Publishers Don’t Trust Facebook Anymore, Scale Backs And Erratic Behavior Prove Troubling

Facebook has not been having a very good start of the year, with its misdeeds during the 2016 U.S. presidential elections still haunting it even now. One of the consequences of its failure to address key issues, which was revealed it was aware of at the time, is the loss of confidence in the platform. This applies to both users and publications, with the latter no longer seeing Facebook as trustworthy.

As WIRED notes, publishers no longer see Facebook as a reliable partner in providing them with exposure on the platform. The social network’s behavior has been considered erratic and contradictory, even during the best of times, and downright counterintuitive at worst.

Its recent announcement of scaling back on how it highlights news articles on the site has hit publications particularly hard since it meant that they would get even less traffic coming from the social network. This was on top of the reduced number of referrals that it was sending in 2017 when coverage of the proliferation of fake news on the platform started gaining steam.

As a result of this practically unhinged behavior, the publishers themselves have decided to hold back on how much of their contents will be featured on Facebook in favor of other platforms such as Google. The search engine company’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) has been particularly fruitful for publications since they allow news articles to load faster on smartphones.

Facebook claims that it isn’t about to give up on publishers, however, with a recent panel discussion during the SXSW conference seeing the company’s head of news product, Alex Hardiman trying to explain what the social network is trying to do. Apparently, Facebook was attempting to redefine its relationship with publishers, focusing more on quality than quantity.

While these sentiments might sound noble, it doesn’t change the fact that it is driving some legitimate publications out of business due to the constant changes it is making to its algorithm. Some journalists are even accusing Facebook of not really understanding how the news business works.