The Facebook News Is Even Worse Than We Thought

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A couple of days ago I mentioned that Facebook “tweaked” its news feed algorithm to help conservative sites and hurt liberal sites like Mother Jones. That was bad enough. But yesterday we learned it was far more malicious than we knew:

In late 2017, Zuckerberg told his engineers and data scientists to design algorithmic “ranking changes” that would dial down the temperature….[But] there was a hitch: Everyone knew that most of the untrustworthy “junk” on Facebook, when it came to politics, originated with “conservative/conspiratorial” sites. And while Facebook was under fire from both right and left, its chief worry—now that Republicans had regulatory power in Washington—was “getting Trump off their back.”…It was made clear that “we can’t do a ranking change that would hurt Breitbart.”

….The code was tweaked, and executives were given a new presentation showing less impact on these conservative sites and more harm to progressive-leaning publishers—including Mother Jones. “The problem was that the progressive outlets were real [news] outlets like yours,” recalls the ex-employee, “and the right ones were garbage outlets. You guys were one of the outlets who got singled out to balance the ledger.”

The full story is here. The end result was an enormous decline in traffic from Facebook and a consequent decline in revenue—which was undoubtedly the goal of the Republican activists (and Facebook VP Joel Kaplan, a former George Bush staffer) who lobbied for it.

In other words, this was no accident. Facebook was determined not to antagonize conservatives, regardless of their content, and the only way to do that was to reduce the reach of liberal sites. So they tweaked and tweaked until their algorithm had hurt Mother Jones and other liberal sites sufficiently and then rolled it out.

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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