Earlier this year, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took on a personal challenge to "fix" the social media platform. Recently, Facebook has been under constant scrutiny due to its involvement in the US presidential election and its role in the spread of fake news. In an effort to improve the platform, Facebook changed its News Feed algorithm to focus on fostering meaningful social interactions across publisher content. Infographic: Statista

According to a recent report from Shareaholic, the aforementioned change in Facebook's News Feed has had a negative effect on traffic generated from the platform. But as the report cites data from the second half of 2017 highlighting the decline in website traffic from Facebook, the changes could make the situation worse. That's because the data is from the period before Facebook announced its News Feed changes, so it's likely that the company tweaked the algorithm long before the actual announcement.

Facebook's share of traffic to a sample of 2.5 lakh websites declined from 30.9 percent in the second half of 2016 to 18.2 percent in the second half of 2017. The decline has been attributed to a number of changes made to the news feed along with a general change in user behavior on the platform.

While Facebook's contribution to website traffic declined in the second half of 2017, Pintrest and Instagram benefited from the change. The report reveals that Instagram's share grew nearly tenfold year-over-year in 2017, while Pinterest reported a 1.5 percent increase in share of visits over the same time period. Facebook's contribution to website traffic is expected to decline further as more users move away from the platform.