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media matters
Over and Over Again, The Corporate Media Spews GOP Propaganda on Social Security
Media outlets, particularly the Washington Post, have long pushed the myth that Social Security is a driver of the national debt.
May 09, 2024
The Washington Post fearmongered about the latest projections reported by the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, declaring in its headline “Social Security and Medicare finances look grim as overall debt piles up.” The Post, which put a negative spin on the trustee report despite it showing improved conditions from the previous year, then pushed misleading framing about Social Security and misinformed readers about President Joe Biden’s and former President Donald Trump’s proposals regarding the future of the program.
The Post falsely claimed Social Security will run out of money
The Post ran a misleading headline, “Social Security and Medicare finances look grim as overall debt piles up,” only to partially contradict itself in the sub-headline: “A hot job market means the programs won’t run out of money as fast as once feared, but projections are still bleak.”
In fact, the report from the Social Security board of trustees showed a slight improvement to the program’s fiscal outlook, thanks to economic growth and low unemployment increasing the amount of tax revenue paid into the system.
Even the fiscal obstacle to which the report is looking ahead is not as dire or unavoidable as the Post makes it out to be. The issue is that the amount of revenue taken in from payroll taxes has been lower than the benefits paid out in recent years, forcing the program to tap into its accumulated trust fund in order to pay scheduled benefits in full. But even if no policy changes are made at all, and the current economic projections continue to the year 2035, Social Security would not “run out of money,” as the Post phrased it.
According to the trustee report, current revenue and spending levels can sustain full scheduled Social Security benefits through 2035, after which point the program can sustain 83% of scheduled benefits, a significant hit but a far cry from having no money at all. Moreover, a number of potential solutions are still feasible, which could avoid that steep cut.
Last year’s trustees report examined multiple policy options to extend the solvency of Social Security’s trust fund. One in particular — eliminating the payroll tax cap on taxable income without increasing benefit outlays — was projected to increase the solvency through about 2060. (And that was just one possibility, among many. The Congressional Budget Office has periodically produced reports on the effects of payroll tax adjustments, consistently finding that raising the payroll tax or amending it to include more high incomes would drastically improve Social Security’s finances.)
The Post misleadingly tied Social Security to the national debt
The Post headline tied Social Security to the national debt, and the article claimed that Social Security may be “plunging the nation into insurmountable debt” if the trust fund’s solvency isn’t extended.
But as retirement journalist Mark Miller explained in a Reuters myth-busting column on Social Security, “By law, Social Security cannot contribute to the federal deficit, because it is required to pay benefits only from its trust funds,” which are “funded through a dedicated payroll tax.” This point is also made by economist Alicia Munnell, the director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, who wrote: “Social Security does not contribute one iota to the deficit, since, by law, it can only pay benefits from its trust funds.”
The only way Social Security could ever contribute to the national debt would be if Congress passed new legislation, which was then also signed into law by the president, permitting general revenue to pay out benefits. Congress could just as easily pass a law raising the payroll tax cap, which is currently indexed to $168,600 and applies to around 82% of all taxable income. Every dollar earned after that $168,600 threshold is exempt from payroll taxes, resulting in people with extremely high incomes contributing a lower percentage of their income to Social Security than people who earn less.
Media outlets, particularly the Post, have long pushed the myth that Social Security is a driver of the national debt. Far from contributing to the national debt, Social Security was for many years the U.S. government's "single biggest creditor," as the trust fund is required by law to invest its surplus revenue in U.S. Treasury bonds.
The Post falsely claimed Biden has no plan to strengthen Social Security’s finances
The Post made a blundering attempt at both-sides coverage of this issue in the presidential election, bizarrely proclaiming, “Neither Biden nor former president Donald Trump have released proposals to right Social Security’s finances.” But then, in the very next sentence, the Post included one of Biden’s actual ideas to deal with the fiscal issue: “Biden has signaled a desire to raise taxes on individuals earning more than $400,000 and devote that new revenue to the Social Security Trust Fund.” (This would be one version of the aforementioned options to raise the payroll tax threshold.)
Such a proposal would indeed add years to the trust fund. But, because the Post dismissed the idea as seemingly not a serious proposal, it didn’t bother to do the math to find out. The Post’s decision to virtually ignore Biden’s policy is particularly strange given that it was included in his budget proposal published in March and featured prominently in his State of the Union address (also in March).
The Post then contrasted Biden’s opposition to benefit cuts, as he voiced in his past two State of the Union addresses, with Trump’s dithering on the entire subject: “Trump has floated cuts to the programs, but quickly backpedaled from that position and insisted he wouldn’t support reducing benefits.”
The Post is putting its own spin on Trump’s record here. This March, while Biden was outlining his plan to sustain Social Security through payroll taxes, Trump signaled his openness to gutting the program. When Trump was president, he proposed completely eliminating the payroll tax that funds Social Security, and each one of his budget proposals included cuts to the program, facts the Post had previously reported.
The Post has previously used concern over Social Security’s finances to push for benefit cuts
On Threads, American Independent senior writer Oliver Willis (a former Media Matters writer) posted images of Post headlines going back decades, showing the paper spreading panic of looming insolvency for both Social Security and Medicare. If some of these headlines were to be believed, the U.S. would have exhausted some trust funds years, even decades ago. Indeed, just a year ago, the Post warned of the same problem — but arriving a few years earlier, with the headline “Social Security funding crisis will arrive in 2033, U.S. projects.”
That same month, the Post’s editorial board called for, among other things, benefit cuts through “gradually indexing up the age, currently 67, at which people may retire at full benefits, to take account of longer retirements due to rising life expectancy,” among other changes. This is nothing new for the Post; in a nearly two-and-a-half-year period after November 2010, the Post editorial board published 23 editorials that mentioned benefit cuts as a solution for Social Security shortfalls, compared to just 4 articles which mentioned increasing revenues as a solution.
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Will Charlie Kirk Be the Next Rupert Murdoch?
As the original shapers of right-wing media fade into history, Kirk seemingly hopes to raise his own profile in the conservative movement by leaning into increasingly hardcore far-right positions.
Sep 24, 2023
Rupert Murdochannounced on September 21 that he will be stepping down as chairman of Fox Corp. and News Corp. after a 70-year career poisoning global media with right-wing lies and hate. Fox is now in the hands of Lachlan Murdoch, whose track record at the company indicates he is even more grimly ideological than his father, serving as the main force backing Tucker Carlson’s on-air white supremacy and pushing the network to support Donald Trump’s 2020 election lies despite their financial consequences.
While Rupert Murdoch repeatedly made clear in his announcement that he does not intend to take his thumb entirely off the scale of his outlets, the question of who will now rise to prominence in the right-wing media ecosystem lingers. In just the last few years, the movement’s founding fathers, including Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, and Rush Limbaugh, have died or stepped away, leaving conservative media without a center of gravity. Lachlan Murdoch and other rising right-wing media figures are jockeying to lead the hate and misinformation machine into the next generation.
One of these figures is Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk.
Since first appearing on the scene in 2012, when he had just barely graduated from high school, Kirk has built TPUSA into a reported $80 million media empire. The organization hosts numerous shows and has millions of followers across multiple social media platforms. Kirk himself is a Salem Radio host whose nationally syndicated program is broadcast in Limbaugh’s old time slot.
Kirk has appeared at least 235 times on weekday Fox shows since 2018, though his last appearance was May 18, 2023, having since seemingly been blacklisted from the network.
TPUSA is purportedly an organization representing the next generation of conservative activists, with Kirk as their leading voice. But there is scant evidence that the group has a genuine connection with Gen Z, whose social and political attitudes are overwhelmingly liberal. An October 2021 internal presentation obtained by The Verge stated that only 15% of Turning Point’s Instagram audience is actually student-aged. As the organization’s own documentation states: “The content that is going out right now is completely missing our target audience.” (TPUSA told The Verge that “the presentations in question contain multiple inaccuracies and erroneous data.”)
As the original shapers of right-wing media fade into history, Kirk seemingly hopes to capture the attention of the next generation and raise his own profile in the conservative movement by leaning into increasingly hardcore far-right positions. On the very same day that Murdoch announced he was stepping down, Kirk took to his radio show and launched into a vile, racist attack on migrants on the southern border, declaring that a “foreign invasion” of “fighting-age young males who will end up raping many of your daughters.”
He also specifically invoked and validated the white supremacist “great replacement” conspiracy theory.
“Obviously the Democrat Party supports this because of power,” Kirk declared. “They smear us and slander us when we bring up the great replacement. The Castro brothers themselves have said that was the reason.”
“You should be at fever-pitch anger,” he concluded.
Kirk is only reflecting the lasting influence of Tucker Carlson, who brought the great replacement conspiracy theory to mainstream conservative audiences with the full backing of Lachlan Murdoch, who is now the sole chair of his family’s global media empire.
But the Charlie Kirk of today would be unrecognizable to who he was yesterday. In his comprehensive history of the first 10 years of TPUSA, University of North Georgia rhetoric professor Matthew Boedy notes that as the organization has grown, Kirk has expressed increasingly extreme views, including on the topic of immigration.
In 2019, Kirk came under attack by the white nationalist “groyper” movement after he stated that “highly educated immigrants should get ‘a green card’ stapled to their U.S. college diplomas.” This kicked off the so-called “groyper wars” in which followers of neo-Nazi Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes repeatedly confronted Kirk with racist and antisemitic dog whistles while he was on a speaking tour. Kirk ultimately penned an apologia on American Greatness, the same far-right blog that had launched the initial criticism.
Just recently, Fuentes bragged that his followers had infiltrated Turning Point USA and his one-time target had now adopted his messaging.
“I think in 2023, Charlie Kirk, all these others, they sound way more like me, today, than they sound like themselves four years ago,” Fuentes said, before launching into an attack on Jewish people.
Kirk has also radicalized significantly against LGBTQ+ people.
In 2019, he posted a video of an exchange with an audience member labeled “CHARLIE KIRK TAKES DOWN ANTI-GAY EXTREMIST.” In the video, the audience member condemned Kirk for accepting gay people in the conservative movement. Kirk defended himself and gay conservatives, asking, “What does what they do in their private life concern you so much?” and adding that if you do not embrace and love all people as Jesus did, “then you, sir, are not a conservative.”
As Boedy points out, a TPUSA chapter guide from 2017 specifically instructs participants: “no talk about abortion, gay marriage, etc.”
Since then, Kirk has become one of the most extreme voices singling out LGBTQ+ people for violence across the right-wing media.
- In August, Kirk said that trans people who join fraternities and sororities should “be made fun of so much, bullied so much, crying so much, they would get themselves out.”
- Kirk has referred to trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney with an anti-trans slur on multiple occasions.
- Kirk called LGBTQ+ identification a “social contagion.”
- During 2023’s Pride Month, Kirk vowed to remember “all the gay flag stuff” at Starbucks after several stores caved to right-wing pressure to take down Pride decorations.
- On the first day of Pride Month, Kirk tweeted, “Pride is a sin.”
- Kirk has argued that “monogamous heterosexual marriage should be a prerequisite to adoption.”
- In 2022, Kirk warned that gay people “are not happy just having marriage. Instead, they now want to corrupt your children.”
But perhaps Kirk’s biggest transformation has been on the role of religion.
Boedy tracks this transformation masterfully. As TPUSA was getting off the ground, Kirk criticized the conservative movement of decades past for evangelizing too much, claimed to promote right-wing values “through a secular worldview,” and once told an audience that “he saw his job as the face of TPUSA as ‘no different than’ being a plumber or electrician, who likely don’t tell everyone they met about their religion.”
In 2021, Kirk launched the TPUSA Faith initiative, which he has used as a platform to increasingly lean into Christian nationalism. Since then, TPUSA Faith launched Freedom Life Church, a network of TPUSA-aligned congregations with the expressed goal “to change the trajectory of our nation by restoring America's biblical values.”
In 2022, he declared, “There is no separation of church and state.”
Kirk has also falsely claimed that the Founding Fathers based our system of government on the Book of Genesis, and speaks of the country as engaged in a “spiritual battle.”
The Murdochs and Fox News are also directly responsible for helping Kirk launch his career. As TPUSA was just getting off the ground, Kirk started becoming a semi-regular guest on Fox News as the youthful face of opposing the Obama presidency, often hosted by Neil Cavuto. Kirk has appeared at least 235 times on weekday Fox shows since 2018, though his last appearance was May 18, 2023, having since seemingly been blacklisted from the network.
Like the rest of us, Charlie Kirk is getting older, but high school and college students are staying the same age. Conservative media across the board face an uphill battle if they want to win over Gen Z. So far, Kirk’s strategic approach to inheriting the house that Rupert (and Rush) built has been to amplify the extremist fringes.
Jacina Hollins-Borges and Jack Wheatley contributed research to this piece.
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What Florida Students Could Learn From PragerU Kids
The state has just approved children’s content from an offshoot of right-wing propaganda organization PragerU, reflecting and potentially accelerating the state’s hard conservative turn.
Jul 28, 2023
A cartoon Booker T. Washington distorting the history of the Civil War. A narrator explaining that embracing climate denialism is akin to participating in the Warsaw Uprising. An instructional video telling girls that conforming to gender stereotypes is a great way to embrace their femininity. A dramatization of the supposedly civilizing, benevolent era of British colonial rule in India.
These are just some of the episodes of PragerU Kids—an offshoot of right-wing propaganda organization PragerU—that Florida has just approved for use in its public school classrooms, reflecting and potentially accelerating the state’s hard conservative turn.
“The state of Florida just announced that we are now becoming an official vendor,” said PragerU CEO Marissa Streit in a video heralding the news. She claimed that schools have “been hijacked by the left” and “used by union bosses” to pursue an agenda “not for our children.”
PragerU’s infiltration of school curriculum comes as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wages a statewide offensive against public education at every level.
“We are just getting started—additional states are signing up,” Streit added.
In a Meta ad, PragerU Kids highlighted that teachers can use its materials “without repercussions,” signaling that the organization likely fears parents outside of conservative echo chambers could find the videos offensive and inappropriate for the classroom.
PragerU’s infiltration of school curriculum comes as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wages a statewide offensive against public education at every level. Florida recently adopted new classroom guidelines that mandate teachers tell students that enslaved people “developed skills” that “could be applied for their personal benefit.” Earlier this year, DeSantis staged a hostile takeover of public liberal arts school New College, installing anti-civil rights activist Christopher Rufo on the board of trustees; the college has recently seen a “ridiculously high” number of faculty members leave the school.
Here’s what Florida’s latest salvo against public education actually looks like.
PragerU Kids Curriculum
PragerU Kids videos are a mix of animated and live-action shorts, broken up into different recurring series. Some are more overtly political than others, but the roughly 350 videos on the outlet’s YouTube channel seem largely intended to push a right-wing agenda to one extent or another. Now, any of them could be shown in public school classrooms throughout Florida.
Around the World or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Status Quo
In “Poland: Ania’s Energy Crisis,”—part of PragerU Kids’ “Around the World” series—the titular character learns about climate change in school, only to have her eyes opened by her parents, who are helpfully equipped with decades of climate denialist talking points. Ania soon becomes a denialist herself and is ostracized by her peers, who “barely talk to her any more.”
She finds comfort in history, however, as the video analogizes her situation with one of the most famous antifascist acts of resistance in memory. “Grandfather Jakub tells her about the Warsaw Uprising, when the city’s Jews fought back against the Nazis,” the narrator says.
“Through her family’s stories, Ania is realizing that fighting oppression is risky, and that it always takes courage,” the narrator concludes.
Closer to home, “Los Angeles: Mateo Backs the Blue” is anti-Black Lives Matter, pro-cop propaganda. The video describes a Mexican immigrant family that moved to Los Angeles and had their lives upended by the death of George Floyd, whom the narrator characterizes as “a Black man who resisted arrest.”
“Activists claimed that police were targeting the Black community and purposefully killing unarmed Black men,” the narrator says. “As the false claims of racial targeting spread, so did the anger and violence.”
Mateo develops fondness for his school’s “resource officer”—a euphemism, though one not unique to PragerU Kids—and comes to view the cop as “as a guide, a mentor, and a protector, not how he has seen police characterized in the news, as mean-spirited bullies.”
PragerU Kids has other lessons to teach about the world, often steeped in colonialist apologia and market fundamentalism. In “India: Priya Overcomes Adversity” a narrator explains that under Britain’s colonial rule, “Western influence helped transform the country in many positive ways, but some ancient customs are harder to change than others,” referring to the county’s caste system. The video frames India as a backwards land that benefited from the British, who “spread the influence of Christianity and Western values through India” and “discouraged or even outlawed harmful traditions.” The narrator describes India being “given its independence,” rendering the country the beneficiary of British benevolence, rather than the victor in a struggle to overthrow colonial rule.
The video’s description further reveals the purpose of the narrative—to downplay existing oppression by contrasting it with a distorted version of history. “Young people may think that discrimination is worse than ever, but they'll gain perspective,” the caption promises.
PragerU Kids also finds much to praise in the settler-colonialist state of Israel. In “Israel: Shira Prays for Peace,” the country is presented as “the only country in the Middle East that does not oppress its minority populations.” In fact, multiple human rights organizations and experts have determined that Israel is an apartheid state that systematically oppresses and dispossess Palestinians as a matter of practice and law.
Another entry, “Canada: Marcel Makes a Sacrifice,” is an eight-minute hagiography of the for-profit U.S. health care system, and it repeats the same conservative talking points about the dangers of so-called socialized medicine that have been used for decades.
Leo & Layla: Lessons in Collective Forgetting
Another series sees animated characters Leo and Layla traveling back in time to learn from historical figures. In one episode, the pair discuss slavery with a fictionalized Booker T. Washington.
“I hate that our country had slavery,” Layla says. “Mr. Washington, sometimes do you ever wish you could have lived somewhere else? Like a different country?”
“That’s a great question, and I hate slavery too, but it’s been a reality everywhere in the world,” Washington responds.
The overriding theme of Leo and Layla’s adventures—and PragerU Kids in general—is that schools have made white children feel uncomfortable by teaching them about racism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression, and that that anxiety must be alleviated through a rigorous disavowal that the past plays any role in ordering the present.
The fictional Washington then elides the reality of the U.S. Civil War by adopting the passive voice. This flattens the process through which enslaved people freed themselves—alongside the Union Army—into an undifferentiated joint venture of the entire country.
“America was one of the first places on earth to outlaw slavery,” Washington says, getting the timeline completely reversed. “And hundreds of thousands of men gave their lives in a war that resulted in my freedom.”
“When you put it that way, it totally makes sense,” Leo responds.
Washington’s comforting account of history adds up to a conclusion squarely in line with DeSantis’ anti-critical race theory agenda. “Future generations are never responsible for sins of the past,” Washington reassures the children.
“OK I’ll keep doing my best to treat everyone well and won’t feel guilty about historical stuff,” Layla responds, now absolved and innocent.
PragerU Kids’ anti-anti-racism project includes a predictable deradicalization of Martin Luther King Jr., whom Leo and Layla travel to meet.
“My parents… taught me that racism, thinking people are better than or lesser than because of skin color, is wrong and to hate the wrong but never the wrongdoer,” the fictional King tells the kids.
“Wow. That’s so noble,” Layla responds, in an inadvertent but tellingly condescending way.
“My Christian faith directs me to love my neighbors, even when they act in ways I don’t like, and that’s always helped me remain peaceful,” King replies.
Like in the “Around the World” segments, Leo and Layla also have ample opportunities to promote Western chauvinism.
“What’s up with the face?” Layla asks her brother at the beginning of their Christopher Columbus episode. “You look stressed.”
“I’m just doing some research,” Leo responds. “Was today weird for you?”
“Yeah. How’d you guess?” Layla says.
“Columbus Day,” Leo says.
“Or Native American Day, or Indigenous People’s Day—it’s weird, right?” Layla replies.
The kids then discuss how their teachers and peers got into arguments about whether Columbus should have his own holiday.
“The side against Columbus says he was a really mean guy who spread slavery, disease, and violence to people who would’ve been better off if he’d never gone to the new world,” Leo says. “The side for him says he was a really courageous guy who loved exploring, inspired generations, and spread Christianity and Western civilization to people who really benefited from new ways of thinking and doing things.”
When the two kids meet Columbus, he assures them that he was justified in his violence against Indigenous people.
“The place I discovered was beautiful, but it wasn’t exactly a paradise of civilization, and the native people were far from peaceful,” he tells them.
Like the fictional Booker T. Washington, Columbus naturalizes slavery and the slave trade as something that happened everywhere.
“Slavery is as old as time and has taken place in every corner of the world,” Columbus says.
“Well, in our time we view slavery as being evil and terrible,” Layla corrects him.
“Ah. Magnifico! That’s wonderful,” Columbus responds. “I am glad humanity has reached such a time. But you said you’re from 500 years in the future? How can you come here to the 15th century and judge me by your standards from the 21st century?”
As this episode shows, the overriding theme of Leo and Layla’s adventures—and PragerU Kids in general—is that schools have made white children feel uncomfortable by teaching them about racism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression, and that that anxiety must be alleviated through a rigorous disavowal that the past plays any role in ordering the present. If historical wrongs committed by white people in the United States or Europeans must be acknowledged, we must teach that those injustices were undertaken with good intentions. Even more importantly, the past must remain firmly in the past, lest Leo and Layla lose their innocence and be forced to confront continuities of domination.
How To: Instructions in Conformity
Another series, called “How To,” instructs kids on the proper ways to conform to society’s expectations of them, or to repress any unease that results from a sense that power is unequally distributed.
“Most gender stereotypes exist because they reflect the way that men and women are naturally different,” a presenter tells the viewers in “How to Embrace Your Femininity.”
“And those differences aren’t bad,” she continues. “Men and women complement each other and create a well-balanced family and community. So don’t let anybody tell you it’s bad to fit stereotypes.”
In “How to Be a Victor and Not a Victim,” students learn that “people all around the world who have encountered great setbacks have gone on to overcome them, whether it’s poverty, disease, discrimination, or all of it combined.”
That, PragerU Kids says, is the mentality of winners. “Victims on the other hand, don’t believe that personal growth is possible,” the presenter—who, it should be noted here, is Black—instructs the kids.
“Or, even worse, don’t believe it’s needed,” he continues. “Victims are often so busy blaming everything and everyone else for their problems that they don’t stop to think about how their own growth can make things better.”
Other Outlets Chase Dennis Prager’s Model
Other conservative media outlets are attempting to expand their footprint to include children’s programming as well. The Daily Wire, one of the most openly pro-violence and virulently anti-LGBTQ outlets in right-wing media, last year announced a “$100 million commitment to develop entertainment for kids that parents can trust.” Also in 2022, Charlie Kirk launched Turning Point Academy, an affiliate of his extremist-aligned Turning Point USA, which similarly targets elementary school-aged children and defines itself as “an educational movement that exists to glorify God.”
PragerU Kids has a head start on these other outlets, and its curriculum reflects the far-right ideology of Dennis Prager, the organization’s founder. Prager has a long history of making offensive comments, including promoting an anti-gay conspiracy theory about the murder of Matthew Shephard, instructing married women to have sex with their husbands even if they don’t want to, and lamenting that he is socially constrained from using a racist anti-Black slur.
Prager’s recent comments about education are also instructive. “If you see a noose on a college dorm of a Black student, the odds are overwhelming that the noose was put there by a Black student,” Prager said in April 2022.
The goal is to render history and its inheritances invisible, inert, and incapable of inspiring young people to seek a more equal and more just world.
“What has any fifth-grader done to have made the world better because he or she is in it?” he asked last September.
Critics tell him, “‘You indoctrinate kids’—which is true,” Prager said this month. “We bring doctrines to children. That’s a very fair statement.”
PragerU Kids is the newest vehicle for that indoctrination, but Prager also seeks to downplay that very project by presenting his curriculum as ideologically neutral, as he illustrated on his radio show in discussing Florida’s adoption of his product.
“To have responsible—it’s not even right-wing, it’s just responsible,” he said, describing PragerU Kids. “Look at our materials.”
Looking at those materials makes PragerU Kids’ mission clear. Discrimination? Oppression? Structural inequality? These forces either don’t exist, or they’re the fault of the individual who hasn’t sufficiently adopted the rise-and-grind mindset that their more successful peers have.
What this all amounts to is painfully obvious, though perhaps not to the Florida children who will be forced to consume this right-wing propaganda while in a public institution. The goal is to render history and its inheritances invisible, inert, and incapable of inspiring young people to seek a more equal and more just world. PragerU Kids is looking to expand that mission to more states. Now it’s the public’s turn to respond.
Sophie Lawton & Jack Wheatley contributed research to this piece.
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Conservatives Spent 2020 Accusing Facebook of Being Biased Against Them, but Engagement Data Tells a Different Story
In 2020, right-leaning Facebook pages consistently earned more interactions than ideologically nonaligned and left-leaning pages—again.
Jan 03, 2021
Research contributions from Carly Evans & Spencer Silva
In 2020, right-wing media outlets and figures repeatedly claimed that social media platforms, particularly Facebook, are biased against conservatives and censor their content, even though there is no evidence to support these claims. Media Matters and others have demonstrated again and again that no such bias or censorship exists. In fact, there are numerous examples of Facebook capitulating to conservatives and giving right-wing pages preferential treatment.
In this latest study, Media Matters found that right-leaning Facebook pages consistently earned more engagement in 2020 than ideologically nonaligned and left-leaning pages -- and the Facebook pages with the most engagement include prominent right-wing media outlets and figures, such as Donald J. Trump, Fox News, Ben Shapiro, Breitbart, Dan Bongino, and the Daily Mail.
Media Matters used CrowdTangle data to compile and analyze millions of posts from right-leaning, left-leaning, and ideologically nonaligned Facebook pages about U.S. political news that were posted between January 1 and December 15, 2020. We found that right-leaning pages earned over 45% of all interactions on posts from political Facebook pages. Other key findings include:
- Right-leaning pages earned the most interactions this year, with nearly 9 billion interactions on roughly 2.3 million posts. Right-leaning pages accounted for 45% of total interactions from political pages and nearly 30% of total posts.
- Ideologically nonaligned pages earned 5.7 billion interactions this year on roughly 4.5 million posts. These pages accounted for less than 30% of total interactions from political Facebook pages, despite being over 55% of total posts.
- Left-leaning pages earned nearly 5 billion interactions this year on roughly 1.3 million posts. These pages accounted for over 25% of total interactions for political pages and posted only 16% of total posts.
- Right-leaning pages also had the highest interaction rate, a performance metric that measures the engagement of a Facebook page in relation to the number of page "likes" it has and how frequently it shares posts. Conservative pages had an overall average interaction rate of 0.97%, while left-leaning pages had a rate of 0.83% and nonaligned pages had a rate of only 0.27%.
Right-leaning pages consistently earned more weekly interactions
In addition to earning the most interactions overall, right-leaning pages consistently earned more weekly interactions than ideologically nonaligned and left-leaning pages between January 1 and December 15. The only exception was two weeks in March when news coverage was dominated by developments in the COVID-19 pandemic. During this time, ideologically nonaligned pages earned 2-3 million more interactions than right-leaning pages.
In the second half of the year, the gap in performance between right-leaning pages and the others in our data set widened following nationwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism and in the lead-up to the presidential election. During this time period, right-leaning pages substantially outperformed other pages and earned over 100 million more average weekly interactions than either ideologically nonaligned and left-leaning pages between June 3 and December 15.
Right-leaning pages account for 6 of the top 10 political pages that earned the most engagement
Of the 10 political pages that earned the most engagement between January 1 and December 15, six are right-leaning pages, two are ideologically nonaligned pages, and two are left-leaning pages. President Donald Trump's Facebook page leads the top 10 with over 867 million interactions in 2020.
The top 10 Facebook pages posting about U.S. political news in 2020 were:
- Donald J. Trump, a right-leaning page which earned over 867 million interactions on over 6,200 posts.
- Occupy Democrats, a left-leaning page which earned nearly 615 million interactions on over 20,900 posts.
- Fox News, a right-leaning page which earned over 511 million interactions on over 17,300 posts.
- Ben Shapiro, a right-leaning page which earned nearly 380 million interactions on over 33,400 posts.
- Breitbart, a right-leaning page which earned over 338 million interactions on over 20,700 posts.
- UNICEF, an ideologically nonaligned page which earned over 324 million interactions on over 1,700 posts. (UNICEF has partnered with Facebook for public health education, and Facebook's info panel has been boosting the page's posts.)
- The Other 98%, a left-leaning page which earned over 250 million interactions on nearly 10,000 posts.
- Dan Bongino, a right-leaning page which earned over 235 million interactions on over 5,000 posts.
- CNN, an ideologically nonaligned page which earned over 228 million interactions on over 20,300 posts.
- Daily Mail, a right-leaning page which earned over 219 million interactions on over 48,500 posts.
Methodology
Using CrowdTangle, Media Matters compiled a list of 1,773 Facebook pages that frequently posted about U.S. politics from January 1 to August 25, 2020.
For an explanation of how we compiled pages and identified them as right-leaning, left-leaning, or ideologically nonaligned, see the methodology here.
The resulting list consisted of 771 right-leaning pages, 497 ideologically nonaligned pages, and 505 left-leaning pages.
Using CrowdTangle, Media Matters compiled overall and weekly leaderboard data for the pages on this list between January 1 and December 15, 2020. We reviewed data for these pages, including total interactions (reactions, comments, and shares), total posts, pages likes, and interaction rate. CrowdTangle calculates the interaction rate of a group of pages by dividing the total number of interactions (reactions, comments, and shares) earned on all posts from the pages by the total number of posts from the pages, and then dividing by average page likes for the pages. For this calculation, average page likes is based on the page likes for each page at the end of the time frame.
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