Every day, Media Matters uses Facebook's CrowdTangle tool to identify and share the 10 posts with the most interactions from top political and news-related Facebook pages. Our list also specifies the ideological leaning of each page. To capture the daily news cycle, each day's list covers posts made between 8 a.m. Eastern time the previous day and 8 a.m. Eastern time the day of posting. (Data for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday is aggregated and presented on Mondays.)
Publicly available data and reporting on Facebook engagement primarily focus on shared links. (New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose and professor Fabio Giglietto highlight the top-performing link posts on Twitter every day.) In addition to links, our analysis includes all text, photos, native videos, live videos, and YouTube videos shared by the most popular political and news-related pages. For a full explanation of how we developed ideological assignments for these pages, see the methodology here.
Media Matters and others have demonstrated again and again that there is no bias or censorship against conservatives on Facebook, despite claims to the contrary. This dataset is more evidence that no such bias exists.
