This Is Unbelievable. Just When I Think It Can’t Get Worse, It Does.

Hopefully you’ve been following the stories we’ve posted here about FB’s attempts to prevent our content from reaching you.

It started with this. That was from a few weeks ago when Zuckerberg wrote a giant post on his own page to alert everyone about upcoming changes.  I translated it from the garbled bunch of feel-good stuff that he wrote into what he would have said if he were being Actually Honest:

We are better than you are at determining what information you should see in your Facebook Timeline. It doesn’t matter to us that you’ve relied on Facebook to get you information from pages you’ve chosen to follow and like – we know what’s best for you. 

We think pages like The Chicks On The Right are #fakenews, so we’re going to do everything we can to make it nearly impossible to see their posts in your Facebook timeline. It’s an election year, after all.  And it’s way more important to us that you continue to see news from what WE think are legitimate sources (mainstream media) instead of sites like COTR.  

Now, we’re going to justify the changes we’re making by telling you it’s for your own good, and that we care about your happiness and well-being and personal connections, because if we tell you the truth, which is that we want to demand pages like COTR pay us tons of money in order for their posts to get seen, you won’t take us as seriously.  

Anyway, what this means is that you’re going to see mostly just friends and family stuff from now on.  We already started showing COTR posts to fewer and fewer people last year, which is why they’re constantly getting messages from their followers wondering where they went, even though they haven’t gone anywhere.  We just don’t really want you to see their stuff.  But since around 5,000 of their 1.1 Million followers typically still see their posts, we feel like we need to decrease that number some more.  In fact, we wanna get the number of followers that see COTR posts as close to zero as possible. 

And then there was this. The Wall Street Journal reported that FB intended to start ranking content creators based on user evaluations of credibility. And sure enough, FB decided to include our site in its survey of random users to ask if they thought we were a credible news site, EVEN THOUGH WE ARE NOT A NEWS SITE.

Which led to this. 

In that post, we provided screenshots of TONS of examples of the kind of shady stuff our followers have been seeing out of FB.  And then Frank Luntz tweeted out a link to a NON-peer reviewed study out of Yale that listed our site as one of the least trusted news sites, EVEN THOUGH WE ARE NOT A NEWS SITE.

As I wrote in that post:

 What will happen as a result? Facebook will be all, “Ooooo – COTR isn’t trustworthy, therefore we won’t show their followers any of their content.”  That’s what’ll happen.  There’ll be sheep who see Luntz’s post and think, “Oooo – those Chicks are lying to me.”

We’re not lying.  We’re sharing our opinions.  You can agree with us or disagree with us – but we will ALWAYS provide you a source for the information we’re sharing.  And whatever that source is, is likely the news site.  And it’s on THAT news site’s article that we’re providing commentary.

I can’t believe this requires explaining.

So what did we do?  We encouraged y’all to join our Facebook GROUP, because groups apparently aren’t as targeted as regular pages.  Nearly 28,000 of you have joined our group, and have been telling us that you’re finally seeing our content again regularly.

But now? FB has decided it doesn’t like that either. It doesn’t like that we’ve employed a workaround/alternative way to get our content to you.  It doesn’t want you deciding for yourself what content you want to see.  One of our clever and competent readers sent me a screenshot of FB’s latest trick. Check this out:

“You can change this anytime?”  WHAT IN THE HOLY HELL.  This is after our follower chose, on purpose and with purpose, to see All Posts, and then Facebook decided that she was  too stupid to know what she wants to see in her own timeline, and they CHANGED HER SETTINGS FOR HER.  But “you can change this anytime” they said.  As if that makes what they’re doing OK.

This is absolutely insane. So, not only is FB arbitrarily unliking and unfollowing our page FOR our followers, even though our followers want to continue liking and following our page, they are now changing our followers’ preferences on what they have selected to see in their own freaking timelines.

This is why we keep telling you that you should NOT rely on Facebook to show you our content.  Bookmark/favorite this website, and check in once a day.  That way, you’ll never miss a thing, and you don’t have to deal with Facebook thinking you’re too dumb to know what you want to see in your own freaking timeline.

GAWD.