A year and a half later, however, the flood of Facebook traffic to news publishers has receded dramatically. Google surpassed it as the primary driver of readership to news sites in late 2017, according to the analytics firm Parse.ly, which counts Slate as a client. In May, Facebook lost its place as the top traffic source on mobile devices, according to another traffic analytics firm, Chartbeat, with more people visiting news sites directly than via the social network. And at Slate, which agreed to share its internal data for the first time for this story, traffic from Facebook plummeted a staggering 87 percent, from a January 2017 peak of 28 million to less than 4 million in May 2018. It’s down more than 55 percent in 2018 alone.

The diminished flow of readers from Facebook to news sites is not an accident. Some of it may be due to readers’ fatigue and the gradual normalization of Trump’s presidency. But Facebook has also pulled back from the news business intentionally. In June 2016, it announced a shift in philosophy, prioritizing posts from individual friends and family over those from groups, brand pages, and (to a lesser extent) news outlets. The effects appeared relatively subtle at first, but Facebook acknowledges they likely compounded over time. Then, in January 2018—a time when it was under heavy fire for its role in elections and politics around the world—Facebook announced another major change to how its news feed algorithm chooses what you see when you load up the platform, this time de-emphasizing news publishers in particular and skewing the feed further toward posts from individuals.