Factual“Le Monde” recorded, for a week, the most popular messages on Facebook in the United States. Almost all published by pages to the right of the right, they show the viral power of the most extreme pro-Trump activists.
“If you think Donald Trump can’t be re-elected in November, you’re not spending enough time on Facebook. ” At the end of August, the journalist from New York Times Kevin Roose published the result of a long analysis of the most popular contents of the social network in his country. This analysis was based on “engagement”: a somewhat fuzzy measure that aggregates all the interactions generated by a message (sharing, comment, “like” by users), but which provides an overview of its visibility and of its success.
For a week, from September 11 to 18, The world scrutinized the most “engaging” Facebook posts in the United States, where the social network remains widely used: in the second quarter, 198 million Facebook accounts were active every day in North America. Unsurprisingly, topical subjects linked, directly or indirectly, to American politics largely dominate this ranking, which outlines a social network that has become an essential platform for disseminating opinions, information or rumors more or less. less committed – that the current tenant of the White House, candidate for his re-election, had already been able to handle with great efficiency in 2016.
In 2020, in the game of engagement, it appears that the American right is still largely victorious. Fifteen pro-Trump pages largely dominate the most visible and popular Facebook posts; in comparison, only a handful of messages favorable to the themes of the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, manage to find a place.
What if Facebook was the real one “Silent majority”, expression popularized by former Republican President Ronald Reagan to refer to Americans who do not live in New York or Los Angeles, do not have the ear of the mainstream media, and are, in the opinion of Republicans, fundamentally conservative?
While engagement is not an exact science and cannot predict election results, analysis of the best-performing content on Facebook shows that Donald Trump has a solid base of ultra-radicalized activists there, playing hard the map of “virality of emotions” enabled by Mark Zuckerberg’s platform.
Corrupt elites and pedophile conspiracy
Friday, September 11, as America collects in tribute to the victims of the World Trade Center attack, a rather silent majority of Facebook users comments and shares Ben Shapiro’s messages. Host, journalist, polemicist, Mr. Shapiro, 36, has many hats, including that of undisputed star of the social network: over the past twelve months, his messages have collected 325 million interactions. It is certainly less than those of Donald Trump (more than 500 million) but… more than those of the CNN channel (207 million).
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