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The Facebook Files
Confirmed

The Counter-Evidence: Conservative Content Thrived on Facebook

Even as Facebook restricted some content, data showed right-leaning pages and outlets often dominated engagement and conservative news reached a large, distinct audience. This is the strongest evidence against claims that Facebook broadly suppressed conservatives.

Jul 27, 2023
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Whose side it served: Republicans

Conservative pages and outlets were among the biggest winners in Facebook engagement.

What the record shows

Beginning in 2020, New York Times columnist Kevin Roose used Facebook's CrowdTangle tool to post daily top-10 lists of the most-engaged link posts, which were regularly led by right-leaning figures such as Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino. Facebook executives countered that engagement is not reach, but did not release reach data publicly; Nieman Lab reported that an internal reach leaderboard surfaced misleading stories too. A peer-reviewed study in Science (July 2023), using Meta data on 208 million U.S. users during the 2020 election, found that sources favored by conservatives were more prevalent on Facebook. It also found that most fact-checked misinformation sat in a conservative-only segment that 'has no equivalent on the liberal side.'

In their words

“has no equivalent on the liberal side”— González-Bailón et al., Science (2023) · source
“Reach leaderboard isn't a total win from a comms point of view.”— CrowdTangle chief executive, internal note (via Nieman Lab) · source
The other side

Engagement counts measure interactions, not how many people saw a post, and Facebook said its top-by-reach lists looked different. Strong engagement for some conservative pages does not rule out specific restrictions such as the laptop demotion or COVID removals documented elsewhere.

Sources

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