In 2021, Ben Shapiro rules Facebook.

The conservative podcast host and author's personal Facebook page has more followers than The Washington Post, and he drives an engagement machine unparalleled by anything else on the the world's biggest social networking site.

An NPR analysis of social media data found that over the past year, stories published by the site Shapiro founded, The Daily Wire, received more likes, shares and comments on Facebook than any other news publisher by a wide margin.

Even legacy news organizations that have broken major stories or produced groundbreaking investigative work don't come anywhere close.

Daily Wire articles with headlines like "BOOK REVIEW: Proof That Wokeness Is Projection By Nervous, Racist White Women Who Can't Talk To Minorities Without Elaborate Codes" regularly garner tens of thousands of shares for the site, and Shapiro is turning that Facebook reach into a rapidly expanding, cost-efficient media empire — one that experts worry may be furthering polarization in the U.S.

"There's a demand amongst certain subsets of the public for outrage politics," said Jaime Settle, the director of the Social Networks and Political Psychology Lab at The College of William & Mary in Virginia. "This happens on both the left and the right. But the people who do this on the right have just found a lot more successful ways of doing it."

The Daily Wire did not respond to interview requests from NPR for this story.

The site produces very little original reporting, but instead mostly repackages journalism from traditional news organizations with a conservative slant.

That alone wouldn't be noteworthy; the circle of life online means information is written and rewritten in a seemingly infinite loop.