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posted by martyb on Friday October 27 2017, @08:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the raise-your-hand-if-you-never-used-facebook dept.

Facebook has released guidelines for publishers who want to appear in the "news feed":

Facebook has released new guidelines that outline how publishers can adapt to the company's efforts to fight back against fake/false news and other low-quality content.

Head of News Feed Adam Mosseri unveiled the guidelines at an event this morning at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, where he said they don't represent any changes to Facebook's approach — they're just a way for publishers to understand the strategy.

He added that Facebook's efforts in this area are "targeted at bad actors." But for legitimate publishers, the guidelines can still be important to "make sure you don't get caught up in the crosshairs."

Publishers have panicked at recent news feed changes:

The new feature Facebook is trying out is called Explore. It offers all sorts of stories it thinks might interest you, a separate news feed encouraging you to look further afield than just at what your friends are sharing. Meanwhile, for most people, the standard News Feed remains the usual mixture of baby photos and posts from companies or media organisations whose pages you have liked.

Sounds fine, doesn't it? Except that in six countries - Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala, and Cambodia - the experiment went further. For users there, the main News Feed was cleared of everything but the usual stuff from your friends and sponsored posts - in other words, if you wanted to have your material seen in the place most users spend their time you had to pay for the privilege.

In a Medium post entitled "Biggest drop in organic reach we've ever seen", a Slovakian journalist Filip Struharik documented the impact. Publishers in his country were seeing just a quarter of the interactions they used to get before the change, he said. What had become a vital and vibrant platform for them was emptying out fast. Other journalists around the world have looked into the future and hate what they see. Their organisations have become addicted to Facebook as the one true way of reaching audiences and going cold turkey would be very painful.

Previously: The Tentacles of Facebook
Facebook is Going to Let Publishers Start Charging Readers to View Stories this Autumn
Google, Facebook Algorithms Promote 4chan Threads Identifying Wrong Man as Vegas Shooter


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