Facebook intentionally reduced traffic to external news sites by 50% last year, according to a new report.
The report, published by Chartbeat and Slikeweb, relies on analyzing traffic from about 800 news sites using third-party tracking data to estimate traffic redirected from Facebook.
Data collected since 2018 shows that traffic to Facebook's external news sites is down 58% over the past six years and 50% over the past year.
The data also shows that Facebook currently accounts for only 7% of all reported visits on these sites. In 2018, visits from popular social networks represented about 30% of total visits.
Small websites are disproportionately affected by platform changes, the report says.
Meta committed to gradually reducing the presence of news content in its applications, and in December it ended the “Facebook News” project to support news publishers.
Meta recently announced that it intends to reduce certain political content on its platform to improve user experience while making displaying politically relevant content an optional option.
Meta has changed the AI-based content filtering and display algorithm to reduce the appearance of external links and thus improve the appearance of videos, images and content from other publications, thus helping users stay on the site's platform for a longer period of time. As long as possible. Focusing on the entertainment aspect ignores the controversies and heated debates that come with political content.
In 2021, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: “One of the key feedback we're hearing from the community now is that people don't want their experience on our services to be dominated by politics and conflict.”
Zuckerberg made the comments after appearing before the US Congress to examine the role of meta-platforms in the unrest in the US.
Meta aims to increase user engagement on the platform while staying away from political issues and regulatory scrutiny, and follows the same guidelines as Instagram and Threads.