In 2021, Ben Shapiro rules Facebook.
The conservative podcast host and author’s personal Facebook page has more followers than The Washington Post, and he drives an engagement machine unparalleled by anything else on the the world’s biggest social networking site.
An NPR analysis of social media data found that over the past year, stories published by the site Shapiro founded, The Daily Wire, received more likes, shares and comments on Facebook than any other news publisher by a wide margin.
Even legacy news organizations that have broken major stories or produced groundbreaking investigative work don’t come anywhere close.
Daily Wire articles with headlines like “BOOK REVIEW: Proof That Wokeness Is Projection By Nervous, Racist White Women Who Can’t Talk To Minorities Without Elaborate Codes” regularly garner tens of thousands of shares for the site, and Shapiro is turning that Facebook reach into a rapidly expanding, cost-efficient media empire — one that experts worry may be furthering polarization in the U.S.
“There’s a demand amongst certain subsets of the public for outrage politics,” said Jaime Settle, the director of the Social Networks and Political Psychology Lab at The College of William & Mary in Virginia. “This happens on both the left and the right. But the people who do this on the right have just found a lot more successful ways of doing it.”
The Daily Wire did not respond to interview requests from NPR for this story.
The site produces very little original reporting, but instead mostly repackages journalism from traditional news organizations with a conservative slant.
That alone wouldn’t be noteworthy; the circle of life online means information is written and rewritten in a seemingly infinite loop.
But The Daily Wire has turned anger into an art form and recycled content into a business model.
In May, The Daily Wire generated more Facebook engagement on its articles than The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News and CNN combined.
Other conservative outlets like The Blaze, Breitbart News and The Western Journal that publish aggregated and opinion content aimed at invoking outrage have also generally been more successful at generating engagement than legacy news outlets over the past year, according to NPR’s analysis, which used data compiled by the media intelligence company NewsWhip.
The success of these outlets on Facebook may also undermine conservatives’ oft-repeated claims that the social media network has an anti-conservative bias.
In the first two weeks of July, The Daily Wire published at least 25 articles related to critical race theory.
Deen Freelon, a communications professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, says Shapiro also taps into people’s desire to consume information that doesn’t cause “cognitive dissonance” or interfere with their pre-existing biases.
“Traditional media would set the agenda, but not necessarily tell people what to think,” said Freelon. “Ben Shapiro is sort of cornering both aspects: telling [people] what to think about, and secondly, telling them what their opinions should be about those particular topics.”
An ‘intellectual sheen’
In the years since he left Breitbart News, Shapiro has carved out a rare niche within the conservative media world. The graduate of Harvard Law School taps into many of the same culture war themes that former President Donald Trump played into while also disagreeing with Trump, a feat he’s managed without becoming a target of the former president’s ire.
Shapiro has also publicly denounced the alt-right and other people in Trump’s orbit, like Steve Bannon, as well as the conspiracy theory that Trump is the rightful winner of the 2020 election.
“Last week, the Capitol was breached by a group of fringe Trump supporters who had bought into a series of lies,” Shapiro wrote shortly after the violence on Jan. 6.
But in the same column, he quickly turned his attention back to Democrats, and their support of the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests last summer which many conservatives have falsely sought to paint broadly as riots. He’s been widely condemned for anti-LGBT comments.
“I’m not going to go along with the general societal willingness to rewrite basic facets of human nature and human biology and, frankly, mammalian biology in order to suggest that a delusion is true,” Shapiro said, at an event at Stanford University in 2019.
Judd Legum, a former Democratic campaign operative who founded ThinkProgress.com, now writes a newsletter called Popular Information which focused a recent edition on The Daily Wire’s Facebook success.
He says Shapiro takes many “red meat culture war issues” that might seem offensive at first glance, but gives them “an intellectual sheen.”
“He’s able to make these concepts seem as enticing as possible and make them not seem crazy,” Legum told NPR.
A zero-sum game
The Daily Wire’s success isn’t just amplified by the shrinking local news market, it may be contributing to the demise of local news as well.
Legum and his cowriter Tesnim Zekeria analyzed 70 of The Daily Wire’s top stories on Facebook in May and June and found that almost all of them were regurgitations of another outlet’s reporting.
“For this minimal effort, The Daily Wire is rewarded with massive engagement on Facebook while the source of the journalism, quite often a local media outlet, gets a tiny fraction of engagement,” Legum and Zekaria wrote.
Legum mentioned a May 20 Chicago Tribune article as an example.
The original story was written by the Tribune’s Chicago police beat reporter and it received 870 engagements on Facebook.
When The Daily Wire published its version however, which drew from both the Tribune and the Chicago CBS affiliate’s stories, it received more than 350,000 engagements on Facebook. Each quote in the piece was attributed to a local affiliate, and as Legum noted, The Daily Wire’s headline used a quote out of context to spice up the story.
“The Chicago Tribune has to pay for this beat reporter, they have to do the work, they have to attend the meeting, they have to have sources,” said Legum. “The Daily Wire doesn’t do any of that and they’re getting pretty much all of the traffic and the benefits from Facebook.”
Legum’s previous reporting also revealed how the company operates a number of large Facebook pages that don’t obviously appear connected to The Daily Wire at first glance, with titles like “Conservative News” and “Don’t Mess With America,” but which exist only to promote Daily Wire content.
Facebook struggled internally over how to handle that page coordination, according to reporting by The New York Times last year. One employee told The Times that Facebook worried “taking action against a prominent right-wing network could set off a Republican backlash.”
Publicly however, there has been no indication that Facebook views The Daily Wire’s engagement success to be a problem.
Freelon, the UNC professor, says Shapiro has done a brilliant job threading the needle of engaging much of the Republican base with polarizing content while not running afoul of the social media platforms.
“Regardless of whatever you think of Ben Shapiro’s ideological leanings,” Freelon says, “it’s hard to deny that he’s doing what he’s doing well.”
