Facebook Friends? The Impact of Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm Changes on Nonprofit Publishers

Abstract

This paper analyzes the changes in traffic from Facebook to nonprofit news organizations before and after the major change to the Facebook News Feed in January 2018, implemented in response to the controversy over fake news dissemination from Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election in the United States. We find that while the organizations in our cohort generally experienced a decline in referral traffic from Facebook, it was more varied than the declines reported among larger, commercial press outlets that released their own Facebook referral data. We speculate that the variation and lower overall decline may be due to how nonprofit news organizations’ stories are shared on Facebook. Further, we suggest additional research into both the best practices of Facebook sharing for nonprofit news organizations and how they can siphon additional control of their content distribution from third-party technology platforms to their own.