Comment by AaronFriel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AaronFriel | Hacker News Reader

This shouldn't be terribly surprising. CrowdTangle, an analytics tool by Facebook, regularly reports that all of the top ten stories and links in the US are right leaning.

Take for example Facebook's top ten for the last ten days, per the New York Times' Kevin Roose's tracker. These are self reported by Facebook's CrowdTangle:

Today, 10/16, most of the news is explicitly partisan and right leaning, one post by Dan Rather: https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10/status/131751290168337612...

10/15: similar mix, https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10/status/131711759703326720...

10/14: https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10/status/131674996947526861...

It goes on and on. Scroll through the Facebook Top 10 account and you'll see right leaning, sometimes far right pundits, at greater volume and (if these links follow the typical power distribution) far, far greater attention and traffic than any even moderate or neutral news source, let alone anyone comparably left wing.

Sorry but you’re spreading misinformation in this post. Beyond the fact that your interpretation doesn’t follow from the evidence you’ve provided, as pointed out by the neighbor post, you’ve misstated what CrowdTangle is measuring.

All of the top 10 links shared on FB in a week typically consists of NPR/NYT/TMZ etc. Recently the left leaning website MoveOn was in the top 3 (source: https://twitter.com/tomgara/status/1310314212078620680?s=21).

Shapiro or Bongino are never near the top 10 in terms of link engagement - the metric they do well on is sum total page engagement. Which makes sense - anecdotally, most of me and my left leaning millennial peers are getting our online political engagement from Twitter and Instagram. AOC is a sensation on Insta, Bongino is not.

I see you’re relying on Kevin Roose for your information - unfortunately he’s an absolute spigot of misinformation. I made the same mistake in the past, until I took a deeper look into these issues, and found most of what he says to be totally wrong. I hope you, and others, will reconsider taking him at face value in the future.

It sounds like you're agreeing with me: right wing news pages have far greater reach and popularity, in part because they game the system (as the Daily Wire does, for example, by amplifying its page traffic by reshares.)

It should still concern you that no Facebook page rivals these right wing pages. Just because a given URL might break into the top 10 URLs for a day doesn't affect that these pages dominate news feed volume.

If you go to Dan Bongino's Facebook page, you'll see why his page doesn't show up in the by-URL analysis: most of his content is not links to external content, but in-Facebook content. So I'm not sure why it's "misinformation" to point that his page has enormous amounts of traffic, and I think it's misleading to say that it doesn't because grouping by a metric that excludes that traffic.

It seems pretty unfair to argue, "If you just aggregate the data by a dimension that's null for these right wing pages, you'll find they tend to disappear!"

Top 10 lists can be misleading. If there are fewer popular right-leaning news sources, then all the right-leaning audience will be concentrated there, pushing them into the top 10, while the left's audience is diluted.

Like splitting the vote, or how Muhammed (and alternative spellings) is the most popular baby name in the UK: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/muhammed-rea...

You would have to look at the total story popularity, not just the top 10, to make any kind of conclusion.

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