Facebook’s Left Right Roundabout
One conservative publisher may be doing more to set the conservative agenda than any of the conservative media sites normally cited by politicians and journalists. As I’ve noted before, conservative publishers dominate political discussions on Facebook, according to data reported by the traffic monitoring service NewsWhip. And most of that dominance can be attributed to the one source — The Daily Wire created by political commentator Ben Shapiro. Half and sometimes more of the top ten political postings each week in the last month came from it.
It accounted for 21 of the 40 top political posts cited from the weeks running from May 21 to June 11th. By way of perspective, Fox News had only two stories that made it into the top ten. Other conservative publishers to score were The Western Journal (2), The Daily Signal (1), the Statesman (1), The Blaze (1), The Washington Times (1), The Rumble (1) and Bongino (1). For those mathematically challenged journalists, that adds up to 31. Three-quarters of the top ten political posts were by conservative publishers, some of whichcould be rightfully labelled ‘alt-right’ such as the (my personal opinion) Bongino.
So what does that leave for the ‘liberal’ or ‘mainstream’ news media? The Washington Post did best with… a ‘whopping’ three stories to hit the top ten. The others: The New York Times (1), The Hill (1), NBC (1) and NPR (1). Still doing the math? That leaves two spots unaccounted for. And here’s the second big takeaway. The other big scorer was publisher American Military News. At this point, you’re saying… “Michael, why isn’t this in the conservative column?” That’s because, according to MediaBiasFactCheck, it is actually one of the ‘least biased’ publishers on Facebook. Surprise!
Its top story and the one that scored the number one spot came in May with its report on the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision that “warrantless gun confiscation is unconstitutional.” It scored an incredible 1.3 Million ‘engagements.’ (Newswhip defines engagements as the total of likes, comments, and shares.) That same story was responsible for Bongino’s one story to make the top ten.
Somewhat humorously the ‘liberal’ publisher, The Hill, scored its one top story with a report on Trump appearing on Bongino’s show.
For News scored the top spot with a posting about Florida Governor DeSantis prohibiting transgender athletes from competing in female sports.
The Daily Wire scored the top story in the second week of June with its ‘report’ on the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision that illegal immigrants do not have a right to a green card.
Lastly one of the reasons for the success of The Daily Wire may not be evident, just looking at the total ‘engagements.’ Again, NewsWhip simply adds up the total likes, shares and comments. However, when you look at the number of postings versus the number of engagements, The Daily Wire’s postings have many, many more shares, likes and comments. It averages less than 2,000 posts to get its level of engagements while many of the other sites post five, six and sometimes ten times that number.
Liberals and Progressives accuse Facebook of favoring conservative publishers, but the response rate for The Daily Wire postings would seem to validate Facebook’s claim that the right-wing media sites are just better at engaging people.
“…the right is better at connecting with people on a visceral level…”
Critics, which include many former Facebook executives, don’t entirely dismiss the argument that the conservative appeal is more emotional than rational but argue that such appeal is being played up because of the Facebook algorithms. As one former Facebook executive put it, the algorithms are actually acting as an “accelerant.”
Both arguments are undoubtedly factors, but there may be one other explanation that plays into the equation. It is the KISS principle — Keep It Simple, Stupid. The U.S. Navy first adopted in 1960 and which many organizations have adopted. It’s the idea that most systems work best if they are kept basic rather than complicated. The same can be said about messaging. Although The Daily Wire’s editor-in-chief John Bickley doesn’t use that term. That is the underlying theme when he says their stories have “a clearer perspective or stronger take on stories.”
Progressive and mainstream publishers may want to consider that approach if they want to improve the likes, shares and comments on their postings. Then again, one could argue that would be a ‘dumbing down’ of issues. Maybe the best approach is to take the approach reportedly voiced by Albert Einstein:
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
Republicans and Democrats alike believe that the solution to what both sides see as a bias against them is to reign in the power of the social media giants, especially Facebook. While there may be some legitimacy to those arguments, it may also be that they’re simply blaming the messenger instead of looking at the bigger problem of the message itself.
