Part of an e-mail we got from one of our news feeds this week:

Earlier this year, we noticed something strange about our website traffic: The number of people coming to The Intercept from stories shared on Facebook had fallen off a cliff.

In a single year, our Facebook traffic dropped by a whopping 53 percent. The number of visitors from our own Facebook page dropped by 83 percent.

This drop-off is being felt across the industry, confirming what we’ve long suspected: Facebook has changed its news feed algorithm to suppress links to legitimate news sources like The Intercept.

Facebook has been gradually throttling hard news for a while — replacing it with content that’s upbeat and advertiser-friendly. But what we’ve seen this year is unprecedented. In the words of one news publisher, “Facebook nuked everyone’s traffic.”

Not coincidentally, a wave of digital news organizations have laid off staff, filed for bankruptcy, or shut down entirely in the last few months alone.

The Intercept has felt the pinch as well. When people don’t see us in their news feeds, fewer new readers find our journalism. Since reader support is a crucial part of how we fund our investigative reporting, that’s a very real problem.

Now, we’d love to just say, “We don’t need Mark Zuckerberg,” and be done with it. But the reality is that tens of millions of Americans still rely on Facebook as a primary news source. It will take time for readers and publishers alike to transition to this brave new world.

It’s a problem that we know only too well; many people do. If you say things that the Leftists-Globalists don’t like, they censor you and if possible, cancel you completely. Free speech for opposing views is something they’re extremely hostile to. We saw that locally at Julian Batchelor’s two Kapiti meetings this year when ill-behaved Antifa/Green/Labour brats (most from out of town) did their utmost to stop him addressing people who had come to listen.

But pro-US Democrat Party Big-Tech is a far bigger problem and both Facebook and Google are huge censors; we’ve seen our pageviews take a Stuffing this year. It’s why we ask people to share, share, share our posts.