borders explicitly wrote that this course was meant to show loyalty to Trump. It made access to reliable information and independent journalism harder.
Links to Reporters Without Borders:
„Meta’s ten-year war of attrition against journalism“
January 10, 2025: RSF traces 10 years of Meta policy against professional journalism and describes a technical, economic and political structure that pushes quality journalism down on the platforms.
RSF Calls for Advertiser Pressure on Meta
January 27, 2025: RSF describes a "relentless assault on journalism" and explicitly calls on advertisers to put pressure on Meta. Algorithms should favor reliable journalistic sources, clearly distinguish journalists from online personalities, and strengthen authentic journalistic content over manipulated material.
Current Fight Over Meta and News in Canada
August 26, 2026: RSF points out that since 2023, Meta has largely blocked news content on Facebook and Instagram in Canada rather than participate in the country's legally mandated compensation system. In February 2026, a group of independent local television stations asked Canadian regulators to force Meta into negotiations. The dispute remains unresolved.
Reporters Without Borders already took Facebook to court in 2021, accusing the company of deceptive business practices because it promised a safe information environment while hate, threats against journalists and disinformation were being spread millions of times over. Since then, RSF has repeatedly warned about Meta's treatment of journalism and freedom of information.
How tightly this machine grabs hold becomes clear when you look at the youngest users. Are teenagers being deliberately pulled into harmful use? Courts are now fighting over that question. 29 U.S. states accuse Meta of deliberately designing Facebook and Instagram to keep children hooked for as long as possible. They point, among other things, to endless scrolling and autoplay. On top of that come highly personalized recommendations. The states claim Meta accepted known risks of depression and self-harm in order to keep usage high. They even include the risk of suicide. Meta denies deliberately making children addicted. But a court in New Mexico went very far in 2026. It found that Meta had created a public danger through addictive design and inadequate protection of minors, and among other things ordered $567 million for a youth mental health fund. The EU is now also officially accusing Meta of failing to adequately control addictive features. A child who cannot stop scrolling is the perfect user for this business.
The right-wing firebrand often needs 12 words. The journalist needs documents and sources, and above all, time. Facebook then decides which one reaches a million people first. For right-wing conservative forces, a platform world with less fact-checking and weakened professional journalism is favorable ground. For a democracy, it is extremely dangerous. A president who attacks critical media and strips away their access meets a platform owner whose systems can demonstrably reward emotional and extreme content disproportionately. Low-quality sources included. When that same platform owner scales back journalistic oversight while moving closer to an administration that regularly treats independent journalism as an enemy, a danger zone opens up for the entire society. As long as Facebook is carried by its users and the simplistic beats democracy, the right-wing channels will keep gaining ground.
This connection needs tough public scrutiny and independent journalism. It needs political and social resistance against any further concentration of information power in the hands of a few. Independent journalism, in turn, survives only as long as readers support it, especially when no platform is giving it reach. We are also suing Meta (Facebook).
Why we are suing:
Anyone who wants right-wing populism not to simply get passed along, who wants violations of human rights and international law documented, who wants us to stand up to the Trump regime, who wants ICE deaths not to disappear into a case number, who wants innocent people locked up in ICE facilities to be seen, who wants right-wing populism stopped in Europe too, who wants the Iran war scrutinized, and who wants facts on climate change to count for more than the volume of those denying them, is directly helping us do exactly that. Every day, an icy wind blows in our faces, and we keep going anyway.
Read also our article: Facebook puts a warning on investigative journalism - and its own support team says in writing that no one can review it
Anyone who wants right-wing populism not to simply be passed along, who wants violations of human rights and international law documented, who wants us to stand up against the Trump regime, who wants ICE deaths not to disappear into a case number, innocent people imprisoned in ICE facilities, right-wing populism stopped in Europe too, the Iran war scrutinized and facts on climate change to count for more than the volume of those denying them, is directly helping us do exactly that. Every day, an icy wind blows in our faces and we keep going anyway.
Updates – Kaizen News Brief
Alle aktuellen ausgesuchten Tagesmeldungen findet ihr in den Kaizen Kurznachrichten.
To the Kaizen News Brief In English
Ich sag nur Bildzeitung!
Die SCHLGzeile, die den Nacken Trifft!
Ausgesuchte *Fette* Texte überwinden
den Bereich Sozialkompetenz und landet im Stammhirn, im Bereich Alarm und Angriff!
Da bleibt nicht viel für den „Homo Sapiens“, dem vernunftbegabten!
… ein Blatt, was die Welt nicht braucht, leider gibt es viele dieser Art aktuell
Dieser Artikel ist mir aus der Seele gesprochen! Es ist wirklich erschreckend, wie viele nur eine Überschrift lesen, ohne den zugehörigen Text auch nur aufzurufen.Das sieht man dann deutlich an den Kommentaren.
Außerdem sind viele dieser Überschriften außerordentlich irreführend formuliert, mit Absicht.
BILD Niveau, dieses Blatt hatte schon immer eine Klientel, die bildungsfern war, nur großgedruckte Schlagzeilen geleden hst und Bilder angeguckt.
Als 68er war mir das schon bekannt.(hab 68 Abi gemacht).
Aber diese Klientel ist gewachsen, man hinterfragt nicht, konsumiert lieber, ist bequemer.
Ich teile nur, was ich gelesen habe, hole mir meine Nachrichten selber zusammen, möglichst breit gestreut, und gut recherchiert.
Genauso im TV, da ist für mich Phönix informativ, wo Debatten etc.live übertragen werden, Gesprächsrunden gut moderiert und sachlich verlaufen.
Genauso meine regionalen Nachrichten, wir haben hier ein Bürgerforum aus unabhängigen Journalisten, das auch hinterfragt, und öffentliche Diskussionsrunden veranstaltet.
Den Kaizen Blog habe ich per whatsapp abonniert, lese aber auch hier bei fb
… vielen Dank. Das mit dem Bürgerforum ist eine gute Sache und man muss sich neu sortieren. Das größte übel ist aber Facebook, aber der Weg wird lang sein, bis die meisten das verstehen. Das erleben wir selber. Aber wir ziehen durch und das mit einem lächeln …
Einmal: Interessant, dass Wissenschaftler in den USA diese Daten noch zusammentragen dürfen. Und psychologisch: Spannend live zu erleben, wie relativ Wahrheit ist und wie einfach der Wahrheitsbegriff im großen Stil in eine Richtung verschoben werden kann. Interessant ist dabei auch, wer hier besonders anfällig für das Prinzip „wir gegen die“ ist. Episch heroisch… Und wie offen und skrupellos persönliche Bereicherung und Korruption gezeigt wird, ein menschliches Wesen nichts wert ist und die Menschheit geopfert wird. Ohne mit der Wimper zu zucken. Das ist für mich persönlich das Krasseste überhaupt.
… ja, und dadurch geht jeden Tag ein wenig Demokratie mehr verloren, aber die wenigsten wollen etwas ändern. Wir erleben es jeden Tag, lassen uns aber nicht unterkriegen 🙂