Right Wing News, one of hundreds of “inauthentic” Facebook Pages removed in October, consistently outperformed Pages like Breitbart and Fox News from 2013-2016
and I mean all of them—offer no real basis for evaluation.” http://twitter.com/... Kevin Roose / @kevinroose : A lot of the image-based hoaxes I find go viral in FB groups. Read @d1gi on the groups problem: http://medium.com/... Jason Kint / @jason_kint : Huh??? “Right Wing News and its affiliate Pages consistently saw more interaction on Facebook than the Pages of many of the largest news media in the country—including properties such as the New York Times, The Washington Post, and Fox News. Combined.” http://medium.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Jonathan Albright's dataset closes the loop on a question raised two years earlier, when an analysis of 1,000+ posts from six partisan Facebook Pages found the least-accurate ones shared most widely. What Albright adds is scale: Right Wing News wasn't a fringe outlier but, by interaction counts, bigger than Breitbart, Fox News, the New York Times, and The Washington Post combined for three straight years.
The awkward part for Facebook is that it deleted these Pages in October as 'inauthentic' — meaning some of the platform's headline political engagement during the 2016 cycle was manufactured by networks it now disowns. Later coverage shows the pattern didn't end with the purge: right-leaning pages over 500K likes still consistently outperformed left-leaning rivals into 2019, and Daily Wire content kept getting amplified by coordinated page networks that Facebook declined to remove.
First-order effects
- Facebook's own removal decision retroactively invalidates part of its 2013–2016 engagement leaderboard: the Pages that beat legacy publishers were networks the company now classifies as fake, undercutting the metric advertisers and publishers used to size political reach.
- Legacy publishers like the New York Times and Washington Post learn their Facebook distribution disadvantage versus partisan aggregators was even larger than reported — and partly against non-genuine competition.
Second-order effects
- Facebook faces a consistency problem its own later decisions expose: it purged Right Wing News as inauthentic yet refused to remove Daily Wire-promoting Pages it deemed 'run by real people' despite parent-company ownership overlap, so the enforcement line between coordinated and organic becomes the battleground.
- Advertisers and researchers get ammunition to demand audited, authenticity-filtered reach numbers rather than raw interaction counts, since raw counts demonstrably included removed networks.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — misinfo-heavy publishers drawing multiples of trustworthy outlets' engagement per the NYU study — platform distribution structurally decouples from editorial institutions, shifting political media power to whoever optimizes shareable outrage regardless of organizational authenticity.
- The recurring gap between what platforms measure and what they enforce points toward external verification of reach and authenticity becoming a regulatory and advertiser requirement rather than a platform self-certification.
The trend: Facebook's engagement economy has systematically rewarded coordinated, low-accuracy partisan publishing over institutional news, with each purge and enforcement exception revealing how much of the platform's political reach was never organic.