In late 2017, Facebook (FB  ) announced plans to introduce changes to their news feed to promote personal, conversation-provoking content at the expense of content pushed by advertisements for news publishers, brands, and nonprofits. This move is a reaction to criticism that Facebook needed to more closely monitor the credibility of the news it circulates, particularly in light of the role the company played in the fake news scandals of 2016 and 2017. Facebook's move also seeks to increase user happiness and increase the reputation and quality of its own business, while decreasing the time that users will spend on the site, and hurting the web traffic that publishers gain from using Facebook as a source of advertisement exposure.

These new rules are expected to prioritize content sharing between friends and family members. It has caused digital publishers to scramble for new business tactics, as many relied on Facebook for a sizable chunk of their web traffic. Statistically speaking, the percentage of publishers' Facebook-sourced online traffic fell from roughly 40% in 2016 to 24% in December 2017. In previous years, other routine algorithm tweaks have also deprioritized brands' content, which has triggered increased spending amongst advertisers to push their content back into the Facebook mainstream viewing sections. They were previously granted the right to this exposure without pay. Publishers source their anguish to the stark drop in their web traffic, while Facebook is pushing back by asserting its prerogative as a public company to do what is in their best interest.

Facebook's test of what qualifies as worthy content is currently being determined by "meaningful interactions," which are defined by subjective criteria, rather than black-and-white language. Facebook is deliberately refraining from clarifying the precise definition of what constitutes a "meaningful interaction." It is clear that advertisers who seek to game the system using engagement baiting techniques will be cut, and fewer advertisements will be present overall on Facebook, as Facebook's primary goal with this switch is to facilitate the interactions taking place between the various users it hosts, not interactions between individual users and the brands they encounter through Facebook ads. On the plus side, some publishers are optimistic that this change will narrow down the existing playing field by getting rid of poor quality or spam content.

Advertisers now must reckon with the prospect of spending more to reach Facebook users, as they were previously reliant on free exposure through the news feed. It will be difficult for any publishing company to determine the precise impact Facebook's new algorithms will have on their web traffic, but experts predict that lifestyle content will likely have an easier pass with the new radar than world and business news. This is because users are less likely to be disrupted or annoyed by lifestyle content, whereas many readers deliberately opt out of or avoid world and business news. Nonetheless, advertisers are still game to play by Facebook's rules, and are happy to take a smaller share of what they originally had, in light of the huge amount of web traffic that Facebook represents.