Why the right wing has a massive advantage on Facebook

[Jake Winker Frogen]

It is funny...that all i hear hear is how Facebook is Leftist..when most of the the top 25 most popular sites are Conservative. It would appear that all Facebook has managed to do is piss off both sides...both sides vow to remove protections--the article is long..but quite informative,

Why the right wing has a massive advantage on Facebook

A company executive responds to claims of bias.

www.politico.com

Throughout 2020, Democrats have denounced Facebook with growing ferocity as a "right wing echo chamber" with a “conservative bias” that’s giving an edge to Donald Trump in November.
But Facebook says there's a reason why right-wing figures are driving more engagement. It's not that its algorithm favors conservatives — the company has long maintained that its platform is neutral. Instead, the right is better at connecting with people on a visceral level, the company says.
“Right-wing populism is always more engaging," a Facebook executive said in a recent interview with POLITICO reporters, when pressed why the pages of conservatives drive such high interactions. The person said the content speaks to "an incredibly strong, primitive emotion" by touching on such topics as "nation, protection, the other, anger, fear."

"That was there in the [19]30's. That's not invented by social media — you just see those reflexes mirrored in social media, they’re not created by social media," the executive added. "It's why tabloids do better than the [Financial Times], and it's also a human thing. People respond to engaging emotion much more than they do to, you know, dry coverage. ...This wasn't invented 15 years ago when Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook."
In the final stretch of the 2020 campaign, the Facebook posts with the most engagement in the United States most days — measured by likes, comments, shares and reactions — are from conservative voices outside the mainstream media: Dan Bongino, Ben Shapiro, David Harris, Jr., Franklin Graham and “Blue Lives Matter,” according to the Facebook-owned tool Crowdtangle. Trump’s personal page also regularly makes the top of the list, in effect allowing him to become a publisher in his own right and navigate around the traditional media.
Left-wing posts make the daily top-25 much less frequently. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and the Facebook savvy Occupy Democrats are among the pages that occasionally hit such levels of engagement.
The growth of right-wing content on the platform has enraged liberals, who accuse the social media giant of kowtowing to the right out of fear of being painted as biased toward the left. It has also ratcheted up the brawl between the left and the right over the social network weeks before the election, as both parties try to influence the platform’s policies.

Members of both parties are increasingly threatening to dismantle the so-called Section 230 protections that shield Facebook and other internet companies from liability.
“I’ve never been a fan of Facebook, as you probably know. I’ve never been a big Zuckerberg fan. I think he’s a real problem,” Biden told The New York Times editorial board last year. “Section 230 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked.” The Trump administration this week introduced a bill to chip away at those protections.

I find right wing sites also tend to censor more as well.

Their libertarian DNA is dying before the authoritarian cult of Trump.

 

[Oddball]