July 11, 2016: As reported on this blog and elsewhere, Facebook made a momentous tweak to its algorithm that makes it much harder for news publishers to get their content in front of users. (Because the consequences to Facebook news publishers are so potentially dire, some have termed this event “FriendAGeddon,” in a nod to 2015’s infamous Mobilegeddon incident initiated by Google.)
One publisher – the Sacramento Bee – has taken to the Web – and to its own pages – to plea with its loyal users to take steps to directly override Facebook’s algorithmic content decisions. This can be done by going directly to the publisher’s page, Liking/Following it, and clicking on “See First” in the dropdown window (as illustrated in the screenshot below). Doing this will inject the news publisher’s content back in the content stream, where it will again be visible to users.
It’s good that Facebook has provided users a direct way to keep the lifeline of news alive on their content streams. If enough people do what the Sacramento Bee asks, it may ameliorate the financial damage caused by Facebook’s algo update while at the same time keeping Facebook’s users better informed with information not originally sourced by their friends, family, or other personal associates, who may or may not have good news judgment.
Unfortunately, the way that Facebook has done this moves far too much manual work onto its user base. Most Facebook users read more than one publication, and I’m sure many – especially those working in communications-related industries, may read dozens or hundreds. Asking each one of these users to find, visit, and modify settings on a publisher’s individual Facebook page is both onerous and unnecessary.
Instead (and it would probably take Facebook’s engineers less than 20 minutes to code this up), it would be far better to have a checkbox or simple control in the user’s settings area that would allow the user to create a global setting allowing the same thing. Such controls could be set up as follows:
1. No news (only personal organic updates from friends and associates please).
2. Some news (this control could be refined to reflect additional choices, for example “happy news only,” “neighborhood news,” or “news that I can use at my job.”)
3. All news (don’t show me anything that’s not trending on a bona fide news site).
It is curious that Facebook doesn’t give this very basic, simple level of control to its users. There may be economic, technical, or even philosophical reasons for not doing so, and I’m sure that these reasons are good, or at least reasonable inside of Facebook. But right now, given that the only way that Facebook’s users can see news is to contact each publisher manually and invoke the “see first” control, the lack of these controls is a disservice both to Facebook users and the news publishers whose content is generally of high quality and – more importantly – whose mission is not just to entertain or divert, but to actually inform.
Facebook, are you listening (I didn’t think so)? In the meantime, if you are on Facebook and you want to help keep a news publisher alive, please visit their page and click “see first.”
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