Chronicling Facebook’s abuse of publishers
Let’s take a stroll back through time and check out Facebook’s past flip-flops on news that hurt everyone else:

-In 2007 before Facebook even got into news, it launched a developer platform with tons of free virality, leading to the build-up of companies like Zynga. Once that spam started drowning the News Feed, Facebook cut it and Zynga off, then largely abandoned gaming for half a decade as the company went mobile. Zynga never fully recovered.

-In 2011, Facebook launched the open graph platform with Social Reader apps that auto-share to friends which news articles you’re reading. Publishers like The Guardian and Washington Post race to build these apps and score viral traffic. But in 2012, Facebook changed the feed post design and prominence of social reader apps; they lost most of their users, those and other outlets shut down their apps and Facebook largely abandoned the platform.

-In 2015, Facebook launched Instant Articles, hosting news content inside its app to make it load faster. But heavy-handed rules restricting advertising, subscription signup boxes and recirculation modules led publishers to get little out of Instant Articles. By late 2017, many publishers had largely abandoned the feature.

-Also in 2015, Facebook started discussing “the shift to video,” citing 1 billion video views per day. As the News Feed algorithm prioritized video and daily views climbed to 8 billion within the year, newsrooms shifted headcount and resources from text to video. But a lawsuit later revealed Facebook already knew it was inflating view metrics by 150% to 900%. By the end of 2017 it had downranked viral videos, eliminated 50 million hours per day of viewing (over two minutes per user), and later pulled back on paying publishers for Live video as it largely abandoned publisher videos in favor of friend content.

-In 2018, Facebook announced it would decrease the presence of news in the News Feed from 5% to 4% while prioritizing friends and family content. Referral shrank sharply, with Google overtaking it as the top referrer, while some outlets were hit hard, like Slate, which lost 87% of traffic from Facebook. You’d understand if some publishers felt…largely abandoned.

Are you sensing a trend? 📉

Facebook typically defends the whiplash caused by its strategic about-faces by claiming it does what’s best for users, follows data on what they want and tries to protect them. What it leaves out is how the rest of the stakeholders are prioritized.

For some, Facebook has really become a new mecca but I have long noticed that many news quickly disappears from the news feed. I am against censorship in this form. I like honesty and unbiased journalism. I rather prefer to always use only local Springfield News. Our journalists are conscientious in their work and do not add anything extra to the picture of events. Do you still use Facebook? This is stupid…