Is politics making a comeback on Facebook?

Facebook has had a long, complicated history with political content. For many years, conservative publishers and personalities like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino rode the platform’s algorithm to viral success by spreading outrage bait and politically incorrect memes. After the 2016 election, the company’s PR team took a lot of heat for those types of viral pages, with liberals and non-partisan watchdogs urging the company to crack down on political misinformation. Then, after the 2020 election, Facebook decided to withdraw from politics altogether, announcing tweaks to its algorithm to reduce political content in users’ News Feeds and ending partnerships with news publishers. 

By 2024, political engagement on the platform had cratered for progressives and conservatives alike. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, even began to stem the flow of political posts on its sister apps Instagram and Threads. 

That’s why many were caught off guard by the company’s announcement last month that it would “take more of a personalized approach to political content” and phase political posts back into users’ feeds. 

“We’re going to start treating civic content from people and Pages you follow on Facebook more like any other content in your feed, and we will start ranking and showing you that content based on explicit signals (for example, liking a piece of content) and implicit signals (like viewing posts) that help us predict what’s meaningful to people,” the company’s public policy chief, Joel Kaplan, wrote in a blog post. “We are also going to recommend more political content based on these personalized signals and are expanding the options people have to control how much of this content they see.”

Now, just three weeks into Donald Trump’s presidency, data from CAP Action’s social listening database shows that top political pages on Facebook are beginning to see a steady increase in total weekly engagement (reactions, comments, shares) on their posts. 

I looked at engagement data for ten major political Facebook pages—five conservative and five liberal. The data shows that at the beginning of December, these pages each averaged 250,000 cumulative post interactions per week. Last week, each page received an average of 1.2 million cumulative post interactions. 

While still a far cry from pre-2020 levels of engagement, this increase is significant.

These pages’ posts are now receiving more interest than they did on Election Day 2024, and many haven’t seen this level of consistent weekly engagement since early 2021. At that time, political interest was high - President Biden was taking office, a global pandemic was raging, and insurrectionists were attacking the U.S. Capitol. 

Another clear illustration of this trend is with Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders, who boasts over 5 million followers on his main political Facebook page. For most of last year, Sanders averaged just 2,000 interactions on any given post. Over the past three weeks, each of his posts have averaged more than 26,000 likes, shares, and comments.

This political shift isn’t just impacting individual post engagement, either. Last week, I spoke to one Democratic strategist whose organization’s Facebook page tripled its following in 2025 despite not changing anything about its posting strategy or cadence. 

Because Meta is notoriously opaque, it is unclear if these changes are caused by tweaks to the platform’s algorithm or simply increased audience interest in political news due to the new administration (aka a “Trump Bump”). It could be a little bit of both. Many progressives have taken to Facebook to criticize Trump’s dismantling of the federal government, while many Trump supporters are cheering the MAGA takeover.

“This increase in engagement​ on Facebook is something we are seeing across all platforms since Trump took office, for pages across the political spectrum,” says Eric Coffin-Gould, Senior Director of Analytics at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. “I think the Meta algorithm changes play a role here — at the very least, they’re not actively suppressing political content — but we’re still doing research. Instagram still sees much higher engagement overall for political pages than Facebook, but Facebook pages seem to be benefitting more from the changes in the past few weeks.

If the platform’s shift is more than just a blip, it will have significant implications for how campaigns and other political actors use Facebook to reach voters in the future. The legacy political organizations, engagement-bait networks, and right-wing personalities who built audiences on Facebook and saw reduced influence in the TikTok era could suddenly hold a much larger megaphone than they did just several months ago. 

More things you should read

• Pew published a new report on how news influencers talked about Trump and Harris during the 2024 election. Topline: Pew found that twice as many posts mentioned Trump than Harris. That is in line with the research my colleagues and I conducted on TikTok last cycle.

• Apparently, Elon Musk and the conservative Heritage Foundation have a new target in their sights: Wikipedia editors.

• The Wall Street Journal took a look at how Steve Bannon’s ‘War Room’ is “the hottest stop on DC’s media circuit.”

• Meanwhile on the Left, progressive media publisher NowThis doubled its revenue last year and became profitable, according to AdWeek.

• I missed this one last week: Trump campaign digital advisor Alex Bruesewitz will be taking the reins of the President’s digital strategy at his new political action committee, Never Surrender. That group will maintain the Trump campaign’s social media accounts like @TrumpWarRoom and @TeamTrump.  

• Want to know how much cash campaigns and political groups are spending on digital ads each week? My former colleague Lucy Ritzmann is bringing back the FWIW newsletter every Friday. 

• Run for Something founder Amanda Litman wrote a pretty great piece on how it feels to get dunked on online. 

• What’s next for Mr. Beast? Class consciousness.

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