On Tuesday, House Republicans held another House Judiciary Committee hearing on the horrible cruelties that Facebook allegedly inflicts upon fine upstanding conservatives. Specifically, conspiracy-minded Republicans who follow conspiracy-peddling far-right websites continue to believe that there is a secret Facebook plot to censor conservative content, and have been hounding Facebook to elevate conservative content in order to prove they are not doing that.
Whether this is the usual case of working the refs or a genuine belief, by House Republicans, that the social media world is conspiring against put-upon conservatives, the premise is untrue. The notion that Facebook is biased against conservative content is itself a conspiracy theory. Media Matters, a group of stupid jerks who use facts to answer questions like this one, did the actual research.
We identified 463 Facebook pages that had more than 500,000 likes each and regularly posted content dealing with American political news. We analyzed data from these pages, week by week, between January 1, 2018, and July 1, 2018, to observe trends in post interactions (reactions, comments, and shares) and page likes. We found two key things:
Thing number one: Right-leaning and left-leaning partisan posts had "virtually identical" average interaction rates, meaning Facebook doesn't appear to be taking any actions to "censor" conservative posts or highlight non-conservative ones. Thing number two: Conservative ideological pages tended to have a much higher total number of interactions than either nonpartisan or lefty sites, because they tend to have bigger audiences.
So it's bunk. The entire premise of conservatives being disadvantaged by Facebook is a conspiracy theory; in reality, the opposite is true. Conservatives are making out like bandits, largely due to the longstanding online conservative habit of flocking to an orbit of hard-right opinion sites and ignoring all others.
That isn't going to stop House Republicans from insisting, in very public hearings, that conservatives are getting the short end of the stick. The world being biased against conservatives via an entrenched set of secret conspiracies in the media, in education, in government, in science, and anything else you can think of is a foundational premise of the modern movement. Conservatism can't exist without the premise that the world is out to get them. MS-13 is under their porch, so everybody needs a gun. Book-learning is biased against the conservative belief system; what we need around here is less education. Climate change is a conspiracy by researchers who are merely jealous that the oil companies have more money than they do.
And the mere existence of non-conservative content on Facebook proves that our electronic infrastructure is biased against conservatives, apparently, regardless of what any of the actual numbers, numbers that nobody in the Republican House at any point bothered to look up, might have to say about that.
It could be working the refs. For two decades it was rather explicitly an attempt to work the refs, but in recent years Republicans have gone from seeking the votes of gullible ideologues to electing the most gullible to Congress outright. The current crop may genuinely believe that even if conservatives are getting the lion’s share of Facebook news traffic, the company is still biased against them because some idiot on the conservative internet, prominently featured in numerous and prominent posts on Facebook itself, said so.