Facebook’s fake news fight does collateral damage for small sites

Bloomberg

Cyrus Massoumi spent the last few years building exactly what he thought would thrive on Facebook: A series of inflammatory conservative websites, finely tuned to produce the most viral and outrageous version of the news. The social network rewarded him with an audience.
Facebook Inc. now wants something different. Reacting to concerns about how fake news spread on its social network, including by Russian propagandists, the company has altered its algorithm to punish sites like Massoumi’s. Facebook has put out a series of blog posts explaining how higher quality content will be rewarded.
Massoumi, who’s featured in the latest episode of the Decrypted podcast, said he had to decide between running “a garbage website that is barely profitable after the fake news crisis” and a “clean website.” He chose clean. In August, he shut down his biggest partisan website, MrConservative.com,
and poured his resources into TruthExaminer, a liberal website he launched just before the election. He made sure it played by Facebook’s stricter rules, especially around clickbait—headlines manipulated solely to attract page views. “You know exactly what you’re getting with all our headlines,” Massoumi said.
There was one glaring problem: less traffic. When Facebook changed its algorithm to disrupt the financial incentives for fake news, the tweaks had a collateral effect on the whole ecosystem of businesses built on its news feed, including Massoumi’s liberal property. Traffic for TruthExaminer went down 60 percent starting in March and hasn’t recovered,
according to Nicole James, his
editor-in-chief. “We never broke the rules that were constantly changing,’’ James said. “I did everything I’m supposed to do. We don’t steal, we don’t cheat. But I get people who message me and say, ‘I don’t see your posts anymore.’”
To build a business on Facebook is to accept volatility. The company has played host to many startups tuned specifically for what its algorithm rewards, only to crush them later. In 2014, the feel-good website Upworthy reached almost 90 million unique visitors, built on curiosity-gap headlines like “9 Out of 10 Americans Are Completely Wrong About This Mind-Blowing Fact.” That same year, changes to the news feed algorithm cut the traffic in half, forcing Upworthy to change its strategy.
In 2016, as Facebook started to prioritise video in its news feed, the tech news site Mashable dismissed writers to focus more intently on the visual medium. The strategy didn’t save the website, which sold for $50 million, a fraction of its prior valuation. More job cuts are expected.
Now partisan news sites are reacting to Facebook’s changes to give lower rank to sensationalism, clickbait and misinformation. Massoumi said he saw no reward for his higher-quality content. He saw competitors get even more aggressive to beat the algorithm, and
succeed. The experience reinforced what he’s known for years to
be the only unchanging Facebook rule: Whoever gets the most
attention wins.
Still, Facebook is intentionally unclear about what is and isn’t allowed on its site. The company doesn’t explicitly ban fake news, and remains especially uninterested in policing partisan content, still fearful of appearing biased. Facebook’s programme using third-party fact checkers to combat fake news only scratches the surface of the problem.
Much of the controversial content still exists on Facebook, it’s just harder to find as it experiments with giving lower rank to whatever it deems bad quality.