Facebook says decline in number of views of newsfeed for news sites was a glitch

Facebook has claimed that the dip in the number of people who see posts of news publishers' NewsFeed was a glitch in its own method of collecting data and that posts still reached the same amount of people as before.

NewsWhip, a social media tracking startup, had published a blog post noting that news content on Facebook had experienced a marked decline in the number of people reached from the middle of February and into March.

According to the Mashable, this had led to some concern that media publications, who have grown quickly in the past few years with help from Facebook traffic, had suddenly suffered a demotion in the site's all-important NewsFeed.

The bug had caused a stir in media circles, with some quietly discussing a decline in reach from Facebook in recent weeks, but with little proof, there was not much to pin complaints on.

Facebook has recently been engaged in talks with publishers to put content directly on to its site as opposed to posting links that direct people back to media websites. This has triggered a wave of paranoia amongst media analysts, who worry that this type of relationship would give Facebook even more power over media companies.