If Facebook is reducing the amount of controversial news that users see, I think that’s a really good thing for society (since presumably this means that fake news and rage bait news is de-prioritized as well.) But it is very shitty that Facebook has so much power over so many companies. It’s upsetting that a single company has so much power over what people see online.
Facebook managed to convince the higher ups at journalism orgs that it was an easy revenue solution without providing data short of essentially “look how many people are on our site.”
Everyone I worked with in actual newsrooms knew a push to reliance on Facebook left us in a really bad position with predictable results, but it happened nonetheless.
Facebook gave traffic to links? In my experience Facebook is the worst platform for external content, almost no body sees the post.
publishers relying on Facebook traffic
Well, there’s your problem. Journalists think Twitter is their audience and publishers think Facebook is.
If only there was some kind of a protocol, widely supported, that would allow publishers to push content to their readers directly. Readers could “subscribe” to (say) “channels”, which would get populated with items published by publishers.
It could be a really simple method of sindication! I even saw a nice icon that I think would work well for it:
