Earlier this year, we noticed something strange about our website traffic: The number of people coming to The Intercept from stories shared on Facebook had fallen off a cliff. In a single year, our Facebook traffic dropped by a whopping 53 percent. The number of visitors from our own Facebook page dropped by 83 percent. This drop-off is being felt across the industry, confirming what we’ve long suspected: Facebook has changed its news feed algorithm to suppress links to legitimate news sources like The Intercept. Fewer readers means fewer donations — and for a nonprofit news outlet like us, that’s a serious issue. Our ongoing investigations of corporate corruption, government malfeasance, and the dark money pouring into 2024 elections simply depend on reader support… Facebook has been gradually throttling hard news for a while — replacing it with content that’s upbeat and advertiser-friendly. But what we’ve seen this year is unprecedented. In th...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51