Facebook's narrow definition of "news" had some pretty dire consequences for every publication that didn't fit it.
Starting in early 2018, Facebook has endured what Wired called "15 months of fresh hell" in a devastating recap published Tuesday. Scandal after scandal and data breach after data breach has led the public's trust in Facebook to plummet — and it all started with an engineering team's ironic attempt to build that trust in the first place.
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But the policy still took effect, and traffic measurer Parse.ly documented just how devastating it was. From 2017 to 2018, arts and entertainment content saw its Facebook referrals drop by a whopping 71 percent. Music saw a 65 percent drop, and both style and fashion and family and parenting went down by 61 percent. Facebook finally dropped the news definition in September 2018, but not until traffic dropped for pages across the board — and not until several news sites publicly called out Facebook for its flub. Read more about Facebook's failures at Wired.
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