• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, January 11, 2021

Media Matters analyzed posts and data from pages about U.S. political news to check engagement levels, and found that total daily interactions with conservative content significantly dropped after suspending Trump’s account. 

Apparently, the balance of content continues to shift.

Media Matters compiled a list of 1,773 Facebook pages from January 1, 2020 to August 25, 2020. The list consists of 771 conservative pages, 497 ideologically nonaligned pages, and 505 liberal pages. Previously, the analysis found that conservative, nonaligned and liberal each took one third.

This is not the first analysis of content engagement on Facebook.

In a previous study of engagement from political pages on Facebook, conservative content accounted for 45% of total interactions — between January 1 and December 15, 2020.

Engagement data of political Facebook pages since the presidential election shows that conservative-focused pages consistently earned more total daily interactions than liberal or nonaligned pages, but stabilized in these two days after Trump’s temporary suspension.

The data shows the impact of removing Trump permanently from Facebook, especially following Twitter’s announcement banning the president.

In October, Media Matters conducted a similar analysis during the four-day Senate-led hearings to consider President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett. During that time, conservative pages on Facebook dominated the content around the nomination.

Media Matters’ analysis shows that posts on conservative pages at the time garnered more overall interactions — reactions, comments, and shares — than posts from liberal or ideologically nonaligned pages.

The company analyzed more than 12,700 posts from political pages from October 12 to October 16, and found the top-performing content was almost exclusively from conservative pages. Five of the top 10 posts were from Fox News, and two were from Trump’s official Facebook account.