Meta’s Content Policy Reversal Makes Almost No Difference for News Pubs
One of the potential upsides to Meta’s content policy changes back in January was the possibility that publishers might start to see more traffic coming from the platform. That hasn’t happened.
In January, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the company that he felt the company’s platforms had become too restrictive from a free speech perspective. In addition, he said that they were “bringing back civic content.” In the transcript shared here, he said:
For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed, so we stopped recommending these posts, but it feels like we’re in a new era now, and we’re starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again. So we’re going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram, and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.
Since news publishers are full of “civic content” and “politics,” some publishers might have thought they’d see more traffic flowing to their sites. For the handful of those we spoke to, that’s just not the case.
According to one comms person at a publication that skews left, according to Ad Fontes Media, “overall traffic from Facebook, and traffic from Facebook to ‘news’ sections, is down YOY. However, we did see a meaningful uptick in January Facebook referral traffic to news sections from the prior month.”
They may be the only ones. Reps from the Boston Globe and Dow Jones both said that they had seen no change over the last few months.
What about the broader publishing community?
AMO reached out to Chartbeat, a content analytics provider, to better understand what’s going on. Their analysis is based on 3,769 sites that have opted-in to anonymized aggregated research. Their findings were inconclusive.
“You’ll see that Facebook share metrics dropped in March, but the pageviews rose,” Lauryn Warnick, communications at Chartbeat, told AMO. “We’d see this as noisy fluctuation and not enough to indicate a shift in any direction.”
There are two ways to look at it. On one hand, pageviews from Facebook are down from a year ago, which is in line with the left-leaning publisher. On the other hand, despite it being an election year, pageviews increased considerably once the election was called.
That also plays out on the Meta pageviews as a percentage of total pageviews.
Facebook’s contribution to total pageviews crashed in November and then started to rise again.
But Warnick is still right. While pageviews have increased since November, the movement in January and February is much smaller, which could mean one of two things. First, the changes to Meta’s algorithms take time to percolate across the entire network. Or, second, there are competing variables at play with regard to that algorithm.
For example, it’s one thing to say that “we’re going to start phasing this [politics] back in Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.” But it’s another to reverse course on links being deprioritized. In other words, it might want political content, but it might still be deprioritizing links out to other sites. In that case, Meta’s platforms might become increasingly political, but there wouldn’t be a monumental change in the number of folks hitting publisher’s websites.
It’s also possible that the sources we spoke with might not be representative of the type of political content that is shared on Meta’s platforms. This author has certainly seen a rise in antisemitic postings, something a more traditional news organization would likely avoid.
As publishers continue on their quest to find reliable sources of traffic, Meta’s platforms don’t appear to have much to offer for growth.
Christiana Sciaudone contributed reporting.
