Zuckerberg’s criticism of the administration’s response falls flat when Trump leads so much of the discussion about COVID-19 among right-leaning pages, particularly when his posts consistently promote misleading talking points. That’s especially true given that Trump is supported by a right-wing Facebook ecosystem that plays a vital role in pushing misinformation and right-wing talking points across the platform.
Methodology
Media Matters compiled a list of 1,223 Facebook pages that pertain to news and media outlets, media figures, politicians, political parties, and issue-focused advocacy groups. Each page in this study also had over 500,000 page likes, had primarily English-language content, and posted content related to U.S. political news.
Two researchers independently coded pages, and a third researcher independently reconciled conflicts between the two datasets. Researchers coded pages for two factors: (1) content related to political news, and (2) ideological alignment (left-leaning, right-leaning, nonaligned, or “other”). We reviewed each page individually, and we only included pages that regularly focused on news about American politics.
We determined the ideological alignment of a page by a page’s name, information in the “About” section, the page owner, and posts. We coded pages that expressed opposition to President Donald Trump or focused on issues primarily aimed at liberals (e.g., protecting abortion rights, calling for action against gun violence, etc.) as left-leaning.
We coded pages that expressed support for Trump or focused on issues primarily aimed at conservatives (e.g., restricting abortion rights, downplaying gun violence, etc.) as right-leaning.
We coded all pages for right-wing and left-wing media outlets as right-leaning or left-leaning, respectively. We coded pages that did not have an ideological leaning in their content as nonaligned.
If we had any doubt about whether to code a page as nonaligned or left-leaning, we erred on coding the page as left-leaning. We coded pages as “other” if they did not fit in any of the above categories or if they contained a mix of left-leaning and right-leaning content. We excluded these pages from the final dataset.
The resulting list of pages were 384 right-leaning pages, 377 nonaligned pages, 435 left-leaning pages, and 27 “other” pages.
We compiled and reviewed the data, including total interactions -- reactions, comments, and shares -- of Facebook posts that mentioned COVID-19 and were shared by our list of 384 right-leaning Facebook pages between 12 a.m. EDT on February 1 and 11:59 p.m. EDT on May 31, 2020.
We defined posts that mentioned COVID-19 as any post that had any of the following terms in the post’s message or in the included link, article headline, or article description: covid, “covid-19,” “covid 19,” coronavirus, reopen, “re-open,” “re open,” pandemic, outbreak, “stay at home,” “stay-at-home,” “executive order,” quarantine, “shelter-in-place,” “shelter in place,” endemic, epidemic, hospital, hospitals, ventilator, ventilators, respirator, respirators, mask, masks, “face mask,” “social distancing,” “social distance,” or virus.
The resulting dataset included 182,489 posts from 370 right-leaning pages.
