Stuart Thompson collected and analyzed data on thousands of Facebook posts for this article.
On the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, Christopher Blair’s fake news empire was humming along.
Mr. Blair had been earning as much as $15,000 in some months by posting false stories to Facebook about Democrats and the election, reaching millions of people each month.
But after a mob of Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol, his growing enterprise came to an abrupt halt. Facebook seemed to recognize its own role in fomenting an insurrection and tweaked its algorithm to limit the spread of political content, fake and otherwise. Mr. Blair watched his engagement flatline.
“It just kind of crashed — anything political crashed for about six months,” he said.
Today, though, Mr. Blair has fully recovered, and then some. His false posts — which he insists are satire intended to mock conservatives — are receiving more interactions on Facebook than ever, surging to 7.2 million interactions already this year compared with one million in all of 2021.
Mr. Blair has survived Facebook’s tweaks by pivoting away from politicians and toward culture war topics like Hollywood elites and social justice issues.
When Robert De Niro appeared outside a Manhattan courthouse last month to criticize former President Donald J. Trump, for example, Mr. Blair dashed off a false post claiming that a conservative actor had called him “horrible” and “ungodly.” It received nearly 20,000 shares.