Last year, I had a discussion with the publisher of a renowned investigative US media site. He told me that he and his team had long wondered about the huge discrepancy between the nation-wide resonance of their work, and its presence in Facebook newsfeed… After meeting people with good knowledge of Facebook’s inner plumbing, they had come to the conclusion that the algorithm was simply biased to favor positive content over the darker pieces that make the bulk of investigative journalism. “We became convinced that Facebook favors a Alice in Wonderland vision”, he concluded.
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Consider the following conclusion in the Reuters Institute Digital News Report (one of the best sources to understand the shifts in news consumption): When asked the question: Thinking about when you have used social media/aggregators for news, typically how often do you notice the news brand that has supplied the content? Less than half of social media users acknowledged being able to identify the actual news source.
Facebook censors your journalism in favor for positive and viral content that is insanely shareable and monetizeable and most people have no idea where a piece was published which is by design. Facebook wants people IRL (in real life) to tell their friends “I saw that on Facebook” not, “I saw that on Buzzfeed”