A new study of posts on popular public Facebook pages about the early days of the Biden administration finds that the focus of these posts, as well as the assessments of the new president, differed widely by the ideological orientation of the pages.
This analysis focuses on the 1,226 posts published on 25 popular public Facebook pages focused on current affairs during a crucial week for President Joe Biden, March 8-14, in which he signed the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill. With about one-in-five U.S. adults saying they often get political news on social media, this latest research explores how news coverage on social media may have differed from broader coverage of the new administration.
Among the popular Facebook pages we studied that describe themselves as conservative, 1% of posts carried positive assessments of the Biden administration, while 67% were negative. For those pages that self-identified as liberal, only 1% of the posts carried negative assessments while 47% had a positive one. About one-third of the posts on conservative Facebook pages and roughly half on liberal pages were neither positive nor negative.
