Following up on recent revelations about the BBC invasion of Facebook

, Samuel Coates, deputy editor of Conservativehome, has cleverly found a silver lining to such wholesale Beeboid waste of tellytaxpayer’s time – revealing that there are eleven times more ‘liberals’ at the BBC than ‘conservatives’.

Facebook lets you target advertising at people based on various criteria, including their workplace and their declared political outlook (using the American terms liberal, moderate and conservative to represent left of centre, centre and right of centre views).

Currently there are 10,580 known BBC people registered on Facebook. Of these, 1,800 have indicated their political views, as follows:

It’s not a scientific survey, but it’s certainly indicative of the imbalance of views represented by those who work for our beloved state broadcasting institution.

For good measure, Samuel goes on to compare the breakdown of BBC political views on Facebook with those of the general UK and London populations on Facebook. It turns out that across the UK, the ratio of liberals to conservatives on Facebook is just 2.5 to 1, with London at 3 to 1 – a long way short of the BBC’s 11 to 1.

There may be an argument that the use of the American terms liberal, moderate and conservative causes confusion, but in that case, why does it seem to cause so much more confusion at the BBC than among the UK population at large?

I wonder how long it will take for the BBC to forbid their employees from indicating their political views on their Facebook profiles…

Update (1pm): Samuel adds:

There are tonnes of stats out there waiting to be found via Flyers Pro in Facebook’s Advertising section, including that the Lib-Con ratio is fairly even throughout the demographics of BBC employees, with men having a very slightly better ratio than women and over thirties slightly better than twentysomethings.

Thank you to Samuel for the tip. Top stuff!