Facebook's year-old "improvements" to the newsfeed have elevated enraging Fox News posts to the service's dominant form

A year ago, smarting over public criticism of its role in promoting division and stoking racism, Facebook announced a major shift in its newsfeed algorithm which would downrank posts from media organizations and uprank the things sent by your friends on the network, in the name of promotion a gentler form of 'engagement' that would emphasize discourse over clickbait, which founder Mark Zuckerberg promised would be 'time well spent.'

A year later, Facebook's feeds are dominated by furious debates about abortion, religion and guns, sparked by Fox News stories shared by users' right-wing, racist friends and relatives. Fox stories attract twice as many 'angry' emojis (