“It is certainly the biggest story in politics since the 2016 election,” one publisher told BuzzFeed News

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Not long after Christine Blasey Ford finished being questioned in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, the conservative Facebook page Western Journal shared a link to an article about comments she had made about her fear of flying. “Truth Comes Out: Ford Was ‘Afraid’ To Fly to DC but Not Hawaii, Tahiti, Costa Rica or French Polynesia,” read the headline. The story focused on Ford’s responses when asked by prosecutor Rachel Mitchell whether she’d taken airplanes to make previous trips. The story was shared to Western Journal’s more than 5.2 million Facebook fans, and a few minutes later it was posted to Conservative Tribune’s page, which has 4.3 million fans. Both are owned by Liftable Media, a conservative media company that over the past two years has come to own more than 30 political Facebook pages with over 25 million likes. Last week Liftable put the full force of its network behind its coverage of Ford and Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, whom Ford said sexually assaulted her when the two were in high school in the 1980s. A few hours after the Ford flying story first was shared, Liftable blasted the link to more than 20 of its other pages in the span of less than six minutes. The result is that today the story has generated over 170,000 shares, comments, and reactions on Facebook, making it WesternJournal.com’s biggest Facebook hit of the past three months. It’s one of several Kavanaugh confirmation stories that have driven more Facebook traffic than usual, according to the company. “I think it’s probably one of the bigger new cycles we’ve seen this year,” Patrick Brown, the CEO of Liftable, told BuzzFeed News. “People voraciously want to read about it.”

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Thanks to the dramatic live testimony of Ford and Kavanaugh and the ongoing drama around a final senate vote, this Supreme Court confirmation process has become one of the biggest traffic generating news stories for hyperpartisan news pages on Facebook of the past two years, according to publishers who spoke to BuzzFeed News. Earlier this year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company would focus on reducing polarization and helping people find “common ground.” “It’s not useful if someone’s just kind of repeating the same thing and attempting to polarize or drive people to the extremes,” he said. A divisive issue like the Kavanaugh confirmation, however, has been a boon for hyperpartisan publishers who’ve otherwise struggled thanks to Facebook’s algorithm tweaks announced earlier this year. Powerful networks of conservative pages have mounted broad campaigns to support Kavanaugh’s confirmation, while on the left the pages controlled by Occupy Democrats are pumping out pro-Ford content. But in spite of accusations of conservative bias leveled against Facebook, the right seems to be dominating. On Wednesday, a New York Times reporter noted that data in CrowdTangle, a Facebook analytics tool, showed that conservative publishers had the top-performing content about Kavanaugh and Ford on the platform:

Sources of today's top performing Facebook posts about Kavanaugh, per @crowdtangle: 1. Fox News 2. Ben Shapiro 3. CNSNews ("News the Lefty Media Doesn't Want You to Have") 4. Breitbart About Dr. Ford: 1. Fox News 2. CNN 3. Daily Caller 4. Breitbart

It’s all somewhat reminiscent of the political Facebook wars fought during 2016 election, when hyperpartisan news was at its zenith in audience and revenue. “Our audience has never been more engaged in a story than the Kavanaugh confirmation. It is certainly the biggest story in politics since the 2016 election,” said Jeremy Boreing, the COO of Daily Wire, the conservative news site founded by star pundit Ben Shapiro. “It’s a very fraught conflict right now and there’s a lot of harsh language and hard feelings [on both sides],” Brown said. “It’s definitely something people are interested in.”

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In addition to using its massive network of pages to drive traffic to its website, Liftable also ran Facebook ads to promote its content, and to gather new email addresses for its lucrative email list.

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