i have some issues with the idea that facebook is the canary in the coal mine of genuine american political sentiment laid out in this post nytimes.com/2020/08/27/tec…
1) it cites “millions” of interactions for conservative pages like ben shapiro’s, based on CrowdTangle data. CrowdTangle doesn’t distinguish between organic interactions and interactions that come from paid promotion for non-ad, “organic” posts. 
There is no data to reflect which Facebook pages are simply spending a fuck ton of money boosting their posts and which aren’t. Ben Shapiro could simply be spending a fuck ton of money promoting his posts.
2) the article cites a Pew stat that 43 percent of Americans get their news from Facebook. Pew STILL only sources participants by phone calls.
43 percent of people who will answer a random phone call, and then actually go through with a survey, get their news from Facebook, not 43 percent of Americans in general (this screenshot is from the methodology of this particular study)
I don’t think Facebook should be absolved at all for enabling all of this activity, and it’s simply wild of them to allow this perception to continue.
But dismantling it would mean revealing how much of its traffic is essentially fake because pages are paying for it, and the fact that it won’t distinguish suggests there’s an absolutely disgusting amount of it going on within the millions of interactions CrowdTangle shows.
