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Notes -
Trump is back on Facebook, Instagram too
Meta to restore Trump's Facebook, Instagram accounts
So this means he's back on all major platforms. I think this shows that maybe, alluding to the below about JK Rowling, that cancel culture does not work as well as on famous, rich targets: they get more chances, and also because they are such big draws and have so many fans, that it's shooting oneself in the foot to cancel them. I have observed the same on YouTube, with Rogan ,Jordan Peterson , and Fox News views being heavily promoted. I tested this by opening YouTube on an EC2 instance US IP, no browsing history. Big tech companies, like all companies, are motivated by profits in the end, more so than ideology. The big question is, will trump post? I think so eventually, come election season . At this point, I think the left has sustained a major defeat in the culture wars.
I regularly check youtube / other social media sites from fresh IPs / browser profiles (just out of curiousity), and things like fox news, peterson, and other popular center-right figures have been popular & algorithmically promoted since at least 2017. Youtube's censorship of right-wing figures has mostly been on specific topics like (their words) "election denial" or "vaccine misinformation", or on farther-right ideas, not the most mainstream center-right figures. The most popular facebook content has been significantly center-right since at least mid 2020 which is when that account started. So other than trump's return, that's mostly the status quo, as opposed to a left-wing defeat
That facebook stat I always have found to be misleading. Yes, Ben Shapiro is (or was) #1 in gross, but think about how he and fox are basically the only two big name outlets looking to attract some 50% of facebook (and America). Meanwhile, the Times, Post, CNN, MSNBC, Tribune, Sentinel, Vox, etc are all fighting for a slice of the other 50%.
Its like noticing "Jim always has the fattest goats at auction" while failing to note that Jim takes his goats to a field outside town to browse, while everyone else uses the beat up and over used town commons.
It's not just ben and fox - dan bongino, trump, breitbart get (or got in trump's case) a lot of top 10 slots, and there's a long tail of cons just like the long tail of libs. I agree this doesn't show conservatives dominating facebook, and more recent posts often have kpop as #1 and seem pretty even between Rs and Ds - but I just intended it to show that conservative popularity on social media isn't a recent change, but how it's been for a while.
But where is the aggregate stat? It is consistently absent as consistent with the recent Caplan rebuttal to Hanania.
Ben Shapiro can get 3 million views. The NFL gets 30 million, and the news program that follows naturally absorbs a huge % of that, typically around 1/3. The stats linked also talk about the best post of the day. The most intriguing post of the day will always be as such! Ben or Dan or Donald do a few posts per day. CNN does 100.
Everything is stacked in favor of making that stat look stupid.
I'm not sure what you mean. If you're saying libs get most of non-top-10 slots but republicans get most of the top slots, so daily top 10 makes republicans look more popular than they are - maybe, it could go either way, my guess is both Rs and Ds get similar chunks of the non-top-10 slots. My reason for linking that account wasn't to suggest republican dominance, just providing some external confirmation to "republican content has been big on social media for a while, and it being big now doesn't suggest any change".
It is almost impossible for it to go either way, unless conservatives are massively over-represented as facebook users. There are just so many more left of center outlets.
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