Add another item to Facebook’s growing list of headaches: Conservative publishers are complaining that the social media network has unfairly targeted their traffic.

In January, Facebook announced that it would be changing the algorithm for its newsfeed, reducing the overall amount of posts users see from publishers and prioritizing, in CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s words, “news that is trustworthy, informative, and local.”


While news outlets across the board have been hurt by the change, there is a growing feeling in the conservative news world that sites that tilt right have been hit particularly hard.

“Facebook is not a neutral host; it has a political agenda,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson said on his show last week, taking up the issue. “It’s an act of ideological warfare, and it’s far more worrying than anything that Cambridge Analytica has done, or is accused of doing.”

Several conservative outlets have certainly experienced Facebook-related traffic decreases, but, short of testimony from Zuckerberg, there is no way to know for sure whether Facebook has intentionally gone after them for their politics.

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Ben Shapiro, the editor-in-chief of the conservative Daily Wire, said the impact of Facebook’s algorithm change on his site has been “substantial," but he declined to give specific numbers.

“It’s clearly made an impact on us; it’s clearly made an impact on every conservative site,” he said. “I think that Facebook needs to be held to public account for its constant manipulation of what its users are seeing.”

A Facebook spokesperson pushed back against the idea that the social media network was targeting conservatives.

“We’ve made changes to News Feed to help people meaningfully connect with friends and family first,” the spokesperson said. “This means public pages of all types are going to experience declines across Facebook. Political pages and partisan news pages, like other public pages, have experienced declines, but there are examples of declines across the political spectrum.”

Facebook does not reveal the formula behind its algorithms, so it is impossible to know for sure what has actually led to different sites’ changes in fortune. There are several possible explanations for why some conservative sites may have seen traffic decreases, including that Facebook has de-emphasized highly partisan sites of any stripe. As part of its changes in January, Facebook introduced a user poll to assess the trustworthiness of different sites. It is possible that users have judged some sites as not trustworthy, leading them to appear less.

Not all sites favored by conservatives have been hurt. Fox News has actually seen its interaction rate on Facebook — the rate at which users like, comment, share or otherwise interact with a post — go up in the past month, according to the analytics tracker CrowdTangle. National Review has also experienced an increase. The liberal Daily Kos, meanwhile, has seen a decrease.

The number of conservative sites that have sprouted up recently in response to the “liberal mainstream media” dwarfs the number of openly partisan sites on the left, so it may appear as though more of those sites are being targeted. One editor at a conservative site said in an email that, while he does believe there is bias at Facebook, some less established sites may simply be getting punished based on poor quality.

“A lot of the digital outlets in the conservative ecosphere (a relatively new thing, like last eight years) are objectively bad and lack coherent, consistent standards,” said the editor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The editor also noted that many have built their strategy entirely around Facebook traffic, which he called “a huge mistake.”

“Any outlet without coherent and consistent reporting standards that places the entirety of its fortunes on clicky Facebook headlines is in for a tough handful of quarters,” said the editor.

But right-leaning sites, ranging from National Review, where Shapiro tackled the issue, to Breitbart, The Blaze and The Gateway Pundit, have written that conservative outlets are being targeted. Those stories have been largely based on analyses done by the conservative site The Western Journal and a nonpartisan site called The Outline.

The issue particularly pricks at Facebook, which was stung in 2016 by reports that employees who curated the site’s “trending” news section were downplaying or suppressing stories that would appeal to a conservative audience. Ironically, the company addressed the controversy by switching to have the trending topics based off an algorithm.

Since that episode, though, conservatives have been on high alert for liberal bias at the company.

The Western Journal analysis, using data from the web tracking company SimilarWeb, compared traffic from Facebook for several sites in February to March. It concluded that sites including Breitbart, The Gateway Pundit, The Daily Wire, The Western Journal, the Conservative Tribune and the Independent Journal Review have all seen marked decreases, while most mainstream news sites had not.

Notably, the analysis also found that Fox News had not been hurt — and, in fact, was receiving more traffic from Facebook — and that some highly partisan liberal sites have.

Patrick Brown, CEO of Liftable Media, which owns The Western Journal, says the amount of traffic his site receives from Facebook has been cut in half since the algorithm change. Overall, the site relied on Facebook for about 50 percent of its traffic, making the changes devastating. Brown says that, as a result, his company has had to lay off employees.

“It’s very troubling for free speech in this country,” Brown said. “It’s pretty clear that this is a huge departure from Facebook’s normal practices and they’re making a decision to support one political side of the conversation against another.”

But according to Yale psychologist David Rand, there may be another explanation for why certain sites have lost traffic. After Facebook introduced its user trust poll, Rand and his colleague Gordon Pennycook ran an experiment reproducing the survey. Rand said many of the sites that The Western Journal saidsuffered traffic decreases in the past month — including the Daily Kos — were rated as untrustworthy by the respondents to his poll. Meanwhile, sites that saw traffic increases in the Western Journal analysis — such as Fox News — were rated as more trustworthy by the survey takers.

“It’s totally consistent, to — actually — an extent I’m pretty shocked about,” Rand said. “If this is a result of [Facebook] implementing that policy, it looks like it’s working reasonably well.”

Facebook has worked assiduously over the years to portray itself not as a media company that makes editorial decisions, but an agnostic platform. Undeniably, though, the company is making decisions that affect what sort of news appears in users’ feeds. Speaking at the Financial Times’ Future of News event in New York last week, New York Times editor Dean Baquet said, “It’s hard for me not to think of what Facebook does as editing. … They make decisions about what people get to see.”

Not revealing exactly how those decisions are made has allowed everyone to draw their own conclusion about why some sites have been hurt more than others.

“Facebook has never been transparent about what exactly they do, and you’re seeing that lack of transparency reflected in frustration from every single side of the aisle at this point,” Shapiro said.

Brown, from The Western Journal, said that although he believes conservatives have been unfairly hurt by Facebook, he is not sure whether it was intentional. He said that when his site reached out to Facebook to inquire about what was happening, it got no response, leaving him to draw his own conclusions.

“They’re totally opaque and not transparent,” Brown said. “Who knows what they’re thinking?”

