Facebook announced Wednesday that their updated News Feed policies will prioritize people over publishers, a move that will likely have a significant impact on news outlets that increasingly rely on the social media network to build their audience.
“Our top priority is keeping you connected to the people, places and things you want to be connected to — starting with the people you are friends with on Facebook,” reads a Wednesday press release written by Adam Mosseri, vice president of product management.
The social media giant’s engineering director Lars Backstrom wrote in a post that “we anticipate that this update may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for some pages.” However, he said “if a lot of your referral traffic is the result of people sharing your content and their friends liking and commenting on it, there will be less of an impact than if the majority of your traffic comes directly through page posts.”
This will likely affect the viewership of many publications, which rely on the hope that users will find their content through social media feeds. Though Facebook has declined to specify the algorithms underlying the News Feed, the release hints at the content that is likely to do well.
“We don’t favor specific kinds of sources — or ideas. Our aim is to deliver the types of stories we’ve gotten feedback that an individual person most wants to see,” stated Mosseri, who wrote the company is “not in the business of picking which issues the world should read about. We are in the business of connecting people and ideas — and matching people with the stories they find most meaningful.”
A report released in May alleged that editors of the site’s Trending Topics, a separate function from News Feed, downplayed stories and sources popular with conservatives. The company has denied the accusations, but announced they are now including a political bias scenario in a mandatory employee diversity class.
