Mother Jones’ bone to pick with FB
LEFT-leaning investigative magazine Mother Jones has taken another shot at Facebook — this time claiming the social network’s “Big Brother” tactics have resulted in layoffs at the mag.
On Monday, Mother Jones news editor Patrick Caldwell revealed that the news-censorship tactics of the Mark Zuckerberg-led socialnetwork behemoth have cost the mag some $400,000 in lost revenue over the past three years.
The loss was particularly painful since the company had to reduce payroll also to offset losses due to the coronavirus, resulting in the layoffs of six members of its 90-person staff, Caldwell wrote in an urgent appeal to readers for donations.
“That $400,000 inevitably meant real hardship,” he wrote. “When we sat down to discuss the budget with Mother Jones’ management, the options were stark: If we couldn’t find agreement on pay cuts affecting the majority of staff, we could be forced (after factoring in severance) to lay off as many as six people.”
The dustup kicked off last week after The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook, fearful of charges that it was censoring rightwing sites after the 2016 election of Donald Trump, altered its algorithms to choke traffic to many of the sites on the left of the political spectrum starting in 2017. Zuckerberg, CEO and founder, personally approved of the plan.
The day the report came out on Oct. 16, Mother Jones’ editorial director for growth and strategy, Ben Dreyfuss, issued a post that appeared to accuse Facebook of downplaying the changes by claiming that everyone would be impacted.
“In late 2017 and early 2018, I had multiple meetings with Facebook executives about algorithmic changes. They were making adjustments, they said, and all publishers should expect traffic and engagement to go down a bit, but not in a way that favored or disfavored any single publication or class of publisher (unless that organization engaged in various bad behaviors).”
Mother Jones’ Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery and CEO Monika Bauerlein, meanwhile, accused Facebook of singling out the mag.
“Facebook used its monopolistic power to boost and suppress specific publishers’ content — the essence of every Big Brother fear about the platforms, and something Facebook and other companies have been strenuously denying for years,” they wrote.
The latest salvo comes as Zuckerberg and other Big Tech CEOs get set to testify on Capitol Hill on Wednesday over their contentmoderation decisions.
“As a news editor here at Mother Jones, I don’t usually write about our internal business operations, and I’ve never written an e-mail to our readers,” said Caldwell, who is also co-chair of the Mother Jones editorial-staff union.
“It’s thanks to those dual roles of editor and union rep that I was so enraged when it was revealed that Facebook had changed its algorithm in such a way that it boosted conservative outlets like Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire at the expense of progressive outlets, specifically us,” he said.
“It’s hard to calculate exactly what these changes mean for Mother Jones,” said Caldwell, “how many people did not see our articles, how many potential subscribers and donors we did not reach, but a very conservative estimate of just the loss in advertising revenue is more than $400,000 between n the time those algorithm changes were implemented and the end of our last fiscal year, this June.”
NowThis, a leading producer of video news for mobile use, said Tuesday it has unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.
The parent company, Ben Lerer’s Group Nine — which also owns sites like Thrillist, The Dodo, Seeker and PopSugar — agreed to recognize the union as the bargaining agent for the 90-person editorial staff. That was after an overwhelming majority of workers on
Monday handed in cards saying they wanted to be represented by the WGA, according to a union rep. The quick result stands in sharp contrast to the contentious battles the Writers Guild had to fight when it unionized Hearst magazines earlier this year and when the NewsGuild of New York unionized BuzzFeed early last year. While BuzzFeed recognized the NewsGuild in the summer of 2019 after writers staged a one-day walkout, a contract isn’t imminent, sources said. Hearst in February lost a bid to prevent its workers from voting to unionize, but the publishing giant has yet to begin contract negotiations. Vice, Vox Media and The Huffington Post are all operating under collective-bargaining agreements after management voluntarily recognized the Writers Guild as their bargaining agent. Among the topics on the union’s agenda at NowThis are pay and fairness, but also diversity concerns. Group Nine, like most media companies, was forced to make deep cuts to its workforce in April when it said it was chopping 7 percent of its then-700-person workforce.