If you want to understand why Facebook too often is a cesspool of hate and disinformation, a good place to start is with users such as John, Michelle, and Calvin.

John, a caps-lock devotee from upstate New York, calls House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “PIGLOSI,” uses the term negro, and says that the right response to Democrats with whom they disagree is to “SHOOT all of them.” Michelle rails against the “plandemic.” Calvin uses gay as a slur and declares that Black neighborhoods are always “SHITHOLES.” You’ve almost certainly encountered people like these on the internet. What you may not realize, though, is just how powerful they are.

For more than a year, we’ve been analyzing a massive new data set that we designed to study public behavior on the 500 U.S. Facebook pages that get the most engagement from users. Our research, part of which will be submitted for peer review later this year, aims to better understand the people who spread hate and misinformation on Facebook. We hoped to learn how they use the platform and, crucially, how Facebook responds. Based on prior reporting, we expected it would be ugly. What we found was much worse.

Read: Facebook is a Doomsday Machine

The most alarming aspect of our findings is that people like John, Michelle, and Calvin aren’t merely fringe trolls, or a distraction from what really matters on the platform. They are part of an elite, previously unreported class of users that produce more likes, shares, reactions, comments, and posts than 99 percent of Facebook users in America.

They’re superusers. And because Facebook’s algorithm rewards engagement, these superusers have enormous influence over which posts are seen first in other users’ feeds, and which are never seen at all. Even more shocking is just how nasty most of these hyper-influential users are. The most abusive people on Facebook, it turns out, are given the most power to shape what Facebook is.

Facebook activity is far more concentrated than most realize. The company likes to emphasize the breadth of its platform: nearly 2.9 billion monthly active users, visiting millions of public pages and groups. This is misleading. Our analysis shows that public activity is focused on a far narrower set of pages and groups, frequented by a much thinner slice of users.

Top pages such as those of Ben Shapiro, Fox News, and Occupy Democrats generated tens of millions of interactions a month in our data, while all U.S. pages ranked 300 or lower in terms of engagement received less than 1 million interactions each. (The pages with the most engagement included examples from the far right and the far left, but right-wing pages were dominant among the top-ranked overtly political pages.) This winners-take-all pattern mirrors that seen in many other arenas, such as the dominance of a few best-selling books or the way a few dozen huge blue-chip firms dominate the total market capitalization of the S&P 500. On Facebook, though, the concentration of attention on a few ultra-popular pages has not been widely known.

We analyzed two months of public activity from the 500 U.S.-run pages with the highest average engagement in the summer of 2020. The top pages lean toward politics, but the list includes pages on a broad mix of other subjects too: animals, daily motivation, Christian devotional content, cooking and crafts, and of course news, sports, and entertainment. User engagement fell off so steeply across the top 500, and in such a statistically regular fashion, that we estimate these 500 pages accounted for about half of the public U.S. page engagement on the platform. (We conducted our research with a grant from the nonprofit Hopewell Fund, which is part of a network of organizations that distribute anonymous donations to progressive causes. Officials at Hopewell were not involved in any way in our research, or in assessing or approving our conclusions. The grant we received is not attached to any political cause but is instead part of a program focused on supporting researchers studying misinformation and accountability on the social web.)

Public groups differ from pages in several ways. Pages usually represent organizations or public figures, and only administrators are able to post content on them, while groups are like old-school internet forums where any user can post. Groups thus ten