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Friend,
Last summer, just at the moment when the 2020 presidential election was really heating up, something bizarre happened.
The number of visitors to Common Dreams from Facebook and Google fell off a cliff.
We don’t know why or what happened, but the data tells a clear story. Something in their algorithm changed so that stories from Common Dreams were being pushed down or hidden entirely from people’s news feeds and search results.
Because such a large percentage of web referrals to news sites like ours come from Facebook, it was a huge blow to our readership and small donor base. More than a year later, it still hasn’t recovered.
Now, thanks to Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, we’ve learned that at the very moment that traffic to Common Dreams was dropping like a stone, Facebook was actively promoting the far-right website Breitbart News, over the strong internal objections of Facebook’s own employees.
Big Tech only cares about one thing: making money. And if conspiracy theories perform better than real news, then that’s what they’ll push. To survive in a world where so much web traffic is controlled by a handful of corrupt monopolists like Facebook and Google, we need readers to chip in whatever they can afford, whether that’s $1 or $100 or more.
Common Dreams covers the news that the corporate media won’t. But with Big Tech’s stranglehold over the internet, we won’t survive unless our readers step up. Will you donate to help meet our crucial Fall Campaign fundraising goal?
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