Traffic referrals to the top global news sites from Meta’s Facebook and X, formerly Twitter, has collapsed over the past year, according to data from Similarweb.

Why it matters: Website business models that depended on clicks from social media are now broken.

[As I mentioned earlier this afternoon, business models built on social-media referrals have proven dangerously unreliable over the last few years. Axios suggests that the latest drop is due to recent decisions to stop complying with government censorship efforts on the basis of supposed “misinformation,” but their own chart shows the collapse starting in late 2020. While Twitter/X gets a lot of criticism for resisting, the chart again shows that the trend preceded Musk’s buyout and then subsequent exposure of censorship — and Facebook’s decline has been even more dramatic. — Ed]