"Facebook became inhospitable terrain for those who want to offer quality content like ours.".
—Sérgio Dávila, Folha de S. Paulo.
By contrast, the newspaper's analysis found, "fake news pages received five times the number of engagements that professional journalism received.".
"These problems have been aggravated in recent years by the mass distribution of deliberately false content...as happened in the U.S. presidential election in 2016.".
The decision to abandon Facebook was ultimately "a reflection of internal discussions about the best ways to get the content of the newspaper to reach its readers," the paper concluded.
Responding to Folha's move, Jeff Benício, a columnist for the Brazilian news and entertainment website Terra, urged other organizations to do the same.
"If there's a mass exit, the social network will lose relevance and become...a virtual space for family and friends to joke around. »