This also explains why right wing pages tend to do so well in NewsWhip rankings. I used to run the Facebook page of a major media outlet, and I was constantly amazed by how often an article would rack up more Facebook likes than views. What’s more, simply adding up the number of Facebook comments, likes, or shares isn’t a good method for determining how many people click on an article link. Either way, you should take my claims made above with a huge grain of salt). I did find a Twitter thread from the CEO where he seemed to acknowledge that their data only came from public pages, but maybe they've updated their approach since then. I actually did a fair amount of Googling looking for this information and for some reason could not find where they definitively said one way or the other. This includes all activity by Pages, Groups, and users who share, comment, or react to the URL." *** ( UPDATE: Judd Legum replied to this by pointing to NewsWhip’s “ data and ethics ” page that states, "For Facebook, our engagement count is a sum of the Shares, Likes, Reactions, and Comments on a URL – on both public and private posts. It’s probably safe to say that the majority of posts published on Facebook aren’t accounted for by NewsWhip’s API search. For the last several years Facebook has been decreasing the reach of Pages while at the same time increasing the reach of individual users and Groups. This means that if I share a New York Times article within a private group or my own Facebook profile, there’s a good chance that my engagement isn’t getting recorded in NewsWhip’s data.Īnd that’s a huge thing to leave out. NewsWhip, as far as I can tell, only reports on metrics from public pages. Whenever you see publishers ranked by their Facebook engagement, it’s usually through a service called NewsWhip. But I also think liberals tend to overestimate the amount of reach conservative outlets get on social media. This is valuable reporting because it sheds light on how right wing media outlets can get significant reach on Facebook without investing huge resources into hiring writers. The Daily Wire gets showered with traffic and the attendant advertising revenue while local outlets, who have to pay for the costs of the reporting, get practically nothing.
Beyond distorting the content of the news, this dynamic has real financial consequences.
The Daily Wire takes another outlet's reporting, excerpts it, and gives it an inaccurate or incendiary spin.įor this minimal effort, The Daily Wire is rewarded with massive engagement on Facebook while the source of the journalism, quite often a local media outlet, gets a tiny fraction of engagement. Isolating the 27 top-performing Daily Wire stories that aggregated another news report, a clear pattern emerges. Nearly all of the top stories from The Daily Wire were aggregations of another news report, a tweet, or a video. These publishers basically take reporting from mainstream news sources and repackage it with incendiary, right-wing headlines: Judd Legum published some good analysis of why rightwing media outlets like The Daily Wire get so much engagement on Facebook.
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