Facebook Faces Off With Trump
Before he was kicked off Facebook for ‘incendiary’ postings, Trump was a driving force on Facebook. For starters, he had the number one Page on Facebook for the final 4th quarter of last year. A whopping 460 Million “engagements” far ahead of second place oddity site, SarcasmLol with 370 Million and more than double every other Page.
On top of that he scored the largest number of reactions for Posts by him in three categories: ‘Comments,’ ‘HaHa’ and ‘Angry,’ according to an analysis of ‘engagements’ on the platform by analytics firm, Newswhip. And there’s more.
Postings about Trump also scored highly. NBC’s posting of his comments about the stimulus bill scored the #1 spot in terms of Facebook comments overall. And the story about about Trump and his wife testing positive for Covid-19 scored well for multiple publishers including, oddly enough, little WAFB.com, the CBS TV station in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Its posting drew more comments and engagement than the same story posted by big publishers, like CNN, The Daily Kos, and The Blaze.
That fact is one of many quirks that the Newswhip analytics report shows. However, while the postings about him tell one story, the postings by him tell an even more interesting story. The question is — what does that tell you?
Let me suggest some thoughts. First, some disclaimers:
— Newswhip’s analysis provides a variety of factors to consider. It is sometimes confusing to differentiate the numbers related to Posts versus the numbers related Pages. They provide different measurements and insights. Posts are what we’ll show next.
— Newswhip provides two sets of overviews — one showing ALL Facebook postings and pages and another set showing Publishers’ postings and pages.
— Newswhip defines “engagements” as the total of Likes, Shares and Comments. One might argue that a comment is a greater degree of engagement than a like and a share is even more engagement.
— Newswhip also provides a separate set of analytics for what is called ‘Native Video.’ This is video that is posted TO Facebook as opposed to video that is linked to Facebook from elsewhere. The next set of data is for native video.
- Not surprisingly, Trump scored the highest in terms of ‘angry’ responses: - 194,541 with a posting about ‘stolen elections.’ That’s about 2% of the top reaction postings.
- Not too surprisingly, Trump also scored the highest of ‘comment’ postings — 637,649 with, surprisingly, a Merry Christmas wish. That’s about 7.5% of the total top reactions.
- Surprisingly, Trump also scored highest in terms of ‘HaHa’posts — 732,711 with an anti-Biden meme. That’s about 8.7% of the total top Post reactions.
- For comparison, Trump’s total for all three was 1,564,901. Obama got the most “loves” with 1,407 141.
To put their reactions in perspective, the top scorer in the category of POSTS was a Christmas wish from a Portuguese soccer player named Cristiana Ronaldo with 2,925,165 “likes.” That’s nearly as much as Trump and Obama combined. Of course, ‘likes’ are the easiest and most often posted reaction, accounting for more than half (62%) of all reactions.
On the political side of the ledger, you can see the divide in the country reflected in a way in the Facebook Page reactions under ‘native video.’ Interestingly, just like Trump, Fox News scored highest in the ‘Comment’ category and the ‘Angry’ category. CNN and Occupy Democrats may be considered on the ‘left side’ of the political ledger, with Occupy Democrats scoring in the important ‘Share’ reaction while CNN took the lead, interestingly enough, in ‘Sad’ reactions.
Politics and political news continues to be the dominant driver on Facebook when you look at who are the major players when it comes to ‘web publishing’ in the fourth quarter. But that is not true when you look at the level of engagement for individual stories.
One of the criticisms you often hear about Facebook is that it leans liberal. That is not borne out by the facts when you look at the analytics provided. As noted earlier, Trump had the number one page on Facebook by a wide margin. Even more telling when you look at the top pages, only one “liberal” or “progressive” political site made the list — Occupy Democrats. But two definitively conservative sites scored highly — Fox News and Breitbart.
Add to that debate the Top 15 Web Publishers on Faccebook as provided by Newswhip. Four of them are definitively conservative while nine of them may be considered ‘progressive’ or liberal. That would seem to indicate that there is a liberal bias although many of the news sites might object to being labelled liberal.
I lumped all clearly ‘non-conservative’ sites as liberal. Based on that admittedly distorted labeling, nearly two-thirds (62%) of the publishers would fall into that category while more than a third (38%) would be considered ‘conservative.’
It is a significantly different story when you look at the numbers for ‘conservative’ versus ‘progressive’s sites in regard to stories published. Then it is virtually an even split — 49.5% conservative and 50.5% progressive.
As a final note, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has referred the ban on Trump to an Oversight Board. The board is made up of journalists, politicians and leaders from around the world and is supposed to be completely independent. Zuckerberg says he will abide by its decision.
Meanwhile another group has formed what it calls the Real Facebook Oversight Board. It is pushing for the ban on Trump to be made permanent.
