Blue Lives Matter experienced a recent change implemented by Facebook which has significantly reduced the number of people we can reach on the social media platform.

This latest change comes after a series of changes which have been ongoing over the past 8 months.

Today, our reach to our audience on Facebook has been cut by 40% of where it was last week.

If you don’t have the time to read this article, the number one thing you can do to help is to sign up to our newsletter to get a daily list of all of our articles in your inbox.

It’s not clear if any of the recent Facebook changes specifically targeted us directly, or if their changes are made to affect certain categories of sites.

The changes started early this year when Facebook announced surveys for websites.

Mark Zuckerberg explained that as a move to reduce the spread of fake news on Facebook, they would be cutting distribution to news sources that rank low in an algorithm based on customer surveys.

He explained:

Here’s how this will work. As part of our ongoing quality surveys, we will now ask people whether they’re familiar with a news source and, if so, whether they trust that source. The idea is that some news organizations are only trusted by their readers or watchers, and others are broadly trusted across society even by those who don’t follow them directly.

This is exactly like telling users, “Because you aren’t smart enough to figure out what content is real, we’re going to ask you what content you think is real.” Their solution doesn’t make any sense until you consider that they already know how people are going to respond.

All partisan content will presumably be affected negatively by surveys. Blue Lives Matter will be voted against by anti-police crowds, and anti-police content will be voted against by pro-police people. Conservative content will be voted against, and liberal content will be voted against. Each side will downvote an opposing side until the last news sources left standing are sources with the least appearance of bias: newspapers and local broadcast news.

Facebook has been courting local news for a while now, and it seems clear that they’ve already picked them as the winners. The surveys are just a way for Facebook to claim that they don’t have responsibility for making the decision.

Facebook expanded this decision by boosting news sources with an audiences mostly in a tight geographic area, such as local newspapers and broadcast news, and cutting distribution of articles from sources with audiences spread out throughout the country or world.

Later on, they made a change to cut distribution of content referencing violence or death. When the most important topics we cover involved the murders of police officers, or getting the facts out on officer-involved shootings, a majority of our content was affected.

We started our website to counter the misleading, if not outright false, information coming from mainstream media. We couldn’t stand seeing Michael Brown continually be referred to as an “unarmed black teen shot by a white police officer” with no mention of the fact that Brown was actively trying to murder that officer after committing a robbery.

Facebook wants to control what news you see, and it’s not the sort of news that’s fair to police officers.


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But you can take action to counter Facebook’s changes. Here’s how:

1. Sign up to our newsletter to get a daily list of all of our articles in your inbox.

2. Follow our other social media pages on Twitter and LinkedIn

3. Tell Facebook you want to see Blue Lives Matter first on your newsfeed. You can do this on the mobile Facebook app by going to the menu button in the upper right, then scrolling down to “News Feed Preferences.”

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Then click on “Prioritize Who To See First” and select Blue Lives Matter.

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On desktop, you can select who you see first by clicking the dropdown arrow in the upper-right and clicking on news feed preferences from there.

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​4) The next thing you can do is to like/comment/share an article after you read it. This will tell Facebook to show our content to more people and counteract anti-police people flagging the page.

5. Even if you follow us, Facebook may still not show you all of our articles, so the best thing you can do is come to our site directly each day. Blue Lives Matter’s Website has the best criminal justice news on the internet. Visit each day so you don’t miss out.

Please help spread the word about what Facebook is doing to not just pro-police sites, but all sites with an opposing political opinion. Thank you for your support.