The end of the social news era? Facebook’s big change
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, said last week he wanted the social network to focus on “meaningful interaction.” But his idea of what that phrase means is likely to differ from that of news industry executives and editors — and therein lies a conflict.
Media companies are bracing for the changes coming to Facebook’s News Feed — the column that appears when the site or app is opened — that will favour posts by friends over material from news organisations and other businesses.
“Nobody knows exactly what impact it’ll have, but in a lot of ways, it looks like the end of the social news era,” Jacob Weisberg, chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, said on Friday. “Everybody’s Facebook traffic has been declining all year, so they’ve been de-emphasising news. But for them to make such a fundamental change in the platform — I don’t think people were really anticipating it.”
Although Facebook users craved conversation and journalists gave them things to talk about, the relationship between the platform and media outlets was imperfect from the start.
Facebook became a news powerhouse with reluctance, and journalism executives allied themselves with it mostly out of necessity, given the 2 billion Facebook users who were often a screen-tap away from an article or video.
Over the years, as Facebook and media companies entangled themselves with each other, users’ feeds that had once been filled with chatter about graduations, changing relationship statuses and other subjects belonging to the private sphere morphed into digital spaces rife with public matters — news! — and the endless and endlessly contentious comment threads that went with them.
The uncle you once looked up to, it turned out, had a habit of sharing rude memes that you did not want to see, much less Like.
That led to a problem for Facebook, which needs its users to linger so it can deliver more highly targeted ads — that’s how the company made a net profit of $10.2 billion in 2016.
Facebook says its changes will improve the “well-being” of its users. In an effort to usher in this new mood of online pleasantness, its product teams will drop the former goal of helping people find “relevant content” as they test the “meaningful interactions” thesis.
The shift in strategy comes, not coincidentally, after a year in which Facebook came under governmental scrutiny for its role in spreading misinformation and hate speech. Zuckerberg gave his interview to The Times as his company was preparing for a hearing, the second Capitol Hill inquiry into the online spread of extremist propaganda. During hearings in the fall, Facebook told Congress that agents working for a Kremlin-linked company had disseminated content that reached an estimated 126 million users in the US in 2016.
As a result of Facebook’s attempt to distance itself from an overheated news
cycle and make a return to its friends-and-family roots, publishers who depended on it for traffic are likely to find themselves in trouble.
News outlets that have built a strong bond with readers and viewers through other means will be watching closely, to see whether the size of their audiences — and corresponding advertising dollars — will shrink in the coming months.
Jonah Peretti, chief executive of BuzzFeed, highlighted the tensions between media organisations and internet giants Facebook and Google in December, when he criticised the mega-platforms that have fuelled the site’s success. “Google and Facebook are taking the vast majority of ad revenue, and paying content creators far too little for the value they deliver to users,” Peretti wrote in a memo published on BuzzFeed.
Last week, the company, which once
called Facebook the “new ‘front page’ for the internet,” posted an ad on the site urging people to download a news app from BuzzFeed. It boiled down the ramifications of Facebook’s latest algorithm change into a pithy phrase: “Facebook is breaking up with news.”
Nearly half of American adults get at least some of their news from Facebook, according to a recent survey from the Pew Research Centre. Once the change is rolled out, people will still see articles shared by their friends — but posts from publisher pages will be less visible.
Facebook’s pulling back from the news — which necessarily depends on conflict — and elevation of homier material may bolster the company’s attempt to enter China, where it has been met with stiff resistance. “Facebook is just desperate to get into China, and it will never do that unless it censors news — and this is actually a neat solution to that,” Mr Weisberg, the Slate chairman, said. “If you only have news on the platform shared by users, users who live under repressive regimes don’t have access to real news and can’t share it, because it’s legally prohibited.”
As the site is now, every Facebook user sees a different set of posts and ads. These are ranked and tailored to what their online habits have suggested about their interests. Although Facebook prioritises certain material — like those birth announcements that quickly draw Likes and comments — there are no firm rules for what pops up high in a given feed. In the coming weeks, though, users are likely to notice a reduction in how many posts appear from news organisations.
“Because space in News Feed is limited, showing more posts from friends and family and updates that spark conversation means we’ll show less public content, including videos and other posts from publishers,” Adam Mosseri, the head of Facebook’s News Feed, wrote.
Jason Kint, chief executive of Digital Content Next, a trade group that represents entertainment and news organisations, including The Times, was sceptical of the Facebook plan. “If this change is as significant as they describe it, news organisations will go out of business or succeed based on a change that they didn’t necessarily have input on,” Mr Kint said. “It reads as something that will drive up engagement and probably push away policy risk, because they’re not allowing news to have the same sort of presence in their feeds.” Mr Kint added that he had hoped it would have found a way to weed out hoaxes and made-up news stories that did not penalise publishers.
Raju Narisetti, chief executive of Gizmodo Media Group, the unit of Univision that operates Jezebel and other sites, suggested Zuckerberg’s company should be less mysterious. “As always, it would be good to see transparency from any platform, particularly Facebook, as to how they are going about deciding what constitutes quality,” Mr Narisetti said.
For media companies, a reliance on the company as a driver of traffic has proved an unreliable business model. Savvy publishers have already recognised that they must find sizable audiences without the help of Facebook users.
Referral traffic to media content from Facebook dropped 25% from February 2017 to October 2017, according to Parse.ly, a digital publishing analytics company.