The Meta-owned company has quietly made changes in recent months that have dramatically reduced referral traffic to media outlets, more than half a dozen publishers told me. The move has put considerable dents in the daily traffic publishers see, with the damage appearing to be more pronounced among those who publish more hard news-oriented content.
When Canada passed such legislation this summer, Meta pulled news content from its platform in the country, a decision that has generated significant blowback. Meta has long argued that publishers need Facebook more than Facebook needs publishers. “News is not a substantial part of Facebook globally,” the company said in a March post, adding that “less than 3% of what people see in their Facebook Feeds are posts with links to news articles.