In the hours and days after news and videos spread of the ICE shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis last week, a small army of right-wing, pro-Trump creators, journalists, and influencers descended on the city and flooded social media.
They filmed protests; rode along with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection; documented — and at times seemingly instigated — confrontations with protesters; and worked a competing, ICE- and Trump-friendly narrative out of what was happening in Minneapolis. From the ground, they churned out content painting protesters as lawless, demonstrations as riots, and anti-ICE activists as extremists or criminals. Outside of the state, right-wing influencers and large social media accounts amplified these videos, posts, and descriptions to reach much wider audiences.
- Right-wing content creators, influencers, and journalists have descended on Minneapolis in the wake of the death of Renee Good by an ICE officer.
- Social media tracking shows that the right has rapidly tried to flood internet platforms with pro-ICE, Trump-friendly coverage. Their content has largely received more views than left-leaning content.
- These trends show how effective right-leaning content creators have been in muddying online discourse.
- Left-leaning creators and critics are at a disadvantage online in competing with this flood of content.
So far, this effort appears to have muddied the conversation around Good’s killing and Minneapolis residents’ response to President Donald Trump’s ICE surge — at least among right-leaning audiences. (Polling this week shows the videos and shooting have broken through to an overwhelming share of Americans, and majorities of Americans do not believe the shooting was justified, or think the ICE agent who shot Good should be criminally charged.)
But social media analytics show that these right-wing influencers have been effective in flooding the zone — producing large volumes of content and drawing viewers.
To log onto social media platforms now is to not only see the videos and outrage, but also constant counter-narratives, attempts to justify Good’s killing, and arguments that ICE’s presence in Minneapolis is warranted.
And that reveals a deeper imbalance in American politics and media in 2026: While witness video, mainstream and traditional news, and liberal commentators have shaped part of the debate over ICE and Trump’s domestic immigration agenda, these critical voices and activists lack the same kind of distribution machine to push their narrative that those on the right have used to some effect.
In that sense, the Minneapolis shooting’s disjointed online realities fit into a familiar problem for liberals, the American left, and the broader anti-Trump coalition since 2020 — just as they lacked their own version of a Joe Rogan or Charlie Kirk to reach the masses or compete for hearts and minds, they also lack the influencer and social media infrastructure that has been churning out ICE-friendly content since at least the summer of 2025.
There are several reasons why.
What right-wing content creators have been able to do
To understand what’s happening online and measure how effective right-wing creators have been since January 7, the day of Good’s shooting, I turned to data researchers at Magnitude Media, a communications and digital media firm that tracks the spread of right, neutral, and left-leaning posts and videos online. Their findings complicate what many users may be seeing in their own feeds.
Over the last week, left-leaning, ICE-critical posts have made up the largest share of all posts on immigration or ICE as a topic. They’ve received more engagement from social media users (about 110 million interactions compared to 76 million for right-leaning posts) and have dominated on TikTok, Instagram, and Bluesky.
“Left-leaning pages have received 29 million more engagements than right-leaning pages on posts related to immigration or ICE according to our tracking, and 37 million more engagements on posts that directly mention Renee Good, Jonathan Ross, or Minneapolis,” Carly Evans, the director of analytics at Magnitude Media, told me. “Right-leaning pages began to close this gap over the weekend and even led on Friday and Saturday, but as of Monday, left-leaning pages were still generating 37 percent more engagement on immigration-related posts than right-leaning pages.”
In other words, the narrative promoted by the Trump administration and its — and reinforced by some algorithms — does not fully match reality.
If you look at trends, you begin to understand why that’s so. This left-leaning domination online only lasted for roughly a day and a half before right-wing content creation began to ramp up. Magnitude’s tracking shows that by January 9, engagements by right-leaning content began to close the gap, while views of right-leaning content began to surge past left-leaning content (Magnitude defines “engagement” as total clicks, likes, or shares, while “views” are the number of times a piece of content was seen, and are not “unique views”).
Before Good’s death, some right-wing creators were already active in Minnesota, for example, by “investigating” cases of alleged fraud in the state that had already attracted media attention before the killing of Good. But many more have arrived over the last week, interviewing ICE agents, boosting the Trump administration’s defense of ICE’s tactics, and documenting intense moments as the city grapples with the federal government’s presence in the region.
The result is a disproportionate volume of content produced and shared across social media by the biggest right-leaning content creators, even if engagement with their content isn’t necessarily keeping pace with that volume.
Vox analyzed the top 20 brands or usernames driving this dynamic. A handful of right-leaning users dominate the top of this chart, and their content performs well: The most effective of these are Nick Sortor, one of the right-wing influencers on the ground in Minneapolis; and Eric Daugherty, a Trump-friendly journalist whose accounts regularly boost Republican or conservative media clips, social media posts, or raw video from Minneapolis from influencers like Sortor.
More recently, the gap between right and left has narrowed for both engagement and views of immigration- and ICE-related content. But the right-wing apparatus is still fully operational, and more advanced than how it was working during ICE operations in other American cities last year.
Why liberals and the left are at such a disadvantage
What the last few months of viral ICE videos and content production reinforces is the uphill battle critics of the administration still face when trying to match the right’s social media presence. You can broadly explain this in two ways: individual incentives and structural advantages.
Individually, right-wing content creators have more experience showing up wherever action is taking place or is about to take place. They may have financial incentives or ideological motivations, and they have a willingness to take risks and put themselves in high intensity situations — as Sortor, right-wing journalist Cam Higby, and influencer Nick Shirley have done and broadcast. With allies in the administration, they may not be as open to physical injury or legal risk as ICE critics, traditional or independent journalists, or protesters themselves. Instead of being vilified by the vice president, the secretary of Homeland Security and her spokespeople, or by other right-wing influencers, these content creators get moral support and boosts online.
But the structural disadvantages are also severe, experts told me. These right-wing influencers, creators, and journalists benefit from not just being partners with the administration, but from the administration itself encouraging ICE agents to function as content producers, or dedicating money to be spent on partnerships with pro-ICE creators.
Then there’s access. In Minneapolis, DHS agents have offered the same kind of ride-along privileges to friendly or allied creators that they’ve offered at the border or in other American cities last year. The same kind of access has not been extended to other reporters in Minneapolis, so independent or left-leaning journalists have instead countered with ride-along style reporting with community activists, as Zeteo News’ Prem Thakker did this week.
Beyond this, there’s also a bigger, financial and network asymmetry at work here: funding for this kind of coverage and reach on social media and independent outlets isn’t comparable on the left to what exists on the right.
“The right is just way better funded,” Ryan Broderick, the founder of Garbage Media, an independent new media company that specializes in covering politics and the internet, told me. He was on the ground last week after the ICE killing of Good, covering ICE agents, protests, and the right-wing journalists and influencers who descended on the city. “They’re making money either on their own or they’re making money from powerful donors,” Broderick said. “The far-right groyper kind of live streamers that I was following around, they were there for at least a week and they’re still there. They have a lot more resources in that way.”
Sure enough, a look at X, YouTube, Threads, or TikTok still shows fresh, newly updated content from the Higbys, Sortors, or Shirleys of the internet.
“There’s also not really a great place for ‘leftist’ or ‘anti-ICE’ content creators to actually share their footage and make money,” Broderick told me.
He mentioned a few outlets that are doing on-the-ground coverage in a style similar to what right-wing content creators are doing, like Minnesota-based Mercado Media or independent journalist Amanda Moore. But these kinds of creators and journalists are limited in their scope or reach on social media platforms, he said.
“If you’re going to film anything, you are putting it on YouTube, you’re putting it on TikTok, you’re putting on X, and those platforms are just not hospitable to that kind of content,” Broderick said. “We were able to go, because we are in a partnership for our podcast with Courier News and they have more resources than we do, but I don’t think I could have bankrolled this myself. It’s not like we’re going to make money off of it the way that a right-wing YouTuber can immediately monetize it.”
Broderick also noted that one other disadvantage is the brazenness and willingness of right-wing social media accounts to take neutral or raw video footage from street scenes and edit or reshare it in a way that “makes people look crazy. So even if you are just a journalist and you’re sharing what’s happening on the ground, your stuff is going to go the most viral when it’s weaponized by the right.”
More broadly, this phenomenon fits into a broader challenge for the left. As was shown by the influence of podcasters in 2024 and Charlie Kirk and conservative youth organizations over the last few years, the left and liberals in America lack a lot of the same resources and reach that the American right has. In moments like this, in the aftermath of Good’s killing, the lack of this kind of social media apparatus makes it harder to contest the narratives that Trump and his allies are trying to force on the nation.
So, newsrooms, independent creators, and activists have the deck stacked against them in trying to stay on this story, keep up attention, and push for accountability. But until the anti-Trump coalition is able to muster the resources and agents to compete with the right’s own apparatus, political debates and discussions will continue to be clouded by mess, right-wing slop, and propaganda.
“Nothing on the left that is the same in size online as the right,” Broderick said. “There’s just not a way right now anymore to create the same amount of content that the right wing can create at the same level and get the same eyeballs because this has been a years in the making process. There are obviously leftist streamers, but even Hasan Piker is not that big compared to anyone of his size or notoriety on the right. You can’t really compare.”
