This is part five of an ongoing, five-part series. Part one, the introduction, is here. Part two, about breaking up ad-tech companies, is here. Part three, about banning surveillance ads, is here. Part four, about opening up app stores, is here.
Once, news organizations enthusiastically piled into social media. New platforms like Facebook and Twitter were powerful “traffic funnels,” where algorithmic recommendation systems put excerpts from news stories in front of a vast audience of new readers, who followed the links at the end of the excerpt to discover sources that became part of their regular news-diets.
As platforms like Facebook grew essential to the new companies’ business, they changed the deal. First, it was a general “deprioritization” of news posts.
This didn’t just mean that articles from news accounts were less likely to be recommended to users who didn’t subscribe to the news publisher’s account. It also meant that people who explicitly followed publishers – that is, who had explicitly directed Facebook to show them the things those publishers posted – would be less likely to see the publishers’ posts.
The public explanation for this was that Facebook was shifting to prioritizing posts from “friends.” but publishers couldn’t help but notice that their account managers at Facebook stepped up the pressure to “boost” their posts.
The implied message was, “While Facebook says it’s prioritizing posts from users’ friends in their feeds, we’re actually prioritizing posts from users’ friends, as well as
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