When Facebook tweaked its newsfeed algorithm in 2017 to reduce the visibility of political news, the company’s engineers intentionally designed the system to disproportionately impact left-leaning outlets, effectively choking off their traffic in the process.
However, in its attempt to appear unbiased, the company evidently overcorrected (which it has a history of doing).
Facebook’s engineers overhauled the update to affect left-leaning sites more than previously planned, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself OK’d the redesign, sources told the Journal.
“We did not make changes with the intent of impacting individual publishers,” a Facebook spokesperson told the outlet.
And yet, in 2019, several of the site’s editors wrote that traffic from Facebook had tanked dramatically over the last 18 months, translating to a loss of at least $600,000.
Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein expressed frustration with Facebook in a Twitter thread Friday, explaining that the loss of traffic had “real effects” on the organization.
“[O]ne reason this is so enraging is that I’ve so long insisted on giving Facebook some benefit of the doubt,” Bauerlein wrote. »
