Is Social Media Biased Against Conservatives? A Fact Sheet.

Here Are The Facts:
#1. Republicans have a huge audience on social media
Donald Trump has:
77 M followers on Twitter ( 54 M @realdonaldtrump + 23 M @potus )
+23 M fans on Facebook + 10 M followers on Instagram =
110 M fans/followers
Further, there were 59.5 million Tweets about Make America Great Again or MAGA in 2017. It was the third most Tweeted hashtag in 2017. Another top hashtag on Twitter is #tcot, or Top Conservatives on Twitter, with 8.4 million Tweets in 2017. During the annual Conservation Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference in February 2018, #CPAC and #CPAC2018 were tweeted 1.2 million times in a four day period. (source: Twitter)
In summary: Trump can message to more than 110 million fans and followers on social media whenever he wants, and conservative hashtags and tweets make up a large percentage of the traffic on Twitter.
#2. Republicans are not getting disadvantaged by Facebook’s newsfeed
A Media Matters study of conservative, liberal, and non-ideological Facebook pages found no bias against conservatives in terms of distribution. The average interaction rate for photos posted by right-leaning pages was also significantly higher than those of left-leaning pages.
A follow-up Media Matters study of a sample of 26 right-wing meme pages found that on average, they earned more weekly interactions and saw a net increase in interaction numbers after Facebook’s recent algorithm changes.
Newswhip also found that in June the top publisher on Facebook (in terms of engagement) was a conservative network — Fox News.
#3. YouTube’s algorithm is heavily recommending conservative content
“84% of partisan videos were beneficial to Trump, while only 16% were beneficial to Clinton.” — The Guardian’s review of recommended videos on YouTube during the election that favored one candidate or another.
#4. Trump’s campaign had a big advantage on social in 2016 — it helped him win
“Without Facebook, we wouldn’t have won. I mean Facebook really and truly put us over the edge.” — Brad Parscale, Trump 2016 Digital Director
“The fact that I have such power in terms of numbers with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. I think it helped me win all of these races where they’re spending much more money than I spent.” — Donald Trump
