Daily users at Facebook are nearing 1.1 billion, (out of 1.6 billion total users), and have risen every quarter since the social network launched. You could combine the daily circulation of every newspaper in America with the daily viewer totals of every cable and broadcast newscast and not come close to that 1.1 billion number. And, just as importantly, Facebook users are much more likely to be more engaged with the stories they're seeing on the site. Even if only 5 percent to 10 percent of users bother to comment or share a story, that's still millions of people who are much more connected to that story than almost every reader or viewer of news on old media. And Facebook does this without creating any news content of its own.
This is why the presidential campaigns are no longer treating Facebook and Twitter as an addition to their public messaging, they seem to be treating social media as the primary source of their public messaging.
So, conservatives want to get some leverage with Facebook because there's no real debate anymore about its political and economic reach and influence. If there is something in the algorithms that's blocking a fair dissemination of their stories and views on the greatest promotional platform of all time, then that's a very frightening and understandable problem for the right wing.