Breitbart News is in the top ten publishers on social media giants Facebook and X, according to NewsWhip’s analysis for the first quarter of 2025.
Overall, the report observed what it described as an overall “increase in engagement across almost every platform, with news returning to Facebook in a big way” in the first quarter of the year. Further, the analysis focuses in part on what it describes as the “right-wing ascendant,” highlighting the top performing nature of publishers such as Breitbart News on social media.
According to the report, “Breitbart and Newsmax both featured prominently among the top ten, outperforming almost all mainstream news content.” It provided one of Breitbart News’s X posts, with more than 121K likes, as a reference.
NewsWhip Analytics (NewsWhip screenshot)
The analysis also provided a chart showing the top web publishers, and Breitbart News is firmly in the top 10. BBC News, the New York Times, Daily Wire, Daily Mail, Reuters, and NPR all follow Breitbart.
Per the report:
The rest of the top 10 web publishers saw similar engagement totals, with the majority earning over 100 million engagements. Although not among the top publishers overall, The Atlantic broke through within the top articles, having four out of 10 all earn hundreds of thousands of engagements.
Overall, among the 50 publishers, engagement was up 38% compared to Q1 2024.
NewsWhip Analytics (NewsWhip screenshot)
Overall, the report highlighted the rise of engagement for news publishers on Facebook, which it describes as “perhaps the starkest and most dramatic finding of this report,” noting the algorithm changed in January, resulting in news “roaring back, seeing a 200% increase compared to Q1 of 2024.”
Fox News took the top rank as far as publishers on Facebook in the first quarter of the year, boasting 115 million engagements, which NewsWhip says is an astonishing 743 percent increase from the Q1 results in 2024.
Breitbart News, again, stands as one of the top publishers on Facebook with over 31 million engagements, standing ahead of Newsmax, Metro, Daily Mail, NBC News, the New York Times, and People.
NewsWhip Analytics (NewsWhip screenshot)
The report also noted that, despite Fox News’s rank as the #1 in this category, it “wasn’t responsible for any of the top 10 posts on the platform, suggesting that it was once again a result of volume and consistency when compared to other publishers on the chart.”
The report also found that conservative publishers, specifically, “saw sustained success” in the first quarter. Bleacher Report has the top spot in terms of top publishers on X, but Breitbart News made the list again, this time ahead of the AP, Sky News, Al Jazeera, and ABC News.
NewsWhip Analytics (NewsWhip screenshot)
Additionally, the report found that President Donald Trump “drives hard news engagement on Instagram” while also identifying TikTok as the “dominant news platform” in the analysis, with ESPN standing as the top publisher on that particular platform. ESPN also takes the top spot as the top publisher across all platforms.
“I’m rarely surprised by the amazing things we accomplish at Breitbart News, but these numbers made my jaw hit the floor,” Breitbart editor-in-chief Alex Marlow said in a statement. “Our team is fast, fearless, fun, and the most accurate news source in the world. That’s why we’ve earned such a vast audience. Congrats to everyone in our virtual newsroom and thanks to all of you who read and support us.”
The analysis comes as Breitbart News stood tall as President Donald Trump took the reins in January, crushing the establishment media on Facebook in the first week of President Donald Trump’s second term as commander in chief.
As Breitbart News reported at the time:
During the first seven days of Trump’s presidency, Breitbart News saw 2,714,627 total interactions on Facebook — far above establishment media outlets including the New York Times, CNN, the Hill, MSNBC, and more.
The New York Times had 1,415,445 total interactions — well over one million fewer than Breitbart — despite having over 13 million more page likes than Breitbart News — roughly 18.2 million to Breitbart News’s 4.4 million.
In third place came CNN with 1,320,053 total interactions on Facebook. Again, this is well below Breitbart News’s 2.7 million interactions, despite the fact that CNN has a whopping 34.5 million page likes.
“At Breitbart News, we’re not just chronicling history — we’re a part of it,” Marlow said at the time. “It’s exciting, though not a huge surprise, to see our crew dominate billion-dollar media conglomerates.”
“We are all grateful to the audience for making that a reality,” he concluded.
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