Is Facebook deliberately cracking down on right-wing pages? Questioning Mark Zuckerberg in the EU Parliament, Nigel Farage was certain it was. Echoing right-wing talking points from Zuckerberg’s Senate hearing, the UKIP MEP accused the Facebook CEO of “wilfully discriminating” against right-wing views on the social network.
Since Facebook changed its algorithm in January, Farage claimed, pages with “right-of-centre political opinions” had been downgraded by Facebook, citing data which showed them “down about 25 per cent over a course of this year.”
So: is Farage correct? The MEP neither revealed the source of his data, nor responded to a request for more information. However, new research in the UK and US, seen exclusively by WIRED, would seem to suggest he could be. In the last six months, daily engagement on right-wing pages has dropped significantly, falling by 600,000, or 4.8 million a week. Overall, in the last year, engagement on these pages has fallen by 29 per cent, a little more than Farage claimed.
By comparison, since October 2017, daily engagement on left-wing pages fell by 8,000, or 56,000 a week. Their total drop since May 2017 amounts to 9 per cent.
However, there’s a catch: the nature of left- and right-wing pages. Simply put, right-wing pages are more likely to feature content that’s banned by Facebook. So is that, rather than the algorithmic changes, the main reason for the decline? The answer, as ever, is complicated.
The findings come from a study by social media analysts EzyInsights, which tracked several hundred “controversial” US and UK pages – defined as ones that “heavily feature hyper-partisan content and fall outside of established mainstream media” – between May 2017 and May 2018.
EzyInsights divided the pages into left-wing, right-wing and “other”, a comparison Steve El-Sharawy, the firm’s head of innovation, admits is not exact. “[Left-wing pages] by nature aren't anything like as extreme in terms of content,” he says. However, by tracking the right-wing pages alone, we can assess the strength of Farage's claim.
First: the impact of deletions. Several large far-right pages have been recently banned by Facebook, such as Britain First, which, when it closed, had over two million fans. Other pages deleted by Facebook include WD Online (4.3 million fans), Conservative Media Page (3 million fans) and Freedom Daily (2.6 million fans).
Of 234 large right-wing pages tracked by EzyInsights, 37 have been abandoned or deleted since January 2017. El-Sharawy estimates that 30 of those were closed by Facebook, with the others abandoned by the page admins.
Charlie Beckett, director of media think tank Polis, says Facebook has been cracking down on offensive posts. “It is clear that Facebook is working hard to ‘clean up’ its newsfeed and to do that they have to have clear guidelines. Those explicitly don't judge whether something is true or false, nor if it is ideologically ‘extreme’ per se. Their definition would be ‘hate speech’, for example, which means suggesting violence against a group. So it is ok to say America Is Evil but it's not ok to say that Americans Are Evil.”
Beckett adds: “The kind of classification for Facebook moderators for closing offensive accounts would tend to centre around issues such as racism and those would tend to be associated with 'right-wing' sites.”
Does the data support that assertion? To assess the effect of bans on right-wing pages, Varpu Rantala, EzyInsights' data scientist, tracked their daily engagement with and without deleted pages. With deleted pages, the drop between April 2017 and April 2018 came to 680,000. Without, it was 379,000.
To put in percentage terms: without the deleted pages, right-wing and far-right pages dropped 21 per cent. With them, they dropped 31 per cent. The conclusion? The majority of the engagement drop (around two-thirds) comes from the change to algorithm, whereas manual deletion accounts for the other third.
In other words: Farage might have a point. Here again, however, the picture is complicated.
Following the 2016 EU referendum and US Presidential election, there has been an increasing focus on partisan pages on Facebook – and, in January 2018, Zuckerberg responded, announcing changes to the social network’s algorithm designed to prioritise posts that triggered “conversations and meaningful interactions between people”.
Since that time, numerous mainstream publishers have reported noticeable dips in their traffic from, and engagement on, Facebook – and the drop in daily engagement across right-wing pages mirrors that general trend, which has hit video and viral sites the hardest.
Does the drop in right-wing pages' engagement stand out from the general decline? Sadly, the answer is unclear – and, unless Facebook starts releasing all its data, isn't likely to get less so. Right wing pages have experienced a bigger drop than mainstream news publishers overall. But the MailOnline, the site with the biggest drop among mainstream publishers, has seen engagement fall by well over a third – although it could be argued that this fits the trend of right-wing sites falling.
With Facebook, it’s always hard to be sure. Just this month, El-Sharawy observed that total engagement across all news publishers in the Netherlands was 39 per cent lower than in May 2017. “Has the algorithm misidentified all Dutch content as 'non meaningful'?” El-Sharawy wonders. Facebook declined to comment.
Using a combination of manual and automated collection, EzyInsights collected 340 of the largest partisan pages on Facebook. Since 2008, it found 234 right-wing pages, 83 left-wing ones and 23 it identified as “other”. “I wouldn't say it's comprehensive by any means, but it's a good chunk,” says El-Sharawy.
The clear trend? Right-wing pages are wildly more popular. Of the 3.2 million average reactions a day generated by controversial pages, for instance, right-wing pages accounted for 66 per cent of engagements.
Even with the recent dip, that continues to be true: right-wing pages generate the most engagement per day by some distance, regularly producing around 1.5 million daily engagements, compared to 900,000 for left-wing pages.
And that of course is only the higher-profile, larger pages. “There are likely thousands of much smaller ones, along with thousands of groups that are set up, attract people in and end up fulfilling the same role as a page but hidden from the public gaze,” says El-Sharawy.
So while the precise details of Farage's claim could still be correct, the larger point is definitely not. Right-wing views thrive on Facebook. You could say it's made for them.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
