Facebook made a major change after years of PR disasters, and news sites are paying the price

Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein has had a front-row seat in recent years to watch Facebook upend the media industry.

Bauerlein, who took over as CEO of the publication nine years ago, remembers when about 5 million users a month visited the Mother Jones website after coming across articles distributed on Facebook. That was in 2017.

But Facebook, now known as Meta, is out of the news business, a move that's disrupted the traffic flow for many publications — Mother Jones has seen a 99% drop in Facebook referrals since its peak — and had disastrous consequences for some. In September, Meta said it would "deprecate" its Facebook news tab in European countries including the U.K., France and Germany as "part of an ongoing effort to better align our investments to our products and services people value the most."

The push away from news followed years of public relations disasters for Facebook regarding the company's handling of misinformation and its decisions on when to cancel accounts and remove posts. Conservative politicians have long accused the company of operating with a liberal bias, while groups on the other side portrayed Facebook as instrumental in the 2016 election of Donald Trump because of how Russian operatives exploited the site to boost his candidacy.

"At this point, it seems pretty clear from the comments that executives at Facebook and Meta made that they have just decided that news is more trouble than it's worth and that they will show people a fairly minimal amount of it," Bauerlein said in an interview.

At Mother Jones, a 48-year-old nonprofit magazine specializing in politics and investigations, the implications were dramatic. Though Facebook had generated millions of referrals a month for Mother Jones