Mark Zuckerberg (photo YouTube)
Facebook is, ironically, now seeing complaints from publishers who saw the traffic on their websites plummet in recent months after Facebook hanged its policies concerning direct news feeds to its users. And the funny thing here is how the company only made the changes after public outcries and government pressure to do so. This came after publishers complained about Facebook using their material for free and governments complained about how the social media platform allowed for the proliferation of fake news.
An unnamed executive at a major media company told CNN, “If you’re a major publisher, you’ve gotten nicked.” And a publisher told the news channel, “Facebook nuked everyone’s traffic,” and that his firm saw more than a 30% drop in year-over-year referral traffic and another told CNN that his company saw a roughly 40% drop.
Meta/Facebook actually predicted that something like this would happen. In March, the company revealed that the results of a study from NERA Economic Consulting showed that traditional media had been bleeding subscribers for decades before Facebook even existed and that publishers reap “considerable economic benefits” from their use of Facebook, constituting approximately 1% to 1.5% of their revenues.
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And Meta/Facebook said news content from traditional publishers is of low value to the firm and declining, while publishers benefit from traffic from social media apps. Globally, 90% of organic views on article links from news publishers are on links posted by the publishers themselves, not by Facebook users, said Meta.
And now the government of Canada is complaining that Facebook’s parent company Meta has taken its new law requiring such social media firms to pay fees for sharing other websites’ content too far. Facebook and Instagram blocked all news from its Canadian users, vene about the wildfires currently raging through the country. Canadian officials say this is preventing people from getting needed information about the emergency situation.
“Meta’s reckless choice to block news … is hurting access to vital information on Facebook and Instagram,” said Canada’s Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge said in a social media post. “We are calling on them to reinstate news sharing today for the safety of Canadians facing this emergency. We need more news right now, not less.”
