Most social media outlets boost right-of-center content rather than censoring it, according to a new study that challenges GOP allegations of bias and efforts to overhaul legal protections for tech companies.
“The claim of anti-conservative animus is itself a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it,” a new report by the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights said.
“No trustworthy large scale studies have determined that conservative content is being removed for ideological reasons. Even anecdotal evidence of supposed bias tends to crumble under close examination,” the study claimed. It was authored by disinformation researcher Paul Barrett, the center’s deputy director, and research fellow Grant Sims. The study was funded in part by Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist and a liberal philanthropist. Major social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter provided data and feedback for the study.
Instead, the study said that conservative content is holding its own and often performs better on popular social media platforms than posts created by mainstream or left-wing voices. In 2020, the Facebook pages of former President Donald Trump and pro-Trump evangelist Franklin Graham consistently showed up in the top 10 most popular pages, as did Fox News.
“On most days, right-leaning U.S. Facebook pages dominate the list of sources producing the most-engaged with posts containing links,” the study said.
The Facebook pages run by three conservative news outlets, Fox News, Breitbart, and the Daily Caller, generated more engagement combined than the seven “mainstream” media outlets in the top 10 combined — CNN, ABC News, BBC News, NBC News, NPR, Now This, and the New York Times.
Republicans have warned Big Tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google that they could lose the liability protections provided by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act because of bias. Last fall, Republicans cited Twitter and Facebook’s decision to block a story by the New York Post about Hunter Biden, the son of then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, as an example of censorship.
The NYU study criticized Facebook and Twitter’s censorship of the Hunter Biden story as “decisions wrapped in mystifying processes.” It also urged the platforms to be more clear, consistent, and transparent with its rules and their enforcement.
More recently, Republicans have expressed frustration over the censorship of Trump. Trump was banned from Facebook, Twitter, and most other major social media platforms after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, which the tech giants say he encouraged.
Some prominent conservatives have even led the charge to leave Big Tech corporations over the alleged censorship in favor of platforms that value free speech.
Online engagement for top Democratic and Republican elected officials was split roughly down the middle, with no single party more favored on Facebook. However, Trump was the highest-scoring official in the country last year with 654 million Facebook interactions, more than six times the engagement Biden got.
The study also said that Republican politicians and right-wing websites were more significant spreaders of misinformation and disinformation online than Democratic politicians and liberal websites.
