News organizations are openly criticizing Facebook for new policies they say are harmful to journalism, The New York Times reported.
At a panel discussion at the Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism on Thursday, Campbell Brown, Facebook's head of global news partnerships, defended a policy the social media platform introduced in response to criticism over how its ad network was able to be manipulated during elections, the Times reported.
She cited the importance of safeguarding elections and said problems with political ads were "something we are deeply concerned about. We hear you."
Last month, with public and political pressure growing over Facebook's role in the 2016 election, Facebook rolled out a policy that created a publicly searchable archive for ads its algorithms deemed to be political.
In addition, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, said the company would start ranking publishers by their perceived "trustworthiness."
"I don't want trust to be a popularity contest decided by users of Facebook," Lydia Polgreen, the editor in chief of HuffPost, complained, the Times reported.
Brown's defense also sparked a contentious exchange with the Times' chief executive Mark Thompson, who accused Facebook of unintentionally "supporting the enemies of quality journalism" by using algorithms that can mischaracterize news as partisan political content.
He showed two advertisements the Times had recently purchased on the platform that had both been flagged as political: one ad promoted a news article about President Donald Trump's summit with Kim Jong Un, another was a promotion for the Times' NYT Cooking site.
Brown said there was a "fundamental misunderstanding" of the policy, adding "The New York Times does not want to be transparent about the money they spend" on ads, the Times reported.
According to the Times, organizations representing more than 20,000 publishers in the United States wrote to Facebook to object to the policy. And some outlets, like New York Media and The Financial Times, have vowed to suspend their paid promotions on Facebook if the policy is not changed, the Times reported.
Facebook has agreed to create a distinction between publishers' content and political ads, but has not built a separate archive, the Times reported.
But Facebook has only manage to inflam tensions with publishers, said Jason Kint, the chief executive of Digital Content Next, a trade group that represents entertainment and news organizations.
"Facebook communicated poorly," Kint said. "They have not built trust with publishers."
Although Facebook remains an important outlet for publishers, its power has diminished, according to the Times.
Data from Chartbeat, an online analytics company, publishers' traffic from Facebook has declined about 15 percent in the last year. At the same time, traffic from Google is up 20 percent since last August.
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