Evidence contradicts right-wing narrative of tech censorship and bias
Evidence contradicts right-wing narrative of tech censorship and bias
https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/440703-evidence-contradicts-right-wing-narrative-of-tech-censorship-and-bias
BY CRISTINA LÓPEZ G., OPINION CONTRIBUTOR
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Available data consistently shows that right-wing contentdoes as well as left-wing content on Facebook, that YouTube algorithms boost far-right content that radicalizes audiences, and that claims of anti-conservative bias are “nothing more than a mix of anecdotal evidence … and a failure to understand the companies’ algorithms and content moderation practices.”
When Media Matters recently took a sample of prominent Facebook pages posting regularly about American politics and looked at 37 weeks of their engagement numbers, we found roughly the same rates of engagement for right-leaning and left-leaning pages. We also found that politically aligned pages get more engagement than nonaligned pages. These results are consistent with a 2018 Media Matters analysis, which found that weekly interaction rates for right-leaning and left-leaning Facebook pages were virtually identical, and both types of pages outperformed pages that weren’t ideologically aligned. We also found that images shared by right-leaning Facebook pages got the most engagement and outperformed photos shared by left-leaning and nonaligned pages alike.
According to Newswhip, a firm that tracks social media engagement, political content dominates engagements on Facebook, which right-leaning publications on Facebook seem to understand well. Available data shows them thriving, contradicting the anecdotal evidence of conservative censorship. Newswhip’s monthly data on Facebook publishers shows that since December 2018, Fox News has consistently dominated the list for “the most engaged publishers on Facebook,” a monthly top-10 list in which right-wing publications like Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire and United Kingdom’s Daily Mail also consistently appear, alongside mainstream, non-partisan publications like The New York Times and NBC News or left-leaning HuffPost.
But data and hard evidence might not be enough to stop the right-wing figures from spinning a narrative that seems to be working well for them.
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