In 2018, Facebook overhauled its News Feed algorithm to show more posts by family and friends, which hurt news and entertainment publishers who relied on it for traffic. Some of those publishers shut down as a result of Facebook’s changes, while others were forced to seek traffic elsewhere.

As of last week, much of the new, virus-related traffic on Facebook was flowing to mainstream news outlets. The Washington Post got 119 percent more clicks on its Facebook links during a two-week period this month than in the same period last month, while traffic to articles published by The Atlantic more than quadrupled over the same period, according to the report. The Times’s Facebook traffic has grown by 180 percent, while traffic to NBC News rose 160 percent.

In a statement, Campbell Brown, Facebook’s vice president for global news partnerships, said, “We are working overtime to help people find and share credible information right now which includes important news from local and national publishers, and expert health organizations. We’re actively testing ways to ensure people see more timely and explanatory Covid-19 related news and information, while out-of-date news gets demoted.”

Facebook’s report also listed the “news ecosystem quality” score, or NEQ, for 100 of its top publishers. Those scores, which Facebook adopted last year and has never spoken about publicly, are calculated based on a number of variables, including whether an outlet is broadly trusted by Facebook users and whether it has a history of sharing clickbait or misinformation. They are one of many factors that determine how often an outlet’s articles show up on users’ News Feeds.

Many of the highest scores listed on the report belonged to large, mainstream news organizations like CNN, The Times and The Post.

The report claimed that since early March, when stories about the coronavirus outbreak began catching on with American Facebook users, those users have sought out news from higher-quality sources than usual.

“We are continuing to see that people are on average reading Covid-19 content from higher-NEQ publishers compared to the other news links they are consuming,” it said.