- MediaToday, By Mathew Ingram, JULY 28, 2022
LAST WEEK, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced a major change to its flagship social-media platform. Instead of a user’s “news feed” being composed primarily of content from friends and other accounts a user has chosen to follow, the main feed on a user’s Facebook page will be an algorithmically-filtered collection of content from anywhere, and posts from a user’s friends will be moved to a separate page. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, wrote about the proposed changes in late April, referring to the news-feed change as one of the company’s “investment priorities”; now the redesigned feeds are in the process of being rolled out to Facebook’s three billion daily users. As part of these changes, Sara Fischer of Axios also reported that the term “news feed” is being retired as a descriptor for the main feed on a user’s page. Facebook first introduced the news feed in 2006, as a way of making it easy for users to see what all their friends were doing in one place, and while the new feature was not well received by some, it soon became the main interface for the social network, and the driving force behind Facebook’s growth as an advertising vehicle.
According to Axios, one reason why the main feed will no longer be called a “news feed” is that Meta is “de-emphasizing its investment in news content.” The Wall Street Journal reported that Campbell Brown, the head of global media partnerships for Meta, said last week the company is “reallocating resources away from its Facebook News tab, and its Bulletin newsletter platform.” This kind of reallocation—which may be driven in part by the financial pressure the company is under—could mean an end to the payments Meta has been making for the past three years to news publishers who agreed to have their content featured on a separate News tab. Facebook News was launched in 2019, after years of complaints from publishers such as Rupert Murdoch, founder of News Corp., about Facebook profiting off of content produced by news-media companies. The Journal reported that Meta has paid a total of $90 million a year to about 200 news outlets, including more than $15 million a year to the Washington Post, and more than $20 million a year to the New York Times.
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Even at the time, many saw the Facebook News launch as primarily a public-relations exercise, not a sign of any ongoing commitment to the media industry or journalism. Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia, wrote in 2019 that a one-on-one interview between Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp—parent company of the Journal and its publisher, Dow Jones & Company—and Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Meta, was “a publicity coup for Facebook,” a sign that it had “tamed the biggest beast in the journalism jungle.” Only a year before the new payments were announced, Zuckerberg seemed skeptical of the idea of paying publishers for their news content, saying, “I’m not sure that makes sense.” Since then, Meta has been forced to make payments to news publishers in Australia, after that country passed a law compelling digital platforms to negotiate licensing deals or else have them imposed by the government. (Several countries, such as Canada and the United Kingdom, have proposed similar legislation).
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The end of the Facebook News tab, and the tacit admission that the main user feed no longer qualifies as a “news feed,” are only the most recent signs that Meta and Facebook’s interest in news continues to decline—apart from payments it is forced to make by legislation, of course, and the remains of a few token programs such as the Meta Journalism Project, which hands out grants and training to local news outlets and whose future, in light of recent reports, now seems murky. When the project was first launched in 2017, as a kind of competitor to the Google News Initiative, Facebook’s announcement made promises about how publishers would be able to use the company’s “Instant Articles” format to generate revenue, and how they would be trained to use Crowdtangle, an analytical tool for social platforms that Facebook acquired. Many have since found Instant Articles to be a bust in terms of revenue, and Crowdtangle appears to be in the process of being dismantled, in part because some Meta executives believe it allowed the media too much access to Facebook data.
Facebook’s history in dealing with the news media is filled with similar examples of promises that have led to disappointment. In 2016, as the Nieman Journalism Lab notes, Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives started “pushing the notion that news video on Facebook was publishers’ bright future.” But the metrics Facebook was using to measure engagement with news video later turned out to be overstated, and the company later paid a group of news publishers—who had committed significant resources to this new pivot-to-video strategy—$40 million to settle a lawsuit over that fact (although Facebook did not admit any wrongdoing). The Wall Street Journal later reported that the shift to more video in the news feed might have actually driven engagement down rather than up, meaning news publishers actually wound up worse off as a result of following the social network’s advice. An attempt to help push traffic to local news publishers also proved to be a bust.
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All of these experiences have come on top of the continued down-ranking of professional news content by the Facebook algorithm. In 2018, Facebook said it was de-emphasizing content from news publishers because, as Zuckerberg explained in a blog post, users told the company that “public content—posts from businesses, brands and media—is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other.” At the time, Franklin Foer wrote in The Atlantic that Facebook was doing the media a favor. “It has forced media to face the fact that digital advertising and ever-growing web traffic will never sustain the industry,” he wrote, “especially if that traffic comes from monopolies like Facebook.” Now, media companies will learn that lesson all over again, as their content is forced to compete in a new algorithm-driven feed run by a company that is trying to compete with TikTok.
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