https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/04/conservative-digital-media-traffic/678055/ For years, Facebooks mysterious algorithms served up links to news and commentary articles, sending droves of traffic to their publishers. But those days are gone. Amid criticism from elected officials and academics who said the social-media giant was spreading hate speech and harmful misinformation, including Russian propaganda, before the 2016 election, Facebook apparently came to question the value of featuring news on its platform. In early 2018, it began deemphasizing news content, giving greater priority to content posted by friends and family members. In 2021, it tightened the tap a little further. This past February, it announced that it would do the same on Instagram and Threads. All of this monkeying with the internets plumbing drastically reduced the referral traffic flowing to news and commentary sites. The changes have affected everyone involved in digital media, including some liberal-leaning sitessuch as Slate (which saw a 42 percent traffic drop), the Daily Beast (41 percent), and Vox (62 percent, after losing its two most prominent writers)but the impact appears to have been the worst, on average, for conservative media. (Referral traffic from Google has also declined over the past few years, but far less sharply.)
That's odd because I recall Zuck recently saying they wouldn't be monitoring misinformation as they did in 2020.
However I can't find anything recent or that supports that, so I guess I was mistaken. Thanks.
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