Report: Tech companies have secret data showing that conservative voices outperform liberals

Axios reports that tech companies are showing conservatives data that they outperform liberals. The companies have not released it.

According to an Axios report, conservative groups are planning to make supposed social media censorship a crucial part of their 2020 campaign. But the report also says that tech companies are conducting outreach with conservatives and “trying to push hard on data showing that conservative voices often outperform liberal ones.”

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Axios’ report says that conservative “charges of overt bias by social media platforms are way overblown.”

This is an understatement. The data is clear: There is no censorship of conservatives on social media platforms. To the contrary, the existing data does show that conservatives receive equal or greater engagement than others.

I. Facebook organic content
Media Matters conducted three extensive studies of political pages on Facebook (pages that post about politics or news regularly), all finding that left-leaning and right-leaning content performed about the same. Those same studies show that right-wing meme pages are the most engaged-with content on Facebook.

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Donald Trump’s campaign ran over 2,200 ads this year referring to immigration as an invasion -- a white supremacist dog whistle later echoed in the manifesto of the El Paso, TX, mass shooter. Nine other Republicans ran similar ads since May 2018. Facebook’s advertising policies and community standards prohibit attacks which target a group of people based on their immigration status. The policy clearly states that “violent” or “dehumanizing” attacks against a group of people based on immigration status are prohibited.

The impact of YouTube is not in doubt. A massive New York Times report found that YouTube fueled the rise of the far-right in Brazil. Another report examined how YouTube radicalized a West Virginia man. The Daily Beast’s Kelly Weill spoke to people who were radicalized on YouTube. “I’d met a neo-Nazi and didn’t even know it,” one told her.

Following pressure about all of this radicalization, YouTube said that it would stop recommending conspiracy theory videos. A HuffPost investigation by Jesselyn Cook and K. Sophie Will found that the channel was instead pushing viewers towards Fox News videos.

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/report-tech-companies-have-secret-data-showing-conservative-voices-outperform-liberals

The other day I was surfing after I watched a video on Youtube on my Roku and it kept playing back-to-back Fox videos that eventually I had to stop it. I think social media is actually biased toward conservatives.