Republicans’ perception of Facebook dropped 60 percent since the controversy emerged, while Democrats’ views have slightly improved, according to YouGov’s BrandIndex, which tracks brand health. The index calculates its score by asking 4,800 people each weekday about their perceptions, using a scale of 100 to negative 100. On May 8, Facebook had a score of 19 among Republicans. By May 16, it had fallen to 7.4.
“Certainly it’s impacting conservatives’ viewpoint of Facebook,” said Buzz Jacobs, co-founder of Strategic Storytelling Co. and former adviser to Republican Senator Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign. "When you have people saying that Facebook can’t be trusted and Twitter can’t be trusted because they have a liberal bent, and then something like this comes out -- it certainly gives people pause."
Since Democrat Barack Obama first used Facebook to help win the White House in the 2008 race, the social network has been working in Washington to try to bridge the gap with Republicans. There was some initial frostiness, in part because the company was co-founded by Chris Hughes, who played a high-profile role as a volunteer on the Obama campaign.
But the power of the company’s targeting tools appealed to political operatives. Facebook’s page promoting its political advertising, for instance, highlights Republican Rick Scott’s campaign for governor of Florida. The candidate, elected in 2011, was able to use Facebook to show ads to non-Cuban Latino voters by syncing them with content about the World Cup, with messages like “Buena suerte, Team USA!” -- or "good luck" in Spanish. He saw a 22 percent increase in Hispanic support, according to Facebook.
Surgeon Ben Carson ran more than 600 different ad campaigns on Facebook during his unsuccessful bid for the Republican Party’s 2016 nomination for president, according to Ken Dawson, who served as the campaign’s chief marketing officer.
"We placed millions of dollars of media on behalf of the Carson campaign on Facebook alone," said Dawson, the president of Eleventy Marketing Group. "From my experience, I’ve found that Facebook has been highly effective and I’ve not experienced what I would perceive as tamping down of any content that we’ve tried to put out there."
User Trust
Facebook’s biggest threat is losing the trust of its user base through promises that may prove difficult to keep. There are benefits to being transparent about a process, but ultimately all parties might disagree on whether news topics are liberal or conservative in the first place, said David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
And no matter how neutral the site intends to be, there’s no such thing as an algorithm or human decision-making system that is completely objective, according to Emma Llanso, director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology. Readers wouldn’t expect complete freedom from bias at the New York Times or Fox News, she said.
“Facebook, like all of the social-media companies, is, at the end of the day, a media company,” she said. “And the kinds of editorial decisions we know and expect a media company to make are also going on at the internet companies we use, and it’s very important for us to understand as we look at where we get our news.”