Part of the reason was Trump’s constant insistence that “it was,” which was amplified by his supporters who saw it as an opportunity to drum up support and siphon off donations, and which was also echoed in right-wing media circles by so-called news sites and pundits seeking personal gain from echoing Trump’s claims.
At the time, there was an active Twitter account that pulled data about Facebook usage from Chartbeat, a site that tracks social media metrics. Called “Facebook Top 10,” the account showed the origins of the top 10 most popular link posts (i.e. posts with links) on any given day on the social media giant.
Between Election Day and January 6, roughly a third of the top 10 most popular links posted were to right-wing sites and activists, including the Trump campaign.
But what’s important to understand is that this wasn’t the exception. Right-wing sites run by commentators Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino often accounted for some of the most popular content. It’s been clear since 2016 that social media stories about Donald Trump, whether accurate or exaggerated, have outperformed other political content. The prominence of right-wing opinions seems to reflect that.
But it was also due to Facebook’s decisions. A 2020 report said the company’s tweaks to the algorithms that determine what people see were weighted in favor of right-wing sites, in part because objective efforts to root out misinformation disproportionately led to the downgrading of right-wing sites. NPR wrote a story in 2021 noting that Shapiro built his media empire on top of his success on Facebook thanks to the site’s algorithms and how conservative content drives the engagement that Facebook craves.
But eventually, Facebook decided to reduce the amount of political content shown in people’s feeds. The impact on the top 10 link posts was dramatic. In 2021, links to Shapiro’s page made the top 10 list 235 times. In 2022, 175 times. What about 2023? 16 times. Bongino’s dropped from 173 times in 2021 to 30 last year.
(The automated top 10 account, created by Kevin Roose of The New York Times, stopped updating last June, months after Twitter changed how publishers automatically posted to their accounts.)
This history is worth revisiting now thanks to a report from The Atlantic, written by veteran Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi, who found that conservative and right-wing media sites are seeing a huge drop in traffic.
“Traffic flow to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital media supporters has not merely slowed, like the rest of the industry, it has completely collapsed,” Farhi wrote. Who’s to blame? “The obvious culprit is Facebook,” he wrote.
British site Press Gazette has published data showing how Facebook referral traffic (links from Facebook to other sites) has fallen across the media industry, with the Washington Post seeing a drop in referral traffic, as well as right-wing sites like Fox News and the New York Post.
The PressGazette analysis found that the impact has been particularly pronounced for smaller sites: the smallest site analyzed saw Facebook referral traffic drop to just 2% of its March 2018 level.
This analysis did not include US right-wing commentary sites, but it is safe to assume that the impact would be similar.
Farhi’s report sparked speculation about whether the impact of Facebook’s changes was due to the demographics of Facebook users in general — after all, Facebook is known to be more popular with older Americans than other social media sites, and less so with younger Americans, who, as we all know, tend to be Republicans.
But Democrats and Republicans appear to use Facebook about equally, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. Older Americans generally use social media less than younger Americans, and are also less likely to report using Facebook. Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say politics has no place on Facebook, according to a Pew Research Center analysis released this week.
This broad range of data, measured after Facebook’s change of policy, may mask the fact that some conservative Americans were very active on Facebook around 2020 and very engaged in political commentary, as evidenced by metrics like the top 10 accounts.
Again, right-wing sites weren’t the only ones that saw their traffic disappear after Facebook tweaked its algorithm, but some of those sites were heavily reliant on traffic from Facebook and likely disproportionately affected by the drop in referrals.
What that means for the sharing of information (and misinformation) in the 2024 election remains to be seen.
