Facebook reportedly choked traffic for left-leaning news sites including Mother Jones

Facebook designed changes to its news feed algorithm in 2017 to reduce the visibility of left-leaning news sites like Mother Jones on its platform, the Wall Street Journal reported, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had personally approved the plans.

But Mother Jones editorial director for growth and strategy Ben Dreyfuss wrote that in multiple meetings with Facebook executives in 2017 and 2018, they reassured him that while traffic might go down, “not in a way that favored or disfavored any single publication or class of publisher.”

According to the WSJ, some policy executives at Facebook voiced concerns in 2017 about pending changes to the news feed algorithm that they thought might have a larger impact on right-leaning news sites like the Daily Wire. So engineers made changes to the algorithm that would have a bigger impact on traffic to left-leaning sites.

A Facebook spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal “We did not make changes with the intent of impacting individual publishers.”

In 2019, Mother Jones editors wrote that the site had seen a sharp decline in its Facebook audience, which translated to a loss of around $600,000 over 18 months. CEO Monika Bauerlein tweeted Friday that that decline meant the organization couldn’t fill positions or pursue some projects. She added that she and others at Mother Jones didn’t think the site was being specifically targeted: “one reason this is so enraging is that I’ve so long insisted on giving Facebook some benefit of the doubt. I was convinced we were a random casualty of their broader trajectory, a fly on their windshield. But it’s always, always worse.”