The Facebook Privacy-Protected Full URLs Dataset was released to enable independent, academic research on the impact of Facebook's platform on society while ensuring user privacy. The dataset has been used in several studies to analyze the relationship between social media engagement and societal issues such as misinformation, polarization, and the quality of consumed news. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the engagement with popular news domains, covering four years from January 2017 to December 2020, with a focus on user engagement metrics related to news URLs in the U.S. By incorporating the ideological alignment and composite score of quality and reliability of news sources, along with users' political preferences, we construct weighted averages of ideology and quality of news consumption for liberal, conservative, and moderate audiences. This allows us to track the evolution of (i) the ideological gap in news consumption between liberals and conservatives and (ii) the average quality of each group's news consumption. We identify two major shifts in trends, each tied to engagement changes. In both, the ideological gap widens and news quality declines. However, engagement rises in the first shift but falls in the second. Finally, we contextualize these trends by linking them to two major Facebook News Feed updates. Our findings provide empirical evidence to better understand user behavior and engagement with news and their leaning and reliability during the period covered by the dataset.

翻译：Facebook隐私保护完整URL数据集的发布旨在支持独立学术研究，以探究Facebook平台对社会的影响，同时确保用户隐私。该数据集已被多项研究用于分析社交媒体参与度与错误信息、两极分化和所消费新闻质量等社会问题之间的关系。本文对热门新闻领域的参与度进行了全面分析，涵盖2017年1月至2020年12月共四年时间，重点关注美国用户对新闻URL的参与度指标。通过整合新闻源的意识形态倾向、质量与可靠性的综合评分，以及用户的政治偏好，我们构建了自由派、保守派和中间派受众新闻消费的意识形态与质量加权平均值。这使我们能够追踪（i）自由派与保守派之间新闻消费的意识形态差距，以及（ii）各群体新闻消费的平均质量的演变。我们识别出趋势中的两次重大转变，每次均与参与度变化相关。在这两次转变中，意识形态差距均扩大，新闻质量均下降。然而，第一次转变中参与度上升，第二次则下降。最后，我们将这些趋势与Facebook新闻推送的两项重大更新联系起来，以提供背景解读。我们的研究结果为更好地理解数据集覆盖期间用户行为、新闻参与度及其倾向性与可靠性提供了实证证据。