Cyrus Massoumi spent the last few years building exactly what he thought would thrive on Facebook: A series of inflammatory conservative websites, finely tuned to produce the most viral and outrageous version of the news. The social network rewarded him with an audience.
These days, Facebook Inc. wants something different. Reacting to concerns about how fake news spread on its social network, including by Russian propagandists, the company has altered its algorithm to punish sites like Massoumi’s. Facebook has put out a series of blog posts explaining how higher quality content will be rewarded.
Massoumi, who’s featured in the latest episode of the Decrypted podcast, said he had to decide between running “a garbage website that is barely profitable after the fake news crisis” and a “clean website.” He chose clean. In August, he shut down his biggest partisan website, MrConservative.com, and poured his resources into TruthExaminer, a liberal website he launched just before the election. He made sure it played by Facebook’s stricter rules, especially around clickbait -- headlines manipulated solely to attract page views. “You know exactly what you’re getting with all our headlines,” Massoumi said.
There was one glaring problem: less traffic. When Facebook changed its algorithm to disrupt the financial incentives for fake news, the tweaks had a collateral effect on the whole ecosystem of businesses built on its news feed, including Massoumi’s liberal property. Traffic for TruthExaminer went down 60 percent starting in March and hasn’t recovered, according to Nicole James, his editor-in-chief.
“We never broke the rules that were constantly changing,’’ James said. “I did everything I’m supposed to do. We don’t steal, we don’t cheat. But I get people who message me and say, ‘I don’t see your posts anymore.’”
To build a business on Facebook is to accept volatility. The company has played host to many startups tuned specifically for what its algorithm rewards, only to crush them later. In 2014, the feel-good website Upworthy reached almost 90 million unique visitors, built on curiosity-gap headlines like “9 Out of 10 Americans Are Completely Wrong About This Mind-Blowing Fact.” That same year, changes to the news feed algorithm cut the traffic in half, forcing Upworthy to change its strategy. In 2016, as Facebook started to prioritize video in its news feed, the tech news site Mashable dismissed writers to focus more intently on the visual medium. The strategy didn’t save the website, which sold last week for $50 million, a fraction of its prior valuation. More job cuts are expected.
Now partisan news sites are reacting to Facebook’s changes to give lower rank to sensationalism, clickbait and misinformation. Massoumi said he saw no reward for his higher-quality content. He saw competitors get even more aggressive to beat the algorithm, and succeed. The experience reinforced what he’s known for years to be the only unchanging Facebook rule: Whoever gets the most attention wins.
That’s at the root of the fake news crisis. Massoumi, 26, started MrConservative.com in 2012, mostly because he thought he understood enough about information going viral on Facebook to get rich off the ads, and because he enjoyed sparking controversy after growing up in a highly liberal part of the country -- Marin County, just north of San Francisco. He used Facebook ads to target conservatives who might be interested in his page, and then served them content that reinforced their beliefs and made them angry.
“News on Facebook revolves around analytics, so we know that we can only write a 250-word article, we know the title has to be tilted,’’ he said, using his term for bias. “We know we have to exclude the facts because if we say anything good about the other side people are like, ‘oh, you’re a closet liberal,’ or on the liberal side, ‘oh, you’re a closet conservative.’ So there is no room to be objective, there is no room to deliver quality.’’
Once others caught on to how profitable the practice was, it became highly competitive. The hyper-partisan sites would keep track of each others’ headlines and rewrite them to draw more eyeballs. MrConservative.com aimed to put out more content, and faster. Sometimes that meant not checking whether it was true.