Facebook dropped a bomb …that it would change the news feed to favor posts from friends and acknowledged that publishers would take a hit. Facebook is in the midst of an existential crisis, with the platform under fire for offensive content polluting the feed and enabling the spread of fake news and Russian meddling in the election. With Mark Zuckerberg talking about none less than his legacy being at stake, everything signaled this was more than just another algorithm change but a fundamental shift away from promoting news posts, which was never core to Facebook’s mission of connecting every man, woman and child in the world in the first place…
It also might mark the beginning of the end of the Facebook media era, where a social network became a chokehold on an industry, crowning new publishing upstarts who mastered feeding the Facebook beast and left many publishers wondering what shoe would drop next as Facebook kept changing its priorities from clicky stories to short videos to live videos to long-form programming.
Read the full piece at Digiday
