FB’S NO NEWS NEWS

‘Family-first’ policy

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg has found a fresh way to rankle news sites — and this one is a doozy.

In a surprise move Wednesday, the social-networking giant said it will tweak its algorithms to prioritize posts from users’ friends and family ahead of news stories and updates from publishers and other companies.

The change, which Facebook said it’s making to ensure people won’t miss posts from friends, will slam traffic for hundreds of online news sites that are already scraping for ad dollars, industry experts say.

Facebook officials found themselves in damage-control mode after Wednesday’s announcement, insiders said, playing down the potential damage in tense conversations with stunned publishing execs.

“They’re saying it’s aimed mainly at click-bait sites,” according to one source briefed on the talks.

News execs are fretting over the fact that Facebook has become a key driver for their Web traff ic. Fortyfour percent of US adults now consume news on Facebook, according to a report last month from the Pew Research Center and Knight Foundation.

Facebook’s new policy “may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for some pages” of publishers and other corporate sites, Vice President Adam Mosseri admitted in a blog post on Wednesday.

Nevertheless, Facebook’s first priority is to keep its users — more than 1 billion each day — logged onto its site and mobile app so it can sell more ads.

Recently, Facebook said its users are logged on for an average of 50 minutes a day, an unrivaled stat that Chief Executive Zuckerberg is looking to goose further.

The sudden switch comes after Facebook was accused last month of manipulating its “Trending Topics” feature to favor liberal news stories over those from conservative outlets — a charge that Zuckerberg has denied.

“We are not in the business of picking which issues the world should read about,” Mosseri insisted in the blog post. “Our integrity depends on being inclusive of all perspectives and viewpoints.”

The move is the latest blow for publishers in their increasingly fraught relationship with Facebook, whose quest for online ad revenue is at odds with their own.

Last year, Facebook got a mixed reception from publishers when it launched its “Instant Articles” feature, which hosts news stories on the social network without linking back to news sites.

Facebook insisted the point of Instant Articles was to help its users avoid the slow Web-page download speeds on news sites.