The title is misleading … Facebook is throttling all traffic … nonprofits and activits just happened to be there too … yet further evidence that building social capital on Facebook may be a poor investment:
“… Put simply, “organic reach” is the number of people who potentially could see any given Facebook post in their newsfeed. Long gone are the days when Facebook would simply show you everything that happened in your network in strict chronological order. Instead, algorithms filter the flood of updates, posts, photos, and stories down to the few that they calculate you would be most interested in … This means that even if I have, say, 400 friends, only a dozen or so might actually see any given thing I post … the ratio that Facebook has more-or-less publicly admitted it is ramping down to a target range of 1-2% for Pages.”
I continue to be amazed and entertained by the naivity and delusion of phrases like this:
“Facebook urgently needs to address the impact that its algorithm changes are having on nonprofits, NGOs, civil society, and political activists …”
It tells me that the author (like many people) still don’t understand the nature of Facebook. The fact that social organizing has been possible on Facebook is a side-effect they tolerate not something that is aligned with their objectives (harvesting people’s attention and converting it into money).