Facebook reportedly choked traffic for left-leaning news sites including Mother Jones
https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/17/21520634/facebook-reportedly-choked-traffic-mother-jones-zuckerberg
Facebook designed changes to its news feed algorithm in 2017 to reduce the visibility of left-leaning news sites like Mother Jones on its platform, the Wall Street Journal reported, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had personally approved the plans.
But Mother Jones editorial director for growth and strategy Ben Dreyfuss wrote that in multiple meetings with Facebook executives in 2017 and 2018, they reassured him that while traffic might go down, “not in a way that favored or disfavored any single publication or class of publisher.”
According to the WSJ, some policy executives at Facebook voiced concerns in 2017 about pending changes to the news feed algorithm that they thought might have a larger impact on right-leaning news sites like the Daily Wire. So engineers made changes to the algorithm that would have a bigger impact on traffic to left-leaning sites.
A Facebook spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal “We did not make changes with the intent of impacting individual publishers.”
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