This is a Pattern

Like 8 months ago I noticed a weird pattern in social media data that @annewhitesell, @LeeHannahWSU and I had collected.

In 2018, local Republican parties on facebook started to receive substantially more attention than local Democratic parties did. https://t.co/CMgHXcb63B pic.twitter.com/dOR9Dp2G6V

— Kevin Reuning (@KevinReuning) June 8, 2022

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I have noted on a number of occasions that Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire makes its money through behaviors that create fraudulent engagement metrics, and that Facebook allows this, largely at the instigation of Facebook's  head of global public policy, Joel Kaplan, who was part of the Brooks Brothers Riot in 2000 which used the threat of violence to prevent a fair counting of votes in the 2000 Presidential election.  (See here and here)

Favoring right wing politics, even when it violates Facebook's rules, and when it involves defrauding its advertisers, has been standard operating procedure for a very long time, and this clearly comes from the top.

Now we discover that Facebook has tweaked its algorithms to benefit Republicans. 

So not shocked:

Facebook pages run by state and local level Republican Parties appear to have received more exposure and engagement than the same types of pages belonging to the Democratic Party, new research finds.

On Wednesday, June 8, research was made public highlighting an apparent "gap in engagement growth 'unique to Facebook' between the GOP pages and their Democratic counterparts by 2019."

………

“Regardless of Facebook’s motivations, their decision to change the algorithm might have given local Republican parties greater reach to connect with citizens and shape political realities for Americans,” the research authors noted.

"The fact that private companies can so easily control the political information flow for millions of Americans raises clear questions for the state of democracy," they added.

Kevin Reuning, an associate professor at Miami University who also co-authored the study, took to Twitter with visual representations of their findings. With the visual, he tweeted about the "weird patterns" in the data.

"In 2018, local Republican parties on facebook (sic) started to receive substantially more attention than local Democratic parties did," he tweeted.

You can look at the paper here.

This has been documented frequently enough that it is reasonable to conclude that this is not a function of Facebook's desire for user engagement and profit. 

It's clear that Joel Kaplan, with the (at best) tacit support of Mark Zuckerberg has had his thumb on the  scales.

Facebook is not just a venal and corrupt business attempting to maximize profit, it is an entity which favors one political view over another, even when it is to the detriment of its customers (the advertisers) and the shareholders.  (Remember, the users are product, not customers)