Right-wing media thrives on Facebook. Whether it rules is more complicated.

The Facebook page of Ben Shapiro, the conservative personality who runs the Daily Wire, frequently makes the top ten list shared by Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for the New York Times. | Jessica Pons/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Untangling the influence of right-wing media is hard, especially with limited data.

A few years ago, New York Times columnist Kevin Roose decided he wanted to get a better look at what was happening on Facebook. Because Facebook does not offer much data about activity on its platform, Roose turned to a Facebook-owned tool called CrowdTangle, which lets journalists and researchers see which public posts are getting the highest levels of engagement. It seemed revealing at first glance.

“I started collecting this data without any kind of agenda. I was just fascinated by it personally,” Roose told Recode. “I was fascinated by how different the world that I was seeing on Twitter was from the one that the data showed was happening on Facebook.”

There, he says he discovered what he calls a “parallel media universe” where extreme right-wing pages reign supreme. Consistently, Roose found, conservative pages were beating out liberals’ in making it into the day’s top 10 Facebook posts with links in the United States, based on engagement, like the number of reactions, comments, and shares the posts receive. That seems to provide evidence against the notion that Facebook censors conservatives, a complaint often trotted out by Republicans despite lacking any significant data to support their claims of systemic bias. In fact, these numbers would make it seem that Facebook is almost entirely dominated by conservative voices. But the problem is, we don’t actually know if this is the case because engagement with public posts only measures one part of what users do on Facebook’s platform and can’t really reveal the extent of conservative influence there.

Critics have insisted that Roose’s numbers can’t tell the whole story. In late July, the head of Facebook’s News Feed, John Hegeman, chimed in, emphasizing that “these lists don’t represent what most people see” on Facebook, pointing to non-public data showing that the list of what’s most seen on Facebook tells a less-partisan tale, with outlets like the Los Angeles Times and BuzzFeed capturing high amounts of attention. This prompted several journalists to ask why Facebook won’t just make the type of data Hegeman cited publicly available.

Meanwhile, Roose has doubled down on his analysis of what gets the most engagement on Facebook. In July, he created a standalone Twitter account, called Facebook’s Top 10, devoted to these calculations, which now has over 16,000 followers (and copy-cat accounts that do the same roundup for posts in Italy and in Sweden). While acknowledging its limitations, he’s floated that the engagement data can indicate what’s really “a rough gauge of what’s grabbing America’s attention” and serve as a “useful reality check for Democrats.” Essentially, Roose thinks this Facebook activity might be the “silent majority” that’s more supportive of Trump than liberals would like.

There’s now a running debate among academics, analytics experts, and observers like Roose around what we know about what’s happening on Facebook and why. Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan recently argued that “Likes,” comments, and shares are just a small part of what people actually see on Facebook, and that it’s difficult to draw conclusions from these interactions alone or to know what they might mean for an election. Meanwhile, CrowdTangle co-founder and chief executive Brandon Silverman conceded that there are limits to the data his tool provides, but he argues that it’s still helpful for understanding how public pages behave.

So, now weeks before a pivotal presidential election, everyone is arguing about what’s happening on Facebook and what it means. Everyone seems to agree that focusing on the available engagement data has some serious limitations and that we need more data to understand the goings-on of the most politically significant social media network in the United States, if not the world. Trouble is, we don’t have any idea when, or if, Facebook will lift that curtain.

On Facebook, engagement is just one part of the story

Lots of stuff happens on Facebook, but what’s publicly available is not a perfect representative slice of the platform overall. Again, what CrowdTangle measures — and what Roose’s Top 10 lists catalog — is engagement with public posts on Facebook. But your interactions in the public spaces of Facebook represent a small chunk of what you do on the platform. Many posts, messages, groups, and pages are private, so what you do there doesn’t get captured by CrowdTangle.

Roose says that he tries to focus his research by looking at US-based posts that include links from pages. That excludes, for instance, posts that are just status updates or posts that just include an image. With these search constraints in place, Roose says he’s finding a regular pattern of public right-wing pages capturing many more interactions than their left-leaning counterparts.

The top-performing link posts by U.S. Facebook pages in the last 24 hours are from:

1. Franklin Graham
2. Donald Trump 2020 Voters
3. Ben Shapiro
4. Ben Shapiro
5. David J. Harris Jr.
6. Fox News
7. Sarah Palin
8. Ben Shapiro
9. An0maly
10. Robert Reich

— Facebook's Top 10 (@FacebooksTop10) September 7, 2020

If you’re a liberal, it might worry you that, according to this metric, posts from pages belonging to Diamond and Silk or Ben Shapiro are regularly outperforming more progressive content like, say, the page belonging to Occupy Democrats. That counts posts like Ben Shapiro commenting on Nancy Pelosi’s recent hair salon visit (and linking to a Daily Wire article about it). What doesn’t get counted, as an example, is your friend posting “Vote for Joe Biden!” as a status only available for view by friends.

But again, the CrowdTangle engagement data doesn’t take into account much of what people do on Facebook. According to Aviv Ovadya, the founder of the Thoughtful Technology Project, CrowdTangle can be useful for understanding what public Facebook is up to, but there’s much more to Facebook than that. “There are better ways of getting at what the entire set of Facebook users are interacting with,” said Ovadya, pointing to Facebook data from another firm called NewsWhip.

The engagement that CrowdTangle measures involves users making a certain type of effort. Engaging with content on Facebook is not the same thing as seeing it or agreeing with it. It’s also something that not everybody does. Consider how often you actually take the step to “Like,” comment on, or share content from a public page instead of just passively scrolling through your News Feed. Different people also engage in different ways.

“Lots of people use Facebook five minutes a day or 20 minutes a week,” said Nyhan, the Dartmouth professor. “There’s some people on Facebook eight or 10 hours a day. So you can get huge engagement numbers catering to that deeply devoted base of hyper-engaged Facebook users.”

Screenshot from Facebook

A highly engaged post from Ben Shapiro included a picture of Nancy Pelosi and a link to a Daily Wire story about the opening of some gyms in government buildings.

And then there’s the hate-like and the hate-share. This is what happens when someone engages with a post from a page but doesn’t necessarily support what the post says.

“Reactions are both positive and negative,” said Kathy Qian, a data scientist currently working with Code for Democracy. “Without directionality to the ranking of reactions, it’s hard to know if people are reacting positively because they agree or they’re hate-commenting or hate-angry-facing, basically.”

The fact that engagement data can be so misleading is why people like Hegeman, the Facebook News Feed boss, have suggested that a better mechanism for tracking activity on Facebook might be measuring reach: how many people actually see a particular post, link, or publisher. But even though the company has argued that reach data offers a more complete picture of what’s popular, Facebook seems shy about publicly sharing that information on a regular basis.

“I would give my left arm to track reach on Facebook,” Roose told Recode, conceding there’s a lot that CrowdTangle doesn’t capture. “If Facebook would like us to be tracking something other than interactions on public pages, groups, and verified profiles, it has a very easy way of making that possible, and it just hasn’t done it so far.”

Of course, data about engagement on Facebook isn’t useless. It does reflect what kinds of posts people are willing to devote effort to responding to, and it’s also one of the factors that influences recommendations throughout the Facebook platform.

But putting too much stock into the type of engagement data Roose has been sharing raises questions about how Facebook handles content posted by conservatives. Censorship on social media has been a hot-button issue for conservatives since at least 2016, when Gizmodo reported that some Facebook employees suppressed conservative voices in Facebook’s trending news section, which the company later removed from the site. Despite the protestations of certain Republican lawmakers, there’s no strong, empirical evidence that Facebook is systematically biased against conservatives. In some cases, the company has directly intervened to help right-wing voices. And again, the high levels of engagement on right-leaning Facebook pages would seem to suggest that conservative content is more popular than ever.

Still, high levels of engagement on Facebook is not quite proof that there’s a silent majority capable of swinging the election one way or the other. It might be more accurate to say that this heightened activity suggests that conservatives have found more concentrated and highly engaged audiences than liberals have with these kinds of posts.

“There is a thriving pages ecosystem on Facebook, where highly emotive content performs well,” Nyhan explained, “and many conservative publishers appear at the top of the highest-performing pages and URLs for generating engagement.” He emphasized that what people do on Facebook also doesn’t necessarily correlate with what they do in the voting booth.

Different data tells different stories about Facebook. More data could help.

One of the challenges in studying what’s politically going on for Facebook’s users is that different users use Facebook differently, and it’s very easy to end up essentially comparing digital apples to digital oranges.

When people do stuff on Facebook, they do it differently for different types of content. Silverman, the CrowdTangle chief, points out that people are more likely to interact with political content without actually clicking through to read it, while the exact reverse is true of celebrity gossip reports. Looking at the most-engaged public posts of all types of Facebook content — not just links but also photos, videos, and so on — reveals a snapshot of what’s popular on Facebook that’s somewhat different from what Roose is broadcasting, Silverman says.

If you look at data beyond the engagement on posts from public pages, the story of what’s popular on Facebook looks a bit different. NewsWhip, a social media analytics firm, calculates the most popular publications on Facebook by looking at reactions, shares, and comments to links that are shared not only publicly on the social network but also privately. Monthly rankings from NewsWhip show a mix of ideological leaning in outlets whose content is performing well on Facebook.

Of course, what the New York Times is trying to accomplish on Facebook might differ from the objectives of Fox News. Some of these actors, such as the Daily Wire, have their content boosted through systematic, coordinated networks, which might explain that site’s recent climb to huge levels of engagement. Whether conservatives appear to be getting more engagement overall, however, is up for debate. As the NewsWhip data showing engagement data from both public and private pages reveals, total engagement on Facebook is a bit more balanced than what Roose’s top 10 lists suggest.

But as those lists reveal, there is evidence of a trend in which certain kinds of conservative content — mostly emotion-driven, deeply partisan posts — attract large levels of engagement. NewsWhip on Tuesday reported that the most-engaged articles on Facebook in the past 24 hours included a slew of conservative media articles.

“Anger travels really, really well on Facebook,” Roose told Recode. “I think the commentators that have sort of excelled at packaging grievances and presenting them to people in an attractive way have really gotten a lot of mileage.” Noting he doesn’t have supporting data, he hypothesizes that liberals, generally, trust a more fragmented set of sources of media than conservatives, which could contribute to why right-wing success makes it to the top of his list.

Facebook, for its part, did not comment on why conservative pages do well by this metric.

Facebook is important, even if we don’t know how the platform matters

Even if we were able to understand the full extent of activity on Facebook, the link between behavior on the platform and real-life political behavior isn’t clear. That’s not to say other mechanisms, like polls, are perfect at indicating voting behavior either, but the actual role of Facebook in political discourse is still difficult to truly understand.

That’s probably why Facebook announced in late August that it would bring on social scientists, including Nyhan, to help study the influence of Facebook’s systems on American democracy. But for those hoping to understand the platform in real time — or at least before the election — that won’t be so satisfying. For those watching Facebook’s own CrowdTangle data in the meantime, don’t get your hopes up.

“There’s a lot of other data points we’d also love to add,” CrowdTangle’s Silverman told Recode. “And those are all conversations that are constantly happening for us internally.” But it wasn’t clear when, how, and if that would happen.

In the meantime, Roose insists that media outlets keep their eyes glued to the biggest social media platform and work with the data they do have. “I think people feel like I’m trying to prove a point by doing this, like I’m making an argument for this data,” he says. “I guess the argument that I feel like I’m making is that people should pay attention to what’s happening on Facebook.”

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‘Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ drama reboot to stream on Peacock

Will Smith said the reboot is an ‘unprecedented two-season order based on a pitch.’

The dramatic reimagining of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air from director Morgan Cooper and executive producer Will Smith has been given a two-season order at Peacock. 

After a reported bidding war the streaming service is developing the hour-long series titled Bel-Air, which is based on Cooper’s popular concept trailer that caught the attention of Smith in 2019, Shadow and Act reports. 

The project is described as a dramatic retelling “that leans into the original premise of Will’s complicated journey from the streets of West Philadelphia to the gated mansions of Bel-Air. With a reimagined vision, Bel-Air will dive deeper into the inherent conflicts, emotions and biases of what it means to be a Black man in America today, while still delivering the swagger and fun nods to the original show.”

Read More: Will Smith to produce dramatic reboot of ‘Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’

Smith announced the news in a YouTube video on Monday, calling it an “unprecedented two-season order based on a pitch.”

In the video, he said, “We have just officially closed the deal with Peacock with an unprecedented two-season-order from a pitch,” the actor shared. “I’ve been in this business for thirty years and that does not happen. They ordered two full seasons of Bel-Air based on the quality of the pitch and the work that you guys have done. So I want to say congratulations. I am hyped.”

Watch Smith’s announcement via the clip above.

Quincy Jones along with show creators Susan and Andy Borowitz are onboard for the new series, theGRIO previously reported. 

Last year, Smith met Cooper and interviewed him for his YouTube channel.

“That’s an idea that is brilliant,” Smith told Cooper about the trailer.

When asked about his inspiration, Cooper explained, “I grew up watching the show since I was 5,” he told Smith. “I remember seeing what you did onscreen so it’s always been a part of me. I remember driving down 71 in Kansas City and I was just thinking about the show. I remember driving under this overpass and when I came out, I had the idea. It hit me like a ton of bricks and I knew I had to tell the story.”

Watch Cooper’s trailer below:

Bel-Air will be co-produced by Smith’s Westbrook Studio and Universal TV.

Smith’s Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air sitcom ran for six seasons in the 90’s on NBC. 

Have you subscribed to theGrio’s podcast “Dear Culture”? Download our newest episodes now!

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Trump’s ever-expanding claims of Biden’s destructive potential

JUPITER, Fla. — President Donald Trump is adding to his list of items that the “radical left” will “destroy” if Joe Biden wins the election.

Trump has claimed, at various points, that Biden’s ascension to the White House would ruin everything from “jobs” to “the Second Amendment” to “God” to the “middle class,” offering scant evidence. More recently, he vowed Biden would “ABOLISH Suburban Communities.” And on Tuesday, he added a new item to his ever-expanding inventory of horrors in Biden’s America: the environment.

“The left's agenda isn't about protecting the environment, it's about punishing America, and that's true,” he said in Florida, where he stopped before a North Carolina campaign rally to sign a decade-long ban on oil drilling off the coast of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.

In North Carolina hours later, Trump reiterated his check list of items Democrats won’t allow, misleadingly describing coronavirus restrictions on large crowds as he bragged about the thousands of people who had shown up to see him speak in recent weeks.

“They have rules in these Democrat-run states that if you are campaigning, you can’t have more than five people,” he said, as the relatively relaxed crowd roared to life. “They did that for me. If you are going to church, you can’t go to church anymore. You can’t go to church. You can’t go to church. You can’t do anything. You have to stay in your house.”

Trump claimed 15,000 people were cheering him on from the packed stands that framed Trump and Air Force One at the airport hangar — a number that seemed to far exceed the few thousand people that had gathered. The event, which featured few masks and people pressed shoulder-to-shoulder, had an under-the-fading sun intimacy that set it apart from Trump’s pre-coronavirus arena rallies. The president easily spotted and called out specific people in the audience, complimenting one woman's dress. He nodded to the appearance of “Peaceful Protester” signs dotting the audience.

“If you are willing to riot and stand on top of each other’s face and do whatever the hell you want to do, you are allowed to do that because you are considered a peaceful protester,” Trump said, with the crowd jeering. “So we decided to call all of our rallies peaceful protests.”

It was a preview of Trump’s fall campaign blueprint, an eight-week sprint during which Trump hopes to close his polling gap with Biden. Core to the strategy: Travel freely, far more than Biden; host crowded rallies light on mask-wearing while Biden does the opposite; and roll out new, election-friendly policies, even if they contradict previous efforts or seem designed to create spectacle rather than to substantively change policy.

Trump showed off each element over a day of travel through Florida and North Carolina. He tossed out new allegations, took credit for contradictory policy reversals, claimed non-existent differences between him and Biden and pivoted — yet again — away from recent reports that he had made disparaging comments about fallen soldiers.

Trump’s day began at Joint Base Andrews, where he found a way to turn even non-hostile questions into rants about the “radical left” and Biden before boarding Air Force One.

“The suburbs are coming big to us, because the suburbs are next,” he told reporters in response to a question about whether he would self-finance his campaign. “If you elected this guy, the suburbs would be overwhelmed with violence and crime. So that’s where we are.”

The message might be working in Florida. Just as Trump touched down in the state, a new NBC News/Marist poll showed Trump and Biden virtually tied. Among registered voters, 47 percent supported Biden’s ticket while 48 percent supported Trump’s — comfortably inside the margin of sampling error. The poll followed another survey from Quinnipiac University earlier this month that also showed Trump within the margin of error, trailing Biden by 3 percentage points in the state.

Florida, which Trump won by 1 percentage point in 2016, is widely seen as a must-win state for Trump in 2020. Given his tenuous standing in battleground states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, political strategists say the president can’t afford to lose Florida.

In response, Trump and his team have made repeated overtures to sought-after voting blocs in the state — everything from taking a hard line on the regimes in Cuba and Venezuela in an attempt to win over the large Florida diaspora from those countries to briefly moving the Republican National Convention to Jacksonville.

On Tuesday, Trump mentioned a laundry list of infrastructure projects that seemed aimed to resonate with more environmentally minded coastal residents in the heavily Republican counties north of Palm Beach County — fixing the dike around Lake Okeechobee, ending the dumping of toxic algae-laden runoff into the St. Lucie River and building a long-promised reservoir as part of the multibillion-dollar Everglades restoration.

The main show, however, was the signing ceremony for the oil drilling moratorium. Trump draped the event with environmental-friendly pageantry that didn’t always jibe with his administration’s record. The move essentially reversed Trump’s own pledge in 2018 to allow oil and gas drilling in nearly all United States coastal waters. And just weeks ago, the Trump administration finalized plans to open up part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil and gas development.

Additionally, Trump has unwound restrictions on toxic air pollution, eased clean water protections and exited the Paris Agreement — all steps that environmental advocates say will damage the climate. Biden’s campaign has also said he would ban “new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters.”

Still, the president on Tuesday proclaimed himself a “great environmentalist,” citing the Great American Outdoors Act, a land conservation bill that passed with near-unanimous support from congressional Democrats, but opposition from roughly half of Republican lawmakers.

“Who would have thought Trump is the great environmentalist?” he mused. “And I am. I am. I believe strongly in it.”

After flying to North Carolina, Trump returned to his rundown of items Trump would save and Democrats would destroy.

Biden’s policies, he said, would be “the downfall of America,” calling his opponent the candidate “backed by left-wing violent rioters.” He claimed, falsely, that Biden would “impose a blanket shutdown” if elected, causing suicides and destroying the economy. He claimed, vaguely, that Biden would “reimpose job destroying regulations.” He blamed Biden for the outsourcing of factory jobs in recent decades.

And he tied Biden to the broader debates over reassessing America’s legacy, and whether certain monuments and markers should be removed, contextualized or renamed to better address the racial injustice woven through America’s past.

“They take away your statues,” he said. “They take away your past.”

“They,” he added, “take away your guts.”

Like Florida, North Carolina is a key state for Trump this fall. He squeezed out a victory in the state in 2016 and is in a dead heat with Biden in 2020, according to most polls. The state is demographically split between college-educated and minority voters, who trend Democratic, and white voters without four-year degrees, who trend Republican.

Both campaigns are aggressively courting those voters, with Biden’s campaign planning to spend $30 million on TV ads in the state and Trump’s campaign dropping $21 million on its own TV ads.

Trump has also made several recent visits to the state to hold smaller events that merge the presidential with the political. He traveled last week to Wilmington, N.C., to name it America's first World War II Heritage City. And, of course, he made a surprise appearance at the bare-bones, in-person portion of the RNC late last month. Meanwhile, Biden has intentionally remained largely at his Delaware home, in a nod to the coronavirus restrictions against travel.

Trump on Tuesday night appeared to be warming up to the smaller rallies he’s been forced to hold as coronavirus cases continue to climb around the country. He rhapsodized about the enthusiasm he was seeing.

The crowd returned the favor.

“We love you,” it chanted in unison.

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Trump revives pre-pandemic talking points as he resumes campaign rallies

President Donald Trump on Tuesday dusted off some of the greatest hits from his pre-pandemic rallies, as he revived a staple of his campaign playbook.

Speaking to a crowd of hundreds of cheering supporters near Winston-Salem, N.C., Trump touched on a number of his achievements that used to make regular appearances in his rallies and relaunched old insults of his Democratic challengers. It was among the first in a return of his signature events since taking a hiatus because of the coronavirus.

The president went after “fake news” journalists, accusing them of misrepresenting his words. He insulted former Democratic presidential candidates using familiar nicknames and praised the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement. He boasted about killing the ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi and the Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani. He decried Democrats over “sanctuary cities” and for what he said was the admission of “poorly vetted migrants, including many from jihadist regions of the world.” Trump mentioned the need for a border wall, even reasserting that Mexico was paying for it.

All of these points, and the language he used to make them, could have been quotes from his pre-March rallies. The setting also evoked his earlier rally venues: He spoke to a large crowd sporting Trump apparel with little room for social distancing, and was framed by a chorus of supporters cheering behind him.

Still, signs of the nation’s current crisis showed through at the event. A handful of attendees — including those directly behind him — wore masks, and the event was outdoors at Smith Reynolds Airport in the golden-hour light, rather than in echoing stadiums. But Trump took the changes in stride.

“This is better than the arenas, I have to say,” he said on Tuesday as the crowd chanted “U-S-A” and “We love you! We love you!” Several of the masks carried Make America Great Again messages and slogans.

Trump spoke in North Carolina as polls show a close race in the critical state. He traveled to the Winston-Salem area just after having spoken in Jupiter, Fla., another key state where polls have Trump and his challenger, Joe Biden, running neck and neck.

Trump paused the rallies in the spring as Covid-19 cases started springing up in the U.S. He tried a revamp during his June rally in Tulsa, Okla., but that event, in an enclosed space with a tightly packed crowd, was a major point of criticism as a possible hot spot for contagion. A Tulsa health official even cited it as a likely cause of a spike in cases.

The president has since used official and smaller political events to share his campaign message, even making points that would be more apt at a rally during his White House news briefings. Trump also made an appearance in Latrobe, Pa., earlier this month to blast his Democratic rival before throngs of his supporters.

During his Tuesday event, Trump also sprinkled in a number of references to developments since his hiatus, including a more pointed attack on Biden and criticisms of the anti-racism protests that have sprung up across the country this summer.

Trump mocked the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Sen. Kamala Harris, as too leftist, intentionally mispronouncing her first name in a derisive tone (Trump earlier in his remarks correctly pronounced her name, and has done so during some White House news briefings). He brought up Harris’ performance in the primaries as a presidential contender and said that “people don’t like her.”

“Nobody likes her,” Trump said. “She could never be your first woman president. That would be an insult to our country.”

Harris, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, is the first woman of color to be nominated by a major party to the vice presidency.

Trump also repeated his more recent criticisms against Biden as a weak, pro-China candidate. Though his disparaging nicknames for his opponent, including “sleepy Joe,” were not new to the rally stage, his particular focus on Biden’s China record was adapted to the former vice president’s nomination. Trump said Biden had failed to protect American jobs in the decades he’s been in national politics, portraying him as bending to China’s interests.

“If Biden wins, China wins,” Trump said. “It’s as simple as that.”

Biden has increasingly voiced concern over China’s human rights and labor record.

Trump also went after Democrats for pushing mask-wearing and sheltering in place, urging for the country to reopen. He went so far as to allege that Democrats were using those preventative measures as a political tool against him.

“On Nov. 4 every one of those states will be open,” Trump said. “They’re doing it for political reasons.”

Several attendees held signs saying “Peaceful Protest” — a derisive reference to the demonstrations that have broken out in cities around the country. Trump denounced Democratic city officials for allowing large gatherings for protests but restricting smaller gatherings because of the coronavirus.

“They have rules in these Democrat-run states that if you’re campaigning, you can’t have more than five people,” Trump said to loud boos. “They did that for me. If you are going to church, you can’t go to church anymore. You can’t go to church.”

He continued: “But if you are willing to riot ... you are allowed to do that because you’re considered a peaceful protester. So we decided to call all of our rallies peaceful protests.”

Trump has repeatedly conflated protesters who have marched against police brutality and racism with rioters and looters — a premise he has used to push for greater federal force in cities. Harris and Biden have both condemned violence in protests while also calling for greater accountability for police.

Trump ended the event to “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People. He used to sign off his pre-pandemic rallies with “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Rolling Stones, but the band threatened legal action to stop its use this summer.

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Tiffany Haddish getting advice from Tyler Perry to realize dream of owning movie studio

The actress says she’s learning from mogul Perry to realize her dream

This week Tiffany Haddish revealed that she has aspirations of starting her own movie studio, and she’s reached out to none other than Tyler Perry to help her do it.

Monday, the 40-year-old actress revealed to Charles Latibeaudiere on TMZ Live that she hoped to branch out from acting and someday own her own studio like Perry.

The Girls Trip actress said she was inspired after it was announced that Perry has become a billionaire, in large part to his expansive Atlanta studio.

READ MORE: Tyler Perry officially becomes a billionaire, Forbes announces

Haddish also noted she’d already come up with a name, explaining, “Oh yeah. She Ready Studios. I would love to do that. I talk to Tyler all the time. He’s teaching me.”

Tiffany Haddish, Whoopi Goldberg, and Tyler Perry attend ‘Nobody’s Fool’ New York Premiere at AMC Lincoln Square Theater on October 28, 2018, in New York City. (Photo by Dominik Bindl/Getty Images)

She said that she makes it a habit to talk to people, “who are doing the things that I want to do,” adding that just the day before, she “went on a hike with some billionaires.”

Haddish’s drive has always been a hallmark of her personality. As theGrio reported last month, during a sit down with fellow female comedian Luenell, she explained how she went from having trouble reading as a child to writing her book, “The Last Black Unicorn,” a New York Times bestseller in 2017.

The Night School star, in particular, pointed out the irony of getting a Grammy nod for book narration when there was one point she was unable to read at all.

“That was kinda cool to be nominated for a Grammy for reading out loud when I couldn’t read at one point in time in my life when I was in my teens,” she disclosed.

Read More: Legends Patti Labelle and Gladys Knight announced for the next Verzuz

“I thought I was stupid. Everybody would say to me, ‘You’re stupid, you’re stupid, you so stupid.’ At that time in my life, I took things literally,” Haddish said. “So if everybody’s telling me you’re stupid – my stepdad, my mom, grandma, everybody used to say, ‘You so stupid.’ So, I believed I was stupid and I can’t read and I can’t do these things because I’m stupid.”

Ultimately, a drama teacher helped her learn to read and the rest is Hollywood history.

Have you subscribed to theGrio’s podcast “Dear Culture”? Download our newest episodes now!

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