Media organisations grapple with the new Facebook

NEW YORK — Facebook’s announcement on Thursday (Jan 12) that it would deprioritise articles and videos may not have come as a surprise to most publishers, but it will almost certainly put a scare into them, even if it is not yet clear what the effect will be.

As the company tries to return to its friends-and-family roots, news outlets like BuzzFeed, CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times will be watching closely.

The change casts a spotlight on the data and algorithms used to sort Facebook’s News Feed, which is core to its enormous digital advertising business. Every user sees a different set of content and ads, ranked and tailored based on their characteristics, what they click and what their friends do.

Although Facebook prioritises certain posts, like those new baby and engagement announcements that quickly draw Likes and comments, there are no hard and fast rules for what a user sees first.

In that vein, it’s unclear for publishers how Facebook’s rules around “meaningful” content will affect them.

“Because space in News Feed is limited, showing more posts from friends and family and updates that spark conversation means we’ll show less public content, including videos and other posts from publishers,” Mr Adam Mosseri, the head of Facebook’s News Feed, wrote in a blog post on Thursday night.

As part of the shift, Facebook pages run by publishers and businesses may see a reduction in the number of people they reach and site visits, he wrote.

The numbers will vary based on factors including “the type of content they produce and how people interact with it,” Mr Mosseri added.

Mr Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, said in an interview with The Times on Thursday that he wanted the company to focus on “meaningful interaction.”

With the changes, the company will prioritise posts that it believes are likely to spur discussion among people who know one another and reduce the kind of content that people simply scroll past or watch.

Mr Raju Narisetti, the chief executive of the Gizmodo Media Group, the unit of Univision that operates Jezebel and other sites, said he was expecting the changes any day, but that he had not heard from Facebook about what it could mean for publishers.

“If Facebook downplays ‘low quality’ publishers, as is widely rumoured, it could be a net positive for Gizmodo, Jezebel, TheRoot and our other brands,” Mr Narisetti said in an email. “As always, it would be good to see transparency from any platform, particularly Facebook, as to how they are going about deciding what constitutes quality.”

Mr Jason Kint, the chief executive of Digital Content Next, a trade group that represents entertainment and news organizations, including The Times, was skeptical of the change in strategy.

“If this change is as significant as they describe it, news organizations will go out of business or succeed based on a change that they didn’t necessarily have input on,” Mr Kint said. “It reads as something that will drive up engagement and probably push away policy risk, because they’re not allowing news properties to have the same sort of presence in their feeds.”

Facebook’s new direction comes at a time when political discourse is often heated in the United States, and nationalist groups are on the rise in other parts of the world.

In this charged political atmosphere, agents working for a Kremlin-linked company, the Internet Research Agency, disseminated content that reached an estimated 126 million users in the US in 2016, Facebook revealed to Congress during hearings on the matter last year.

The move away from news-related content may be a way for Facebook to step back from the political debate, which brings up issues known to ruin family get-togethers.

But Mr Kint said he had hoped that the social media giant would have found another way to weed out hoaxes and made-up news stories without penalising all publishers.

Facebook accounts for about 17 per cent of visits, on average, to the digital companies he advises, he said.

For media companies, a reliance on the company as a driver of traffic has proved an unreliable business model, given that it can change what it prioritises in its News Feed at any time.

Facebook’s battle against clickbait, for instance, sent click-dependent publishers like Upworthy into a tailspin several years ago.

Facebook recently paid millions to publishers, including The Times, to invest in making live videos for the platform, but it is unclear how successful the effort was for both Facebook and the news organisations who signed on.

Many publishers have already recognised that they must spread their content beyond Facebook.

Referral traffic to publishers from the site dropped 25 per cent from February 2017 to October 2017, according to data from Parse.ly, a digital publishing analytics company.

But forced to confront declines in digital advertising and online readership, many publishers have also staked at least some of their future on Facebook’s ability to augment their audience.

The algorithm changes will almost certainly affect ad-supported media companies like BuzzFeed and Bustle, which depend in part on Facebook to bring in an audience.

But publishers that have lately shifted to subscription-based business models, including The Washington Post and The Times, will also have to confront the likely declines in referral traffic that the changes will bring.

Almost half of American adults get at least some of their news from Facebook, according to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center.

The changes matter more for media companies, which can garner more exposure in people’s feeds based on how often their content is being shared or viewed, than for brands, which typically pay for their posts to appear there. Facebook’s annual revenue, nearly all of which comes from online advertisements, has more than tripled in the last four years, reaching US$27.6 billion (S$36.66 billion) in 2016, when it posted a net profit of US$10.2 billion.

The company will report its 2017 results later this month.

Mr Mark Thompson, the chief executive of The New York Times Company, recently compared the relationship between the publisher and Google and Facebook to an “airport and airline.”

“You’ve got an infrastructure owner on which you depend for your business,” he said at a conference last month. “Both parties gain from a smooth operation. But the economic division of value is sometimes difficult and the operation is sometimes difficult.”

Mr Robert Thomson, the chief executive of News Corporation, which owns The Wall Street Journal, said that he had “algorithm angst” at a conference last summer. He complained that although algorithms are viewed as objective and scientific, they are in fact “throwing up content from parameters that you’ve set.”

He added, “The news skew in algorithms is immense and the potential censorship in algorithms is immense.”

Mr Zuckerberg signaled the change in a Facebook post last week.

As he does at the start of every year, he let his audience in on the challenges he hoped to conquer in the coming year, and the chief one for 2018 was making Facebook a force for moral good. His company’s return to its scrapbook roots seems to be a part of making good on that aim.

“The world feels anxious and divided,” Mr Zuckerberg wrote, “and Facebook has a lot of work to do — whether it’s protecting our community from abuse and hate, defending against interference by nation states, or making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent.” THE NEW YORK TIMES