On March 1, Biden gave the annual State of the Union address in which he discussed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, his domestic agenda, and plans for the country’s COVID-19 response. During the hour-long speech and in the immediate aftermath, right-leaning pages on Facebook earned 1.2 million interactions on posts about the address — more than other news and politics pages.
Media Matters compiled and analyzed all Facebook posts about the State of the Union address that were posted by politics and news pages from 9 pm EST to 11pm EST on March 1 and found that right-leaning pages earned the most interactions, accounting for 51% of total interactions on posts from political pages, even though ideologically nonaligned pages posted the most.
In fact, right-leaning pages earned roughly 1.2 million interactions (51%) on over 300 posts (29%), while ideologically nonaligned pages earned nearly 700,000 interactions (29%) on almost 600 posts (53%) and left-leaning pages earned nearly 500,000 interactions (20%) on almost 200 posts (17%).
Right-leaning pages also accounted for six of the 10 posts with the most interactions. These six posts included a livestream of Biden’s address, clips of or reactions to the address, a photo criticizing Biden, and photos amplifying Rep. Lauren Boebert’s (R-CO) outfit.
Methodology
Using CrowdTangle, Media Matters compiled a list of 1,773 Facebook pages that frequently posted about U.S. politics from January 1 to August 25, 2020.
For an explanation of how we compiled pages and identified them as right-leaning, left-leaning, or ideologically nonaligned, see the methodology here.
The resulting list consisted of 771 right-leaning pages, 497 ideologically nonaligned pages, and 505 left-leaning pages.
Every day, Media Matters also uses Facebook's CrowdTangle tool and this methodology to identify and share the 10 posts with the most interactions from top political and news-related Facebook pages.
Using CrowdTangle, Media Matters compiled all posts for the pages on this list that were posted from 9 pm EST March 1, 2022 through 11 pm EST March 1, 2022 and were related to Biden’s State of the Union address. We reviewed data for these posts, including total interactions (reactions, comments, and shares).
We defined posts as related to Biden’s State of the Union address if they had any of the following terms in the message or in the included link, article headline, or article description: “State of the Union,” “SOTU,” “speech,” or “address.”
