How Ben Shapiro's massively popular right-wing site The Daily Wire gets promoted in an inauthentic, coordinated manner by 14 Facebook pages followed by millions
The Daily Wire, the right-wing website founded by pundit Ben Shapiro, is a cesspool of misogyny, bigotry, and misinformation. Tweets: @juddlegum , @kevinroose , @juddlegum , @kevinroose , @jeffbercovici , @slpng_giants , @juddlegum , @willoremus , @juddlegum , @kevinroose , @slpng_giants , @anildash , and @profcarroll See also Mediagazer Tweets: Judd Legum / @juddlegum : 1. How is The Daily Wire, the toxic right-wing site founded by pundit Ben Shapiro, more successful on Facebook than any other major publication? It breaks the rules. And Facebook is going to continue to let them do it. https://popular.info/... Kevin Roose / @kevinroose : A FB spokesman says “these are real pages run by real people in the U.S., and they don't violate our policies.” Still trying to figure out how a network of centrally operated pages with misleading labeling doesn't qualify as coordinated inauthentic behavior, US-based or no. Judd Legum / @juddlegum : 1. This is absolutely ludicrous. The lengths to which Facebook is going to justify The Daily Wire's obvious violations of their rules is astounding. Facebook is banking on people not caring but I think people will care. Let's review. https://popular.info/... https://twitter.com/... Kevin Roose / @kevinroose : Lots of media orgs cross-post stories to multiple pages, that's fine. But some of the pages posting Daily Wire links weren't labeled as being tied to the site. If they are, hard to see how that's kosher, given that FB has punished similar behavior before. https://www.nytimes.com/... Jeff Bercovici / @jeffbercovici : This is huge. It would appear Judd solved the mystery of how the Daily Wire is so improbably popular on Facebook and showed Facebook won't enforce its own very clear rules if it means taking on a prominent conservative whom Mark Zuckerberg has dined with. https://twitter.com/... @slpng_giants : UNBELIEVABLE. THEY ARE THE SAME HEADLINES PUSHED FROM 12 DIFFERENT ACCOUNTS AT THE SAME EXACT TIME! HOW DO THEY EXPECT EVERYONE TO BELIEVE THIS CRAP? @facebook, man. https://twitter.com/... Judd Legum / @juddlegum : 4. Facebook says when it finds “coordinated inauthentic behavior” it will “remove all inauthentic and authentic accounts, Pages and groups directly involved” Facebook admitted that these pages are acting deceptively, but it will not take them down https://popular.info/... Will Oremus / @willoremus : I contacted Facebook this morning to try to confirm @JuddLegum's reporting and see how they're explaining what appears to be preferential treatment of Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire. Facebook still has not responded. https://twitter.com/... Judd Legum / @juddlegum : Here is what the clandestine network of Facebook pages that exist to promote The Daily Wire have been up to IN THE LAST 30 MINUTES Facebook, which has a rule against “inauthentic coordinated behavior,” is going to let this continue https://popular.info/... pic.twitter.com/67T0NYhU02 Kevin Roose / @kevinroose : Using centrally controlled, misleadingly labeled feeder pages to drive traffic to a single domain is a pretty clear-cut violation of FB's rules on coordinated inauthentic behavior. Wonder what happened here! https://twitter.com/... @slpng_giants : Wow. Another bombshell about @facebook. The Daily Wire is clearly breaking Facebook's rules regarding coordinated amplification and they will not enforce them. The facts are all laid out right here. As always, engagement is more important to them than their own rules. https://twitter.com/... @anildash : They're breaking the rules, Facebook knows it, Facebook won't do anything, Facebook bragged about shutting down progressive media sites that did something similar. https://twitter.com/... David Carroll / @profcarroll : Breitbart shared data with Cambridge Analytica but Facebook now actively promotes in News product. Daily Wire practices “coordinated inauthentic behavior” but Facebook looks the other way. Meanwhile Facebook insists we don't want tech companies exerting an ideological bias. https://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Judd Legum's Popular Information documents how 14 Facebook pages with millions of combined followers push The Daily Wire's content in a coordinated manner — precisely the inauthentic behavior Facebook's rules nominally prohibit. The immediate follow-up matters as much as the finding: Facebook reviewed the network and declined to act, saying the pages are "run by real people" and therefore not policy-violating.
That decision lands amid a broader record of Facebook's distribution favoring the right: former employees later described News Feed algorithm tests that were tweaked to help right-leaning publishers, and Zuckerberg's evolution into an active political operator is documented in detail by WSJ sourcing. The Daily Wire story is thus an early, concrete case study in how enforcement discretion — not just algorithms — shapes which publishers win on Facebook.
First-order effects
- Facebook has effectively ruled that centrally coordinated page networks promoting one publisher are permissible when staffed by humans, leaving The Daily Wire's outsized Facebook reach untouched while rival publishers must build audience without equivalent page networks.
- Researchers and journalists tracking engagement — the Roose/CrowdTangle dynamic in the related coverage — now have a documented case showing Facebook will not enforce its own coordinated-behavior standard against a large right-wing publisher.
Second-order effects
- The non-enforcement sets an operating precedent: any publisher seeking Facebook scale can argue its page network is 'run by real people,' pushing competitors toward the same multi-page amplification playbook rather than away from it.
- Each documented refusal feeds the 'working the refs' criticism covered by the NYT — platforms placating hyperpartisan critics — increasing pressure on Facebook from advertisers, watchdogs like Sleeping Giants, and its own employees over selective rule application.
Third-order effects
- If enforcement stays discretionary, distribution power among US news publishers consolidates around whoever best exploits platform tolerance for coordination — a structural advantage that predates and compounds any algorithmic tilt.
- The episode foreshadows regulation premised on platforms' inability or unwillingness to apply their own integrity rules evenhandedly, with the Cambridge Analytica-era trust deficit making external oversight more politically viable.
The trend: Which publishers win distribution on Facebook is increasingly decided by discretionary enforcement choices rather than uniformly applied platform rules — a pattern the Daily Wire page network exposed early and the algorithm-tweak disclosures later confirmed.