How Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are threatening The Intercept

For years, there have been two key ways that new readers discover independent news outlets like The Intercept: search engines and social media.

But social media platforms like Facebook have become increasingly aggressive about suppressing links to legitimate news sites. Their goal is to keep you scrolling forever on their platform, and it’s bad for their business when people click to read a full news story.

As a result, we’ve seen visits to The Intercept from our own Facebook page crash by 99 percent. Mark Zuckerberg flipped an algorithmic switch, and our traffic was instantly zapped.

We’ve seen similar declines since Elon Musk bought Twitter/X, and Google’s AI search results are increasingly geared toward keeping people on its platform as well — at the expense of the actual human reporters Google’s AI bots rely on.

And for a nonprofit news outlet, fewer new readers means fewer potential new donors. That’s why our year-end fundraising drive is especially key. If we’re going to survive this era of Big Tech news suppression, we need readers like you to step up.

Will you make a year-end donation of $5 to help keep The Intercept on sound financial footing going into 2025?

This has been a long time coming, and the relationship between Big Tech and journalism was always a bit of a Faustian bargain.

The truth is, the journalism industry may be better off in the long run no longer relying on Facebook, Google, and the like.

But the transition won’t be easy, and our year-end fundraising drive is absolutely critical.

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 year-end goal today?

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