Right-wing personalities who post sensational and misleading content continue to earn high engagement on Facebook, despite Vice President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg’s comments that “Facebook’s systems are not designed to reward provocative content.” In a new study, Media Matters found that Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino, two right-wing figures who frequently post sensational stories and fearmongering or misleading content on Facebook, actually earned significantly more engagement in 2020 and 2021 than in previous years -- undermining Clegg’s claims.
Molly Butler / Media Matters
Research/Study
Facebook has a problem with sensational and misleading content despite VP Nick Clegg’s claims
Right-wing personalities Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino earned hundreds of millions more interactions in 2020 and the beginning of 2021 than in previous years
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Central to many of the charges by Facebook’s critics is the idea that its algorithmic systems actively encourage the sharing of sensational content and are designed to keep people scrolling endlessly. Of course, on a platform built around people sharing things they are interested in or moved by, content that provokes strong emotions is invariably going to be shared. At one level, the fact that people respond to sensational content isn’t new. As generations of newspaper sub-editors can attest, emotive language and arresting imagery grab people’s attention and engage them. It’s human nature. But Facebook’s systems are not designed to reward provocative content. In fact, key parts of those systems are designed to do just the opposite.
Facebook reduces the distribution of many types of content — meaning that content appears lower in your News Feed — because they are sensational, misleading, gratuitously solicit engagement, or are found to be false by our independent fact checking partners. For example, Facebook demotes clickbait (headlines that are misleading or exaggerated), highly sensational health claims (like those promoting “miracle cures”), and engagement bait (posts that explicitly seek to get users to engage with them).
Facebook’s approach goes beyond addressing sensational and misleading content post-by-post. When Pages and Groups repeatedly post some of these types of content to Facebook, like clickbait or misinformation, Facebook reduces the distribution of all the posts from those Pages and Groups. And where websites generate an extremely disproportionate amount of their traffic from Facebook relative to the rest of the internet, which can be indicative of a pattern of posting more sensational or spammy content, Facebook likewise demotes all the posts from the Pages run by those websites.
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Despite Clegg’s claims, posts that sensationalize or fearmonger about stories often earn more engagement than other types of posts. On June 3, 2020, the top English-language post from a Facebook page was a video from right-wing figure Candace Owens in which she disparages George Floyd and says that the Black community is “unique” because its members are “the only people that fight and scream and demand support and justice for the people in our community that are up to no good.” Media Matters previously reported that this video earned more interactions than any other post from political pages that posted about last spring’s protests against police brutality following Floyd's killing, and it has since been viewed more than 95 million times.
Additionally, Media Matters has repeatedly found that right-leaning pages, which frequently fearmonger and post misleading content, consistently earn equal or more engagement than left-leaning or ideologically nonaligned pages. In a January study, Media Matters reported that right-leaning pages earned nearly 9 billion interactions on roughly 2.3 million posts between January 1 and December 15, 2020, which accounted for 45% of total interactions from political pages. It would not be without precedent for Facebook to allege systems are balanced while treating sensational right-leaning content differently, as there are numerous examples of Facebook capitulating to conservatives and giving right-wing pages preferential treatment, particularly The Daily Wire.
According to Clegg, Facebook demotes all posts from pages run by websites that “generate an extremely disproportionate amount of their traffic from Facebook relative to the rest of the internet, which can be indicative of a pattern of posting more sensational or spammy content.” But right-wing personalities such as Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino continue to get millions of interactions on posts from their Facebook pages, which often include sensational stories, fearmongering commentary, and misleading content from their respective websites. In fact, these pages earned significantly more engagement in 2020 and the first three months of 2021 than in 2017, 2018, and 2019 combined.
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Ben Shapiro
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For example, in August 2020, Shapiro’s top posts included one linking to a Daily Wire article that exploits the tragic death of a 5-year-old by claiming that “the national media doesn’t care that Cannon Hinnant died, and doesn’t want you to care, because he was white,” and a post with a link to a Daily Wire article that gives explicit details of former President Bill Clinton’s affair during his presidency in response to Clinton calling Trump’s Oval Office “chaos”:
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In February 2021, Shapiro’s top posts included a complaint about “cancellation for being a conservative,” claiming that “Disney dumped one of its leading stars because she wouldn't toe the leftist line”; an anti-trans post that fearmongers about the inclusion of trans athletes; and a post claiming that “Hollywood elites have been dictating culture and insulting your values for far too long”:
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Dan Bongino
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Bongino earned the most engagement in October 2020, with posts from his page racking up over 47.3 million interactions. The majority of these posts contain links to articles from his website, Bongino.com, or to Rumble, where he posts videos from his show. Top posts made during Bongino’s October 2020 engagement peak included a post calling NBC’s Savannah Guthrie “unhinged” and posts that linked to Bongino’s articles accusing Kamala Harris of doing “a lot of lying” and asking, “Are you sick of hearing celebrities talking about politics?"
