Western Journal: Facebook’s Algorithm Change Disproportionately Hits Conservative Sites
by ALLUM BOKHARI
BreitBart.com
15 Mar 2018
A data-driven report in The Western Journal sheds more light on how Facebook’s recent newsfeed algorithm change has disproportionately affected conservatives and conservative media.
The report is based on data from the third-party service SimilarWeb, which tracks web traffic. It shows that conservative publishers have lost an average of 14 percent of their traffic from Facebook since the platform’s newsfeed change, while liberal websites have gained an average of 2 percent. When Fox News, a high-traffic outlier, is removed from the results, the average drop in Facebook traffic for conservative websites is 32.4 percent.
Breitbart News recently reported that Facebook’s recent changes to users’ newsfeeds had caused engagement on President Trump’s page to drop by 45 percent — almost half. This was followed by a story in The Outline which revealed that the engagement of conservative sites including Fox News, Breitbart News, and Gateway Pundit had also taken a hit, while mainstream sites like CNN and the New York Times were largely unaffected.
From the Western Journal:
After removing the 15 publishers with the least traffic from Facebook, the trend becomes even more clear.
Of the remaining 35 news sources, the 12 most liberal sites averaged a boost of 0.21 percent — in other words, they don’t appear to have been affected in any meaningful way.
The Rest…HERE
