Hi Mark. We met last year, but you probably don’t remember. Let me remind you about what we discussed: You told me how important The Chronicle’s work is in the Bay Area and how invested Facebook was in helping us to do it.

I believed you. I really wanted to, and, frankly, I didn’t have much of a choice. Fifteen years ago, people were more likely to use newspapers to pass time — they provided information and entertainment. When you created Facebook in 2004, it became that and more: Long-forgotten high school friends reappeared. Relatives in other states posted photos of new babies. I got news from a variety of outlets, both ones that I purposefully followed and ones my friends shared. Facebook was both a time suck and saver. The ultimate convenience.

Journalists adapted. Advertising dollars flowed out of our companies and over to you, but we struggled along, trying to anticipate the seemingly capricious changes in your news-feed algorithm. We created new jobs in our newsrooms and tried to increase the number of people who signed up to follow our posts on Facebook. We were rewarded with increases in traffic to our websites, which we struggled to monetize. A repeated admonition at journalism conferences became “reach readers where they’re at.”

We were successful in getting people to “like” our news, and you started to notice. Studies show more than half of Americans use Facebook to get news. That traffic matters because we monetize it — it pays the reporters who hold the powerful accountable.

After you and I met, your work life got harder. Just as we had learned how to market real news on Facebook, so too did more nefarious operations. It became clear foreign agents and domestic partisans used Facebook to spread fabricated news. I know your San Francisco employees were mortified — they told me so. You and your No. 2, Sheryl Sandberg, seemed less bothered.

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Still, I naively hoped that your corporate conscience might move you to realize that Facebook has an obligation to more than its shareholders. You grew it by getting people to rely on it for both the baby photos and the real news.

Then this week you announced that the news makes people cranky and anxious, so Facebook would suppress all publishers’ posts. Never mind that many of our subscribers made a conscious, proactive decision to follow us on Facebook. News is too messy, too much of a bummer, and because you haven’t been able to stop click-bait shops or the Russians, you shrugged and gave up. Maybe you’ll put news posts on a separate stream somewhere else within the app. Maybe.

The thing is, my relatives will still share fake news on Facebook, and it will show up in my “news” feed under your new rules. I’ll still see the partisan opinion pieces that my friends share. But I won’t see posts from responsible news outlets I choose to follow unless I take several steps to force the newsfeed to prioritize it.

Simply put: You’re making the country’s absolutism worse and abdicating your responsibility to improve public discourse. Facebook likes to say it’s a creative company. Surely there is a more creative solution.

This isn’t an academic point. The San Francisco Chronicle won’t go out of business because of this decision. But smaller publications very likely could, and virtually all news organizations will lose money that pays for reportage. Efforts to band news organizations together to address this could violate antitrust laws, so many of us feel helpless. We might speak to Facebook’s middle managers on a regular basis, but they’re starting to seem pretty ineffectual.

So I’m saying this to you as your neighbor and a user of your product: You can do better than this. Each decision you make that limits the reach of our journalism hurts our ability to effect positive change in our city and state.

Eventually, you’re going to realize that’s not good for anyone.

Audrey Cooper is the editor in chief of The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: acooper@sfchronicle.com. To comment, submit your letter to the editor at SFChronicle.com/letters.