Low-Quality News Posts Get 7% More Engagement Than Quality Journalism

University of Oxford researcher Mohsen Mosleh analyzed over 10 million posts across seven social media platforms, finding lower-quality news sources consistently outperformed high-quality outlets. Posts linking to fringe sites received about 7% more engagement than those linking to BBC, Reuters, and The Associated Press. The study examined X, BlueSky, TruthSocial, Gab, GETTR, Mastodon, and LinkedIn, covering 11,520 news domains rated by professional fact-checkers and journalists. The pattern suggested user preferences drive engagement rather than algorithms. High-quality journalism still dominated by total volume and overall engagement, but underperformed on a per-post basis. Conservative content performed better on conservative-leaning platforms while liberal content succeeded on liberal-leaning sites, but the quality gap remained consistent across all political orientations. (Story URL)