Within the span of eight days in January, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced two different key changes to Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm that together have boosted a “trusted” minority of news outlets while suppressing their competitors.
First, Facebook would slash news articles’ share of the newsfeed from five percent to four percent in the coming months, Zuckerberg said. Second, Facebook would boost certain “trusted” news outlets and suppress other, ostensibly less trustworthy sources.
The algorithm changes have disproportionately harmed conservative publishers, tech website The Outline concluded in a lengthy report earlier in March. Conservative and right-wing publishers “were hit the hardest” by the algorithm change, the report found, “while the engagement numbers of most predominantly liberal publishers remained unaffected.”
Conservative website Western Journalism reached the same conclusion in a similar data report last week. Conservative websites saw a significant drop in traffic from Facebook following the algorithm change, while comparable liberal sources saw a slight increase, that report found.
Facebook has no plans to identify which media outlets it’s boosting and which ones it’s suppressing, a company spokesperson told The Daily Caller News Foundation on the phone, arguing that releasing the data would provide an incomplete picture of Facebook’s newsfeed makeup. – READ MORE
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