In May, Ben Shapiro's website The Daily Wire had more Facebook engagement on its articles than The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post and NBC News combined.
Miles Parks at NPR:
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 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.
[...]
Other conservative outlets such as 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.
[...]
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, such as 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 a 2019 event at Stanford University.
NPR examines how right-wing pundit and Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro is building his empire of Facebook engagements that is putting it on top of the list, further undercutting claims of "anti-conservative bias" at Facebook.
