“This is a scam,” declared Dan Bongino, dedicating the first segment of his podcast Wednesday to attacking Haugen. (He talked about her on The Dan Bongino Show a day earlier, too.) “I’m begging conservatives out there: Please do not fall in this trap. It is clearly a left-wing op.” Fellow podcaster Ben Shapiro sung a similar tune. Any possible legislation resulting from Haugen’s testimony would produce “top-down tyranny,” he said in a video posted to his Facebook page Wednesday. His website, The Daily Wire, answered the call as well and sought to discredit Haugen by highlighting her potential contributions to Democratic politicians. (That much is true. She donated about $2,000 to liberal groups over the past seven years, including a main online funding portal for Democrats, ActBlue, according to FEC disclosures. But the bipartisan embrace of her testimony suggests Republican lawmakers don’t share The Daily Wire’s concerns.) And social media influencer Jack Posobiec kept up a steady patter about Haugen, tweeting and posting on Instagram about her more than a dozen times in two days…

These right-wing figures have a good deal at stake. Much of online conservative media is built around Facebook, where their articles get traded around vigorously by the site’s aging user base. Content from Shapiro (8.2 million Facebook followers) and Bongino (nearly 5 million) regularly rank among the ten most popular pieces on the site, according to daily data collected by the New York Times. “The only way for these guys to make money is Facebook—their entire business is Facebook,” says Matthew Sheffield, who created an early digital conservative site, Newsbusters, and served as the founding managing editor at another, the Washington Examiner. “They couldn’t survive in a true marketplace of ideas because their ideas are crap . . . exaggerated, sensationalist content that inflames emotions.”

Shapiro wasn’t shy about admitting to the stakes. In the video posted to his Facebook page, he said: “If Facebook gets shut down or gets restricted by the federal government, the outlets that are going to suffer are not The New York Times, CNN or MSNBC. The outlets that are going to suffer are all the competitive brands,” coding his language. What he really means: brands run by himself and his peers.