I'm in a @MotherJones board meeting today so it's going to take a while to fully process this infuriating news, but just briefly (because YOU, as a news consumer, should be furious): wsj.com/articles/how-m…
At the time that this happened, Facebook claimed it was reducing the prevalence of "low-quality" news in users' feeds. Seems a reasonable goal. But guess what? When they did that, it turned out to hurt low-quality news from right-wing propaganda outlets. So what did they do?
They made changes so that actual journalism that reporters and factcheckers and editors and data crunchers and art directors worked their assess off on got downgraded, just to balance things out. So stuff like this versus stuff like this:
.@MotherJones had a big presence on Facebook because our team worked really hard to bring quality news to users on social platforms, and people were hungry for that. But suddenly our reach dropped like a stone. motherjones.com/politics/2019/…
And this had real effects. A roughly $400,000 decrease in annual revenue, for starters. There are positions we couldn't fill, projects we couldn't do because of this. But the bigger effect is on YOU, readers. YOU were kept from seeing news you wanted (even if you followed MoJo.)
Just for the record, no one at Mother Jones has ever been invited to dine at Mark Zuckerberg's home. Nor should someone who wants to dine with propagandists ever call on us.
But you can bet that we'll keep covering Facebook as the massively powerful company that it is, even if it tries to pull the rug out from under us. motherjones.com/politics/2020/…
Last thing before I go back into meetings, one reason this is so enraging is that I've so long insisted on giving Facebook some benefit of the doubt. I was convinced we were a random casualty of their broader trajectory, a fly on their windshield. But it's always, always worse.
Well, not the last thing, because if you got to this point in the thread perhaps you'll consider helping support the incredibly hard working journalists whose work got suppressed by this. Reader support is the lifeblood of MoJo's newsroom, please join! secure.motherjones.com/flex/mj/key/7L…

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More from @MonikaBauerlein

16 May
I don't think people have fully grappled with what coronavirus is doing to journalism, in part because a few big orgs are still doing well. But the immune system of democracy is literally crashing before our eyes. motherjones.com/media/2020/05/…
And it's not because the internet happened, or any of the other facile explanations. It's a lot simpler and more infuriating than that. One word: Greed. Two words: Hedge funds.
"The profit is the product," one news union leader said about hedge funds. And what else has been wrecked by that principle? So many companies you might have shopped (or worked) at: Payless, ToysRUs, Sears. Brads that needed to evolve, but got gutted instead. And it gets worse:
Read 5 tweets
5 Feb
There's a German word, Steigbügelhalter (stirrup holder), that describes helping someone come to power, but has been specifically applied to politicians who use the mantle of respectability to aid and abet authoritarianism.
This may well describe what happened in Washington today. But it's global, too. Back in Germany, the mainstream conservative and libertarian parties just collaborated with the far-right AfD to oust the socialist who'd won a regional election. theguardian.com/world/2020/feb…
The AfD there is led by a man who a court has ruled may fairly be described as a fascist. This is the logical extension of "my righteous ends justify pandering to the enemies of democracy." Whether that goal is confirming Supreme Court justices or defeating a socialist.
Read 6 tweets

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