This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Brazil’s biggest newspaper, the Folha de S Paulo, has announced that it will no longer publish content on its Facebook page, accusing the social media giant of encouraging fake news with an overhaul of its news feed algorithm.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and CEO, has said the algorithm change announced last month will prioritize “meaningful social interactions” and personal posts instead of content from businesses, brands and media.

But Folha’s executive editor, Sérgio Dávila, said the move simply enabled the spread of political disinformation and hoax stories.

“In effectively banning professional journalism from its pages in favour of personal content and opening space for ‘fake news’ to proliferate, Facebook became inhospitable terrain for those who want to offer quality content like ours,” he said.



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Dávila said the paper’s move reflected “the declining importance of Facebook to our readers”, but the algorithm change had been the deciding factor, he added.

Folha said its own research showed that shares, comments and likes for the 10 biggest Brazilian newspapers via Facebook fell 32% in the 12 months from January 2017.

In an article on Thursday, Folha said that from October to January it analysed interactions via Facebook with 21 sites that publish fake news and 51 “professional journalism” sites.

Fake news interactions on Facebook tripled, while interactions with professional journalist sites fell 17%. Fake news interactions fell slightly in January, following Facebook’s algorithm change, Folha said.

The paper said it will keep its Facebook page, which has 6 million followers, but no longer update it.



Concern over fake news is rising in Brazil ahead of October’s presidential and congressional elections. In January the government said it was setting up a work group to combat fake news made up of federal police officers, electoral court officials and prosecutors.

Folha is the biggest newspaper in this continent-sized country of 209 million people, with 285,000 print and digital sales and 204m page impressions last December, according to the Communication Verification Institute, or IVC, a non-profit media auditor.

But fewer people are accessing it from Facebook, the IVC said.

During the last six months of 2017, access to Brazil’s biggest news sites via Facebook fell from about 9% to 7%, IVC’s president, Pedro Silva, told the Guardian, quoting unpublished research.

Access to news sites via Facebook fell even further in the week beginning 22 January, when an appeal by former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva against a sentence for corruption and money laundering was being heard. That same week, Folha’s digital audience grew, he said.

Facebook did not immediately reply to requests for comment. In defending the algorithm change in January, Zuckerberg said that “posts from businesses, brands and media” were “crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other”. The change meant people spent 50m hours less on Facebook, Zuckerberg later said.

Brazil is Facebook’s third biggest market in the world, with 130 million users, according to statistics portal Statista.