Facebook says it won't remove Pages promoting Daily Wire content because they're “run by real people”, but at least two are owned by Daily Wire's parent company
This is the online version of the Popular Information newsletter. You can get independent accountability journalism in your inbox every week. Tweets: @juddlegum , @slpng_giants , @juddlegum , @mathewi , @juddlegum , @juddlegum , @juddlegum , @juddlegum , @kevinroose , @juddlegum , and @kevinroose See also Mediagazer Tweets: Judd Legum / @juddlegum : Facebook claims these 12 large Facebook pages are “real pages run by real people” and not centrally-controlled inauthentic behavior by The Daily Wire They all just posted the same link from the Daily Wire with the same text ALL WITHIN FOUR SECONDS https://popular.info/... https://twitter.com/... @slpng_giants : Absolutely ridiculous for @facebook to claim that this does not break their rules for inauthentic behavior. If it's not, let's all see the proof. Show us that real humans are running these accounts. https://twitter.com/... Judd Legum / @juddlegum : 3. One page in the network is The Right News. It is associated with a website called http://therightnews.net . Here is the record showing that http://therightnews.net was aquired by Forward Publishing, the parent company of the Daily Wire on 4/29/16 https://popular.info/... Mathew Ingram / @mathewi : Judd Legum says several Facebook pages that appear to be separate entities are actually controlled by Daily Wire as a way of hacking the Facebook algorithm to generate more traffic https://popular.info/... Judd Legum / @juddlegum : 6. Another page that Facebook is claims is run by “real people” is Conservative News. It's associated with a website called http://conservativenews.com . That page is also owned by Forward Publishing How do I know? It's in the footer of its defunct website https://popular.info/... pic.twitter.com/V1Imf1BHAO Judd Legum / @juddlegum : 1. UPDATE: So in response to my report that The Daily Wire is gaming Facebook with a network of 14 large pages Facebook released a new statement. Facebook says these are “real pages run by real people” Facebook is wrong and I have receipts https://popular.info/... Judd Legum / @juddlegum : 2. I'm particularly interested in the claim by Facebook that these pages are run by “real people” and not The Daily Wire. I have evidence that at least two of the pages in the network are OWNED BY THE DAILY WIRE https://popular.info/... 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/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Judd Legum's Popular Information had already documented, the day before, how 14 Facebook pages followed by millions were promoting Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire in a coordinated fashion — twelve of them posting the same link with identical text within four seconds. Facebook's response was to defend the network as "real pages run by real people" and decline removal.
The new wrinkle: reporting ties at least two of those pages, The Right News and Conservative News, to Forward Publishing, the Daily Wire's parent company. That puts Facebook's "real people" standard in direct tension with the ownership structure behind the pages, and makes this a live test of what counts as centrally-controlled inauthentic behavior when the coordinator is a media company.
First-order effects
- Facebook keeps the pages up, so Daily Wire and Forward Publishing retain a multi-million-follower distribution layer that operates outside the platform's inauthentic-behavior enforcement.
- Popular Information's documentation — including the four-second posting synchronization — now stands as an unresolved contradiction of Facebook's own stated rationale, handing accountability reporters a concrete enforcement gap to press on.
Second-order effects
- Other partisan publishers can read the outcome as a playbook: as long as individual pages have human operators, a parent company can run a coordinated page network and stay inside policy — making owned-page syndication a cheap growth channel relative to buying reach.
- The decision compounds earlier enforcement questions around Facebook's handling of right-leaning content, from the internally debated removal of a well-founded fact-check label to former employees' accounts of News Feed tests tweaked to favor right-leaning sites, sharpening advertiser and regulator scrutiny of whether rules bend by publisher.
Third-order effects
- If enforcement keys on who operates a page rather than who owns it, coordinated amplification by media companies becomes structurally exempt from inauthentic-behavior rules — an instance of the long-running pattern where Facebook relies on labels and third-party flags while leaving distribution itself untouched.
- Combined with reported algorithmic favoritism toward right-leaning outlets, the pattern points toward a distribution landscape where political media companies compete on platform-internal page networks as much as on their own sites, with verification of corporate ownership becoming the missing enforcement primitive.
The trend: Platform moderation of coordinated inauthentic behavior is being drawn around page operators rather than corporate owners, letting media companies run distributed amplification networks inside the rules.