Facebook designed changes to reduce the visibility of left-leaning news sites. Ceo Mark Zuckerberg had personally approved the plans.

Ben Dreyfuss wrote that while traffic might go down,’not in a way that favored or disfavored any single publication or class of publisher’.

Engineers made changes to the algorithm that would have a bigger impact on right-leaning sites like the daily wire. Facebook’s policy executives at Facebook voiced concerns in 2017 about pending changes.

A Facebook spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal’we did not make changes with the intent of impacting individual publishers’. The Facebook spokesperson said that’we do n’t make changes’.

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 that she and others at Mother Jones did n’t think the site was being specifically targeted.

I’ve so long insisted on giving Facebook some benefit of the doubt. I was convinced we were a fly on their windshield, but it’s always worse.

Facebook has a strained relationship with the news business. Its ad business and constant tweaks to its news feed have had a direct economic impact on the industry.

In 2016, Facebook was accused of having anti-conservative bias in the articles it promoted in its trending topics section. The Google amp competitor Instant Articles resulted in mass layoffs at digital media companies.

Mother Jones, an independent nonprofit site founded in 1976, has led numerous investigations into political corruption, private prisons, and the environment. In September 2012, Romney said 47 percent of people who supported President Obama paid no income tax and would support Obama no matter what. Romney later said his comments were’completely wrong’.