Facebook’s Conservative Anger Appeal
The latest analyses of Facebook postings for 2021 continue to show conservative news sources are not being penalized as some claim. If anything it’s the opposite. But there’s a twist. When you examine the top postings, it becomes clear that strength comes mainly from opinion pieces. When it comes to ‘traditional’ or ‘breaking news,’ the mainstream or traditional news sources are more popular.
The analysis of those opinion pieces would also appear to confirm the testimony of the so-called Facebook “whistleblower” that hate was, or is, a primary driver of conservative traffic and that Facebook executives knew that the postings were causing harm.
Not surprisingly, politics was less dominant in 2021 than it was the year before. Of course, that’s partly because 2020 was an election year, but also partly because Trump was less of an influence. Also, not surprisingly, it appears clear that the continued strong showing by conservative sites is mainly driven by their political coverage or commentary.
“… Politics has taken a bit of a back seat,” say the analysts with the Facebook marketing analytics firm NewsWhip, “as high engagement tends to come from more conservative publications, with the mainstream audience observing the events in the White House and Capitol Hill in a more disinterested manner than before…”
The point about mainstream news sites being more popular with breaking news is shown in a number of cases cited in the report, but the one that is surprising is the coverage of the January 6th insurrection in which the top ten stories were all postings by mainstream “liberal” media with not a single conservative news publisher, including Fox “news”, making the list.
Newswhip’s Year in Review breaks out the top stories quarter by quarter:
· The insurrection and impeachment in the first quarter along with the Texas freeze
· Covid, the Delta wave and vaccinations in the second quarter along with mental health in sports related to tennis player Naomi Osaka and gymnast Simone Biles.
· The emphasis on sports continued in the third quarter with the Olympics of course but along with the issue of ‘brand partnerships’ related to Cristiana Ronaldo and (for reasons I don’t understand) the Met Gala.
· The focus in the fourth quarter was on worker demands, hiring challenges and what was labelled ‘striketober’ and the COP26 conference focusing on climate change.
That last issue is a good example of the kind of “news” coverage that drives the Fox numbers on Facebook as well as on air. The primary purpose of COP26 was to focus on climate change, and to that end, more than 20 governmental and financial institutions agreed to stop funding new overseas fossil fuel projects with public money by the end of 2022.
Is that what Fox covered? Of course not. That’s what a news organization would do, not Fox.
Instead, the “Faux News” operation scored its biggest hits with stories deriding President Biden. The concern…. Or at least my concern…. Is that this kind of ‘fake news’ appeal to the ignorant and ill-informed is working. Fox dominates the cable news audience with its right-wing appeal while the Daily Wire dominates Facebook publishing world with its alt-right postings.
The Daily Wire founded by right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro is consistently the number one Facebook publisher and the fourth quarter report by Newswhip shows this again. In that report, The Daily Wire scored nearly 110 Million likes, shares and comments on Facebook compared to just under 97 Million for NBC. But that’s not the full story. Consider this:
· The engagements for The Daily Wire are based on its single Facebook publishing site while the engagements for NBC include the network and its various affiliates.
· The Daily Wire posts very few articles, sometimes as little as one tenth that of the other major publishers but still engages huge numbers for those fewer postings.
The popularity of The Daily Wire is a testament to its understanding and connection with its primary audience. It also would seem to be a clear indicator that accusations of anti-conservative bias by Facebook are unfounded. There is more evidence to show those accusations are wrong.
Of the fifteen top web publishers on Facebook, six are definitively conservative and seven are what may be labelled by some as ‘liberal’ although it may be more accurate to call them mainstream.
— Conservative: dailywire.cm, dailymail.co.uk, foxnews.com, rumble.com, breitbart.com and theblaze.com.
— Mainstream/ Liberal: nbc.com, bbc.co.uk, cnn.com, mirror.co.uk, npr.org, nytimes, and cbsnews.com.
Again, several of those publishers that I’ve tentatively listed in the liberal column would definitely object to that label, and again, rightfully so. I am putting them in that column as a concession to the right-wing critics who label them that way. In any case, add up all the engagements by the two groups and the mainstream media sites are ‘only’ 25 Million likes shares and comments ahead of the conservative sites. And that’s out of roughly 720 Million, or a little more than 3%.
Now, all your mathematicians out there, probably realized 7 + 6 = 13. The two publishers that are not labelled in either category are Reuters which is a news wire service and definitely not biased, and legit.ng which is a Nigerian publisher that has become extraordinarily popular on Facebook.
This examination of the most popular Publishers on Facebook raises serious doubts about the allegation that Facebook is ‘anti-conservative.’ An examination of the most popular Pages on Facebook further confirm that the anti-conservative accusation is bogus. A simple review of the top pages shows that conservative pages do well with four of the top pages slanting conservative (Officialbenshapiro, Fox, dan.bongino and Breitbart) as opposed to two liberal pages (OccupyDemocrats and TheOther98).
Sports accounted for four Pages (ManchesterUnited, BleacherReportFootball, ICC (International Cricket Council) and I put soccer star Cristiano in this category as well. There are three what I call ‘fun’ Pages — thedodosite, WoofWoofTV and DoYouRememberWhen. Finally there are two Pages that are hard to categorize: womenworking and LADbibleAustralia.
An examination of the most popular Stories on Facebook further confirms my argument that opinion postings that inflame people are the primary drivers for conservative sites but that when it comes to actual, real news, most people turn to the traditional, mainstream sources.
The alt-right Daily Wire scored two of the top stories — the Kyle Rittenhouse story, which is understandable and which is news, but then an opinion piece telling people not to comply with vaccine mandates. Again, when it came to breaking news, the mainstream news sites were the ones people went to: CNN for the deaths of Betty White and Colin Powell, ABC for the Kentucky tornadoes, NPR for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery.
The fact that people will primarily look for traditional mainstream sources when it comes to ‘real’ news is confirmed by another analysis by Newswhip. This looks at the various “crises” that dominated the news cycle in the final quarter of last year: The Vaccine mandates of course, but add to that product recalls and controversial CEO’s. A variety of news sources are cited for providing the most engaged stories and virtually all of them were traditional.
In the end the point is clear. Opinion pieces drive much of the engagement online on Facebook. Much more so than straight news reports. There were some ‘feel good’ news stories that broke out, but they were few and far between. What is disturbing though is that the opinion postings that appeared to be most popular were the negative ones that either attacked people or spewed hate.
Which brings us back to the testimony of the Facebook ‘whistleblower’ Frances Haugen. In her testimony before Congress she said Facebook knew that many of those postings, especially on politics, were hate-filled but refused to implement recommendations to limit them for fear of “backlash from conservative partners.” A spokesperson for Facebook responded that those recommendations “would have actually meant fewer automated removals of hate speech.”
(I would note here those are the same ‘conservative partners’ who criticized Facebook for being anti-conservative even though, as I’ve shown, the facts do not support that allegation and in fact show it promotes conservative and ultra-conservative postings.)
In an interview with Time Magazine, Haugen brought it down to a basic level — “the reality is, we solve problems together, we don’t solve them alone.” And that is true. But it’s going to be challenging. As this analysis shows, there are groups claiming to be news that are instead inflaming the anger and hatred. And the businesses responsible for distributing that anger and hatred are doing nothing to stop it.
