The Conservative Battle on Facebook
It would appear that all the complaints conservatives made about Facebook worked. They have gained a much greater presence on the platform, according to this analysis of the latest Facebook numbers provided by the tracking site, Newswhip.
Six of the top ten publishers on Facebook are conservative or ultra-conservative sites which together garnered more than 366 Million engagements — 100 Million more than the four mainstream sites which got a total of 267 Million engagements, by my count.
Breitbart and The Blaze made it into the top ten for the first time in a long time with the New York Post picking up the #10 spot. The Daily Wire created by Whackjob Extraordinaire (My Opinion) Ben Shapiro took over the #1 spot on Facebook with nearly 105 Million engagements.
The contributors and editors clearly know their audience because they managed to get that many hits with only 1,155 postings. That’s much less than others in the top ten such as Fox News (6,199 postings), or CNN (5,324). Interestingly MSNBC also had a limited number of postings (1,493) and while it came in at #18 it had much fewer total engagements (24.3 Million).
For those unfamiliar with him, Shapiro became a nationally syndicated columnist at the age of 17, worked as editor-at-large for Breitbart News before starting The Daily Wire and has written several books, including How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth (2004) and the latest being How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps (2020).
Two personal observations: 1) The success of The Daily Wire should concern journalists everywhere because one of the key tenets of its platforms is a continual criticism of the national media. 2) Conservative commentators have been attacking Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook for allegedly designing the algorithms to penalize conservatives. Many of his staff have criticized him in reverse, for not taking a stronger stance against alt-conservative postings that are clearly disinformation or fake. Daily Wire being one of them.
To conservative readers of this article (if there are any) who might be saying “hooray” while progressives are crying “oh, no,” another point of clarification. There is no doubt, based on my analysis, of a growth in conservative voices, but it may be more an indication of how passionate those supporters are. The high engagement with limited articles at The Daily Wire is indicative of that.
Another indication of that passion comes when you look at the top 25 publishers on Facebook. When you do that, there are only three more publishers that fall into the category of conservative or questionable. So add to the ones cited above: The Western Journal, CNSNews.com and TheConservativeOpinion.com. Those three add roughly another 70 Million Engagements. That means the nine identified ‘conservative’ publishers have a total of 435.9 Million Engagements.
The other fifteen publishers which one would label as either mainstream media or progressive have a total of 547.5 Engagements. (I have excluded the popular publisher, LadBible, from the count.) So, do the math. You end up with conservative publishers average 48.5 Million engagements per site while the other publishers averaged 36.5 Million engagements.
The defining of a publisher as either conservative or progressive is mainly based on this site. However, while the conservative sites are fairly clearly conservative, it is not so clear whethersome of the mainstream sites should be labelled progressive , or maybe even, objective.
As a point of clarification, Newswhip uses the term Engagements to define the interactions. Those interactions are all the Likes, which you know means thumbs up, loves, smileys, angry, etc., along with Shares and Comments. I would argue that Shares and Comments are a higher level of engagement than likes, but that’s a discussion for another article.
Although political stories accounted for much of the conservative publishers’ success, political stories were not the most popular stories on Facebook. By my count, there were only four out of the top 15 stories that you would consider political. The highest engagement story was about the death of Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman published by comicbook.com.
As a final note, I am pleased to say, several local news operations scored with some top stories. Al.com (Alabama news) with a story about a high school principal; 10news.com (San Diego) for a story about people refusing to take the coronavirus vaccine.WSBTV (Atlanta) for a story about children being rescued from a sex trafficking ring. And KFOR.com(Oklahoma City) for a story about a ten year old boy looking for a home.
