To say that it’s been a bad year for Facebook would be an understatement. But the overall relationship between publishers and platforms has shifted dramatically over the course of the year – and not necessarily for the better. Chris Sutcliffe rounds up the key platform moments of the year as part of our Media Moments 2021 report.
It won’t surprise you to learn that the working relationship between platforms and publishers was strained coming into 2021. The aftermath of various disputes around metric misrepresentation and de-prioritisation of publisher content in feeds cast a long shadow over any conversations.
So as 2021 began with an attempted coup in the US that was facilitated by Facebook tools and the Murdoch media leaning on the Australian government around payment for content, the overall landscape was poised for a major shake-up.
A difficult year for Facebook
It’s impossible to talk about 2021 without discussing The Facebook Files. A vast dump of internal comms and documents, followed hot on its heels by further damaging leaks and allegations from the whistleblower Frances Haugen, has potentially done irreparable damage to the Facebook brand. The harm was enough that it spilled over into discussions of regulation in the UK government’s mooted Online Safety Bill, and ultimately led to a rebrand of the Facebook parent company as ‘Meta’ in late October.
The revelations are numerous and well-documented elsewhere, from the potential harm Instagram inflicts on the mental wellbeing of young women to Facebook’s late implementation of safety measures around the January 6 riots in the Capitol. Most catchy of all was the implication that Facebook prioritised growth over all else, including public safety.
Sensing blood in the water, newspapers swarmed. A conglomerate of publishers (controversially mostly English speaking) collaborated on examining and disseminating the information, piling pressure onto Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
This was despite Facebook making consistent overtures to publishers over the course of the year. In a lull in October it announced it was introducing new products to its curated News Tab, which apparently drives more traffic to publishers than the standard News Feed (though as ever the question of payments rears its head). It also announced the first payments to newsletter creators via its push into local news provision.
Unfortunately for Facebook, a company-wide outage also led to increased traffic across news sites, sparking conversations about its impact on publishers’ reach.
SOURCE : Whatsnew
