Writing at the Huffington Post, Ethan Klapper notes that Breitbart News saw a huge increase in Facebook interactions over the weekend following President Donald Trump’s comments on NFL players kneeling during the national anthem and athletes protesting in response:
President Donald Trump’s weekend attacks on the NFL and its players coincided with massive increases in Facebook audience for right-wing news sites, but only modest gains for centrist and left-wing news sites, according to Facebook data analyzed by HuffPost.
The Daily Caller saw a 130 percent increase in weekend Facebook interactions over its August-September average. Conservative Daily, a page run by the Independent Journal Review, was up 96 percent. Fox News had an 85 percent boost. And Breitbart, which is run by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and whose audience is often seen as representative of Trump’s base, experienced a 132 percent increase in Facebook engagement on Saturday and Sunday — and published the top post on the social network by any major American publisher.
The data strongly suggest that the president’s comments on Friday and tweets on Saturday and Sunday fired up his base. Facebook pages typically see higher engagement when their fans are excited about an issue.
The Facebook post in question — which received over 267,000 reactions, 16,000 comments, and was shared almost 529,000 times as of this writing — can be found below:
#WeStand
Posted by Breitbart on Sunday, September 24, 2017
Read the rest of the story at the Huffington Post.
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