There are no words more terrifying to someone in the news industry than “Facebook has changed its algorithm.”
Newspapers have taken a number of huge hits to our business in recent years. Craigslist, Google, and then social media eroded our advertising base.
Hey, fair’s fair. That’s just business, right?
But Facebook, having made off with a good chunk of advertising dollars, is the primary one that turns reporters and editors into its part-time unpaid interns.
Think about where you saw this column. Our stats show that you most likely first encountered it on Facebook, maybe on Twitter. Far less likely is that you found it by actually navigating to our website.
Our survival, digitally at least, depends on social media.
So we work for Facebook. Editors and reporters spend a significant amount of our day crafting posts, taking photos, adding video. That work gives Facebook a big chunk of the content it needs for its survival.
What does Facebook give us in return?
Well, here at the Advance Times, our Facebook page has more than 12,000 followers. You’re probably one of them! But trust me, you don’t see every post we publish. Far from it.
I know that not everyone checks their Facebook page every day. But a typical middling post from the Advance Times will be seen by around 500 to 1,000 people. That’s about four to nine per cent of our total followers.
Why so low? Because of the algorithm, of course!
The algorithm decides who sees what. It picks up on… maybe key words? On comments, reactions, shares, certainly. And it will place our stories in front of more people, or fewer people.
How does it work? We don’t know. It’s a black box.
Are our numbers on Facebook up? Down? Is it because we wrote good stories, boring stories? Or is it because someone tweaked the algorithm?
Sometimes, the changes are dramatic. Online news magazine Slate opened up about its internal numbers last year, noting that between 2017 and 2018, traffic to the site from Facebook dropped a staggering 87 per cent.
Facebook had altered the algorithm.
“Today, we’re announcing an update to News Feed that helps you see more posts from your friends and family,” said a 2016 post on Facebook’s corporate blog. That meant less news in the so-called news feed.
In 2018, Facebook again announced they wanted to prioritize “meaningful interactions,” which seems to mostly mean posts in which people get into vicious arguments in the comments.
There is another way to get your post seen more. We can pay Facebook. The site constantly sends out messages asking us to cough up cash – currently it’s asking for $40 per post. “Boost it to get more reactions, comments, and shares.”
So here’s how it goes. We do the work – researching and writing up the news, creating posts, slowly building an audience of Facebook followers.
Then Facebook withholds most of our followers from seeing most of our posts.
Then it asks for money in exchange for showing those posts to more people.
Facebook, for providing a tool that connects people and groups, has every right to try to make a profit from its service.
But what are the rights of news organizations that are entwined in a symbiotic relationship with Facebook?
We don’t have the right, apparently, to access even a minimum number of our followers through their news feeds.
We don’t have the right to understand how the algorithm operates, or how it might change in the future.
Why not?
Whether a direct financial relationship exists or not, the work we do allows Facebook to keep making money. If Facebook was nothing but pictures of your cousin’s new baby and your friend’s softball team, it would be popular and worthwhile.
But it wouldn’t be what it is without all that work put in by news and entertainment sites.
We work, Facebook profits.
I have a suggestion, for all those other newspapers and radio stations and TV news reporters out there.
We should make some demands of Facebook. Transparency. Access to our audience. A say in how the algorithm deals with news – and with the dross of fake news that pushes so much of the real stuff out of the picture.
And if we don’t get what we want?
A strike, of course.
If Facebook has slashed the amount of news it shows its customers, maybe they’d like to have zero news for a while?
Anyone can post a link to a news story, but if news organizations remove the share buttons from stories and stop posting, the amount of news content would drop off. Dramatically.
Facebook would likely say, of course, that we’re free to go elsewhere.
Considering how little interest they have in letting us connect with our audience, maybe they’re right.
Until then, I have to go work on some digital picket line slogans.