You can look at many accounts from the mid 2010s but the one I can recall the most clearly was FB updated to the algorithm and everything was fine. They then began actively suppressed people who were posting YouTube links a few months later. They told at least Phillip Defranco that the reason was they should advertise. They then came back months later and instead said why not post your videos here. This failed policy years later re-emerged as the video push for news organizations where FB intentionally deceived them into pushing into video to on the platform only for them to later update to honest video view tracking and make all of the media companies realize there was much less viewership than they were initially told was there.

The mafia metaphor seems pretty on the nose to me. If you have a page, its posts will not regularly appear in followers' feeds — that is, the feeds of people who've explicitly signaled that they want to see your content — unless you give Facebook their vig.

If I have a page for my business and people explicitly follow my page to get updates, Facebook will still not surface content from my page as frequently to my followers without paying them.

At some point they decided to basically stop showing updates to your own followers. Affected pages reported a drop of 90%+ in feed views, and the only way to reach your audience again was to boost your own posts, which is a paid service.