Facebook’s Enshittification Continues Apace by Penalizing Link Posts

Here’s something you probably did at least once in the last week or so: After finding an interesting link somewhere on the web, you shared it on Facebook with your friends and followers. When you did this, Facebook generated a “link preview” that included its title, a brief synopsis, and a thumbnail of its featured image — all of which is helpful when folks are deciding whether the link is worth visiting or not.

Sharing links is arguably one of the primary things that people do on social media because we love to share cool, interesting, alarming, or thought-provoking stuff with our friends. But Facebook has made a change to this long-used workflow that will certainly affect publishers, journalists, marketers, bloggers, and others who rely on sharing links for their livelihood.

Meta (Facebook’s owner) now advises against sharing links as posts on your Facebook page. Instead, you should first create a post about the link you’re going to share and then share the actual link in the post’s comments. (Elon Musk offered similar advice to X users last year.)

In the grand scheme of things, this is trivial, especially when compared to some of Meta’s more questionable decisions (e.g., dropping independent fact checkers and loosening content moderation requirements). But it’s certainly of a piece with the “walled garden” nature of social media as they strive to increase engagement and keep visitors on their platforms.

You see, the longer Facebook et al. can keep people on their platforms, then the more ads they can show, and the more money they can make. Hence their decision to effectively penalize posts that link to other sites and encourage people to leave their platforms. Notably, Bluesky has announced that they do not penalize or suppress link posts, a decision that no doubt pleases all of those journalists and news organizations who flocked to it after X’s Elon-induced implosion — but they’re in the minority.

Again, let me reiterate: I know this isn’t a huge deal, and there may even be signs that Meta is backing off this decision for now. Even so, it’s an example of what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification,” that is, the tendency for companies to intentionally make their products worse for users in order to benefit their business customers (i.e., advertisers) and shareholders.

Put simply, link previews make for a better user experience. Users can immediately see what’s being shared and take action without having to dig through the comments to find the link. Encouraging or requiring links to be in the comments, and penalizing posts that don’t follow suit, doesn’t make anything better for users. In Facebook’s case, the only ones who benefit are Meta’s advertisers, and Meta itself.