Facebook ends “Explore Feed” experiment
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) hails Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to terminate the “Explore Feed” function that Facebook had been testing in six countries for the past five months, in which content from independent news media was removed from its main News Feed and was relegated to a much less prominent location called the “Explore Feed.”
Officially, the purpose of this change was to let Facebook users see more content from friends and family in the News Feed. But the experiment, which began last October, had a devastating impact on independent media in the six countries concerned. Facebook announced the end of the experiment on 1 March.
“We welcome this decision because the ‘Explore Feed’ dealt a severe blow to the vitality of independent journalism,” said Elodie Vialle, the head of RSF’s Journalism and Technology Bureau.
“Many independent media manage to survive thanks to the readers they get through Facebook and they lost much of this readership because of this ‘experiment.’ Facebook must stop playing sorcerer’s apprentice and should instead consult civil society and the media before making changes with often dramatic consequences.”
RSF criticized the Explore Feed when it was introduced in the six trial countries: Sri Lanka, Slovakia, Bolivia, Serbia, Guatemala and Cambodia. In Cambodia, which is ranked 132nd out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index, 40% of the population gets its news via Facebook.
When Facebook began the Explore Feed trial in Cambodia, the Khmer-language Facebook page of the Phnom Penh Post, the country’s last independent daily, lost almost 45% of its readers in the space of a few days.
