It’s becoming increasingly clear that Facebook plans to do away with independent publishers like 100percentfedup.com. Several years ago, Facebook marketing representatives contacted us, and pledged to help us drive more traffic to our website from our popular 100 Percent Fed Up Facebook page if we agreed to pay them tens of thousands of dollars for advertising on their platform.
After agreeing to advertise with Facebook, the number of followers on our 100 Percent Fed Up Facebook page increased, as well as traffic to our website from Facebook. Everything was going along as planned, until President Trump won the 2016 election. Only one month after Trump’s inauguration, the traffic to our pro-Trump Facebook page dropped by over 90%. After years of paying Facebook to help build a larger audience, they came like a thief in the night, and took away the ability of our followers (that we paid to bring to our Facebook page) to see our content.
Removing the majority of our content from the newsfeed wasn’t enough for Facebook. Almost weekly, we receive manufactured “clickbait” violations or trumped up third-party fact check violations, as a way to keep our pro-Trump Facebook content from showing up in the newsfeed. Two weeks ago, Facebook hit us with two “clickbait” violations, but refused to show us what the violations were. Instead of examples of “clickbait,” two grey boxes appeared with a notification that read “example is no longer available.” These are the kinds of dirty games Facebook plays with conservative independent publishers.
Along with the grey boxes that are apparently “clickbait,” Facebook sent us an explanation of how they will reduce the distribution of our content for “repeatedly” sharing “clickbait.”
When sent a request to Facebook to review the “grey box” violations, they sent us a message, informing us that we’ve reached the limit of reviews for clickbait and that they would no longer review our requests.
As part of their war on independent conservative news sources like 100percentfedup.com, Facebook will soon be hand selecting the news sources they will feature in their newsfeed, while offering publishers they deem acceptable for their readers, millions of dollars for accepting their offer.
According to the Wall Street Journal – Facebook Inc. is offering news outlets millions of dollars for the rights to put their content in a news section that the company hopes to launch later this year, according to people familiar with the matter.
Representatives from Facebook have told news executives they would be willing to pay as much as $3 million a year to license headlines and previews of articles from news outlets, the people said.
The outlets pitched by Facebook on its news tab include Walt Disney Co.’s ABC News, Wall Street Journal parent Dow Jones, The Washington Post and Bloomberg, the people said.
Facebook’s plans come as the company is facing growing criticism for its role in the news industry’s struggles by sucking up much of the advertising revenue that used to go to newspapers. Combined, Facebook and Alphabet Inc.’s Google earned 60% of all digital advertising revenue in the U.S. last year, according to eMarketer.
Breitbart News reports- Facebook ended its Trending Topics feature last year after being accused of bias, a Facebook executive commented on this stating: “We learned a lot from Trending. This is a completely different product.” The entire Facebook Trending News team was fired in 2016 following an investigation by Breitbart News which revealed an extreme level of bias from members of the team. A former Facebook employee stated that 90 percent of the Trending Topics team was liberal and that Breitbart News received extra scrutiny. The Trending Topics feature continued for some time, run solely by an algorithm.
