Citizen Browser

Split Screen
How Different Are Americans’ Facebook Feeds?

Snapshots from the Facebook feeds of our Citizen Browser panelists illuminate how Facebook’s recommendation algorithm siloes information on the platform. See how we built this tool

Facebook’s recommendation algorithm shows different news, groups, and hashtags to different users. But who sees what? Split Screen attempts to answer that question with real world data from paid panelists as part of The Markup's Citizen Browser project. Now showing two weeks of data collected from to .

Shown more to Biden Voters Trump Voters Women Men Millennials Boomers
Shown more to Biden Voters Trump Voters Women Men Millennials Boomers

The dial compares how often the content was shown to one grouping over the other. You can tap onhover over a dial to view our analysis and a breakdown of the numbers.

Biden Voters Trump Voters Women Men Millennials Boomers

panelists

Biden Voters Trump Voters Women Men Millennials Boomers

panelists

Split Screen cannot reverse-engineer Facebook’s recommendation algorithm, and none of our observations should be treated as causal claims that Facebook has targeted a specific piece of content at a specific group. Using data collected from our Citizen Browser panel, we are only able to demonstrate what Facebook’s recommendations algorithm surfaced to users aggregated by their self-disclosed political leanings, gender, and age. For more information on the limitations, see our methodology.

Content shown on Split Screen is not necessarily the most seen or interacted with by our panelists. We compare the percentage of each group that was served each piece of content. The bigger the difference in percentage between each demographic in a pair, the higher the rank, or position, of the content.

If you see something that you didn't expect and think we should know about it, email us at splitscreen@themarkup.org

One share of Facebook stock

How much is one Facebook share you ask? As of the day we launched Split Screen, one Facebook share was $273.88. Giving us that amount, or whatever you can swing, allows us to hold them to account.

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