Facebook referrals are drying up - here's why that should be cause for concern

Facebook has started to deprioritise news as part of its content mix, with referrals from the world’s biggest social media platform dropping off a cliff in recent months.

Data shared with Press Gazette from publisher analytics firm Chartbeat and digital intelligence platform Similarweb has?highlighted the extent?of the fall.

The analysis confirms a warning issued by the UK’s biggest local and national news publisher Reach, which blamed a dramatic page-view slowdown on “recent changes to the way Facebook presents news content”.

But for independent media, the fall in traffic has been even more severe, and that should be cause for concern.

At the last general election, mainstream media coverage of the main two political parties became so one-sided it was likened to a?‘major assault’?by American linguist Noam Chomsky.

A Loughborough University study found that press hostility towards the Labour Party in the MSM?doubled compared to the 2017 election, while negative coverage about the Conservatives halved.

As Samuel Earle put it to us, Britain has a press “that couldn’t be more servile if it was state-controlled”, and it’s about to get a lot worse.

Last month Facebook owner Meta commissioned a report that claimed that news content plays a “small and diminishing role” on its platform.

What it meant is that news content from independent media will be increasingly suppressed while ‘legacy media’ spreads its wings once again to fill in the gaps.

This poses a serious threat to how you receive your news, but more pertinently, how the stranglehold of the MSM could shape Britain's political outlook.

Watch our interview with Samuel Earle here: