We can’t count on Facebook anymore. Can you donate $5 today?

Social media platforms like Facebook are escalating their efforts to get real news out of your feed. They’ve decided it’s bad for business when users click out to read a long article instead of continuously scrolling through Facebook.

And advertisers, their real customers, are terrified of appearing next to content that might be politically controversial — like The Intercept’s coverage of Israel’s assault on Gaza.

This has been a long time coming, but we’ve passed the point of no return. Visits to The Intercept’s website from Facebook dropped by more than half in the past year. Visits from our own Facebook page dropped by an astonishing 83 percent.

This drop-off doesn’t just mean fewer clicks or pageviews. Because we’re a nonprofit, fewer new readers also means fewer of the donations that ensure we’ll still be here tomorrow publishing journalism that takes on the powerful.

To help fill that gap, we’ve set an ambitious Giving Tuesday fundraising goal of raising $350,000 by midnight, November 28. That’s $350,000 we’re counting on to expand our coverage and start 2024 prepared for whatever the year ahead may bring us.

I hope you’ll join me in making a donation of whatever you can to help meet this goal today. Your support will make sure we can stay in the fight — and that we don’t depend on Mark Zuckerberg to do it.

The war in Gaza has made it brutally clear that real accountability journalism exposing Washington’s broken status quo is more important than ever.

But it’s never been harder to fund that journalism and get it out into the world. News outlets across the board are being squeezed by corporate consolidation, rising costs, and a sudden drop in the social media traffic that was supposed to be the “new normal” just a few years ago.

Facebook’s parent company, Meta, seems ready to be done with serious news, which once made them relevant but never made them much money. It did cause our Silicon Valley overlords exactly the kind of messy political problems they think they’re too good for: liberals accusing them of throwing the 2016 election to Donald Trump, conservatives complaining about censorship.

The news industry will learn to live without Facebook, and maybe we’ll be better off for it. But the transition will be difficult. While we’d love to be done with Zuckerberg as much as many of our readers would, Facebook remains a primary news source for millions of Americans. It’s our job to meet those people where they are and earn their support.

We can thrive in this new world, but we’re counting on our readers to help us get through this period of uncertainty. Will you make a donation and help us meet our goal today?

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Thank you,