Why do Facebook users keep commenting “amen” on stuff?

Both Digiday and Axios this week published pieces about the cliff that digital media outlets have fallen off of this year. According to Digiday, the three publishers to lose the most Facebook referral traffic were The Sun, Business Insider, and The Guardian, which are all down around 80% from where they were last August. And while these are grim numbers, they don’t really tell the whole story of what’s been happening on the platform.

Garbage Day researcher Adam Bumas and I started collecting monthly Facebook data from Newswhip back in June for our monthly Garbage Intelligence reports (the next one is out this week) and have watched with morbid fascination as the platform has completely decomposed over the summer. When we first started tracking news articles on Facebook, the top five were all from US publishers. The top story in June was from an ABC affiliate, titled, “Army veteran from Compton celebrates 107th birthday with neighborhood block party”. It had about a half million interactions and around 12,000 shares. That’s incredibly low compared to what a top story on Facebook would have, say, five years ago, but still fairly normal for the post-COVID era of the site.

By July, though, the deprioritization of news content was much more apparent. Of the top five articles on Facebook that month, only one was from a US publisher, a CBS story about Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett. It had about 400,000 interactions and only 7,000 shares. In August, once again, there was only one US publisher in the top five, an Essence story about a black woman becoming the “second-oldest person in the country”. It had around 300,000 interactions and 8,000 shares. And, finally, as of last month, the only US publisher in the top five was an Associated Press obituary for Jimmy Buffet, which had around 300,000 interactions and an admittedly massive amount of shares, almost 50,000. Parrotheads are big on Facebook, I guess. But the really interesting thing is what is filling in the gaps left behind.

It’s easy to imagine that Facebook is now completely overrun by out-of-work magicians porn-moaning while they make bad casseroles and comment sections full of old people praying to potato memes. Which, yeah, is definitely happening. Both of the top posts on Facebook based on total interactions in August and September came from a page called Supercar Blondie, which makes videos about cool cars. But there are still news publishers growing on the site and third-party links to “news” content being shared in huge numbers. It’s just not happening in the US.

The biggest publisher on Facebook right now is a Nigerian digital tabloid called Legit. It’s been growing all summer and beat The Daily Mail in August, which was formerly the top publisher on Facebook. Legit is owned by Genesis Media Emerging Markets, a Ukrainian company that acquired a bunch of African digital publishers. And in July, GMEM’s Kenyan outlet, Tuko, overtook MLive, a Michigan-based news outlet, for the number five spot. Since then, no US publisher has cracked the top five.

And this shift away from US media is even more pronounced if you look at individual news articles. After June, there was a huge spike in content being published in countries like The Philippines, India, and Nigeria going viral. For instance, in July, the two top articles on Facebook were different stories about Filipino adults going back to high school to graduate. But, in September, things got real weird.

According to Newswhip, seven of the top 10 most interacted with “news” articles on Facebook in September — as in third-party links to “publishers” — all came from one domain: catholicfundamentalism.com. The top story from this exciting new digital publisher was titled, “Do Catholics find “Life” by being pleasing to God? The Psalms tell us! #17.” and it has around 400,000 total interactions and around 2,500 shares. Weirdly enough, just like the potato meme that people are praying to, the comments underneath the post are, also, just people writing “amen” over and over again. The only actual news stories in the top 10 last month, aside from the aforementioned Jimmy Buffet obit, was a story about Meta’s Messenger app getting the notes feature, which was written by Filipino news outlet ABS-CBN, and a story from Legit about Nigerian popstar Davido giving a TikTok user a new iPhone 14 Pro Max.

The point with all of this that Facebook can’t actually “give up on news,” as Wired recently put it. What they’ve really done is give up on moderating what “news” is on the platform. Bible verses or cool car videos, it doesn’t matter. Meta has finally given up pretending it cares whether its users are informed about the world around them or not. That’s what it’s doing when it stops tagging content as “news” in countries like the UK and France. Or block the content entirely, as it has in Canada, as it fights with various state regulators over whether or not it should pay publishers. Or when it turns down the volume on both legitimate outlets and trashy tabloids to prioritize video to compete with TikTok. Or when the company’s head of news relations steps down. Meta is saying, “we have decimated the American media, removed our competitors, built our advertising monopoly, and we are done pretending we care.”

Hello fellow Garbage Day kids. Longtime reader, first time caller. As a fan of Ryan’s writing (especially when he dunks on Reddit), it felt right to support the launch of the book I’ve been working on these last four years by advertising here in the Garbage Day newsletter where some of the most curious minds in online culture meet.

My book is called Which Way Is North: A Creative Compass for Makers, Marketers, and Mystics and it comes out via Penguin Random House on 10/10/23, World Mental Health Day. It asks: where does creativity come from? To answer, it explores through essay, memoir, meditations, and exercises the relationship between our anxiety and our creativity; ultimately suggesting that these come from the same place in our hearts. Yes…I said hearts and I mean that literally. Click here to learn more and order from your preferred retailer.

Thank you all for a moment of your time. I hope my book helps,

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Source: Ryan Broderick || garbageday