Former employees say Facebook singled out Mother Jones

[Mother Jones]( MoJo Reader, I am enraged. Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Facebook—with sign-off from Mark Zuckerberg himself—retooled their algorithm to throttle traffic to certain news organizations, Mother Jones in particular. The story made waves in media circles, and it made Monika Bauerlein, our CEO, and me want to get to the bottom of it. So we teamed up to report it out, and after talking with former Facebook employees, we're even more outraged now. I hope you'll read what we found in our post that just went up, "[Facebook Manipulated the News You See to Appease Republicans, Insiders Say](," and that you'll [stand up for Mother Jones' fearless journalism with a donation](. Facebook’s actions directly affected our bottom line, for starters, and we're behind pace on our $350,000 fall fundraising campaign goal, but this really isn't about the impact on our finances. To be perfectly clear: Facebook used its [monopolistic]( power to boost and suppress specific publishers' content—the essence of every Big Brother fear about the platforms, and something Facebook and other companies have been strenuously denying for years. I'll summarize the best I can. A few years ago, Facebook made some big changes to its algorithm that determines what users see in their newsfeed. The company was battling criticism, like Monika and I [wrote about at the time](, over its handling of the 2016 election and its failure to address disinformation. But the problem that really concerned its executives was this: People were turning away from their product. After a year of overheated and often toxic discussion, engagement on Facebook was falling. So Zuckerberg ordered up some changes to dial down the temperature. The story Facebook has publicly told is that the updates were designed to "bring people closer together" by showing us more posts from friends and family, and to prioritize "trusted" and "informative" sources of news. It would also reduce the amount of news most people see, decreasing revenue to publishers, but we were assured that the changes would have no different impact on Mother Jones than on other "quality publishers." There was just one hitch. What wasn’t publicly known until now is that Facebook actually ran experiments to see how those changes would affect publishers—and it found that some of them would have a dramatic impact on the reach of right-wing "junk sites," as a former employee with knowledge of the conversations put it. According to another ex-employee, when testing showed the proposed changes would take a “huge chunk” out of Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, the Daily Wire, and the Daily Caller, there was "enormous pushback” from Republican lobbyists working in Facebook's Washington office under Vice President of Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan (whom you might remember from [a certain Supreme Court nomination hearing](): “They freaked out and said, 'We can't do this.'" So what did they do? I bet you can guess. New experiments were run, new code was written, and executives were given a new presentation showing less impact on these conservative sites and more harm to progressive-leaning publications—and Mother Jones was singled out in the slides as one that would suffer, while conservative site the Daily Wire was identified as one that would benefit. "You guys were one of the outlets who got singled out to balance the ledger," according to a former staffer. That makes my blood boil for a lot of reasons. Here’s Mother Jones, a rigorously fact-checked magazine with a proud 44-year history (we were honored as Magazine of the Year by our industry peers around this same time), being equated with the Daily Wire, a hyperpartisan conservative opinion site whose claims have been debunked by fact-checkers a number of times. This kind of false equivalence is enraging enough when lazy pundits do it. But when Facebook, the most powerful media company in the world, uses it as the basis of deciding what information users should see or not see, it's more than that. It's an attack on your ability to stay informed. It's an attack on democracy itself. And as we write in the [full column](: It was not the first time Facebook has protected conservative disinformation. It routinely lets itself be manipulated by bad-faith actors working the refs to undermine democracy and gain a platform for disinformation or hate. Monika wrote just a few weeks ago how [decisions like this are connected to so many of the challenges]( we face as a nation right now. And as Ben Dreyfuss, who has led our very successful Facebook work since 2013, wrote, [it's hurtful to him and his team](, who pour everything they have into getting our stories to people on Facebook. It has a real impact on our journalism, too. Mother Jones' reporting exists to make a difference, not a profit, and we've worked really hard to grow our audience from a small and scrappy magazine to what it is now—reaching up to 10 million people a month. Thanks to Facebook’s algorithm changes, the million-plus readers who had chosen to follow Mother Jones saw fewer of our articles in their feeds. Average traffic from Facebook to our content decreased 37 percent from the six months prior to the change to the six months after. And of course there's a very real financial impact—there are reporters I couldn’t hire, projects we couldn't do because of this. It just so happens that this news broke as we were winding down our big fall fundraising campaign, and we were a good bit off the pace to hit our $350,000 goal by the end of the month, which is why we're asking for donations as part of this message. [We still need to raise about $200,000 in these next 10 days, and I hope that you'll help us start closing that gap today if you can](. But beyond the numbers, I also hope that the Mother Jones community will send a strong message: Those of us who care about independent journalism and about democracy, justice, and decency are a fierce and determined bunch, and we will fight for those values no matter the challenge. We've all got a lot of work cut out for us in the weeks and months ahead, but there's no one we'd rather do it with than you in the Mother Jones community. Time and again you've stepped up and had our backs when we needed it, and this is another one of those moments. Thanks for reading, [Alternate text] Clara Jeffery, Editor-in-Chief Mother Jones [Donate]( P.S. If you recently made a donation, thank you! And please accept our apologies for sending you this reminder—our systems take a little while to catch up. [Mother Jones]( [Donate]( [Subscribe]( This message was sent to {EMAIL}. To change the messages you receive from us, you can [edit your email preferences]( or [unsubscribe from all mailings.]( For advertising opportunities see our online [media kit.]( Were you forwarded this email? [Sign up for Mother Jones' newsletters today.]( [www.MotherJones.com]( PO Box 8539, Big Sandy, TX 75755