Facebook is the devil.

At least, that鈥檚 how it feels to a lot of newspaper publishers and editors right now.

This week, Facebook decided to test out a new pay-for-play model on news publishers in a series of small countries. Papers in Cambodia, Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Serbia, Bolivia, or Guatemala saw a drastic dip in the number of people able to view their stories.

It turns out Facebook was testing a tweak to their famous algorithm. If news outlets wanted their posts to go into the regular feed of Facebook users, the papers had to pony up some cash.

Facebook鈥檚 official statement on the matter was that they have 鈥渘o current plans to roll this out globally.鈥�

No 鈥渃urrent鈥� plans. Right. But you can almost sense the drool dripping from the words 鈥渞oll this out globally.鈥�

Somewhere in his chrome and black marble lair in the side of an active volcano, Mark Zuckerberg steeples his fingers. 鈥淎nother revenue stream,鈥� he whispers to himself, as he pets his white Persian cat.

The irony of Facebook (worth approximately $137 quintillion) extracting cash from the newspaper industry is pretty rich.

Should this concern you?

I hope so.

The news industry has tried to keep up with the times. We go where the people are 鈥� from subscription to ad-supported free paper, and then online. We have our own website, of course, but when people flocked to social media, we went, too.

Social media can be a great way of reaching our readers, magnifying our voice, and as a forum for discussion.

Until the middleman suddenly decides to make access more difficult.

If Facebook shuts off the tap, the voices you鈥檒l hear will be the ones that can afford to pay. The amount of fabricated news and deliberate disinformation on social media is already very high. Prepare for it to grow.

Reduce real news to a trickle, and you remove one of the few bulwarks against lies and nonsense.