Lorri Young Lang spent her formative years in the small agricultural town of Ord, Nebraska. Her father was the chief of police, her mother worked for the state roads department, and she was a social busybody cheerfully employed at the Ord Drive Inn restaurant.
She was happy, rich in friendship and had every intention of staying put.
Then she met a boy from Buffalo, Wyoming.
Robbie Lang’s relatives owned the Ord Bowling Alley, and it was here during a summer sojourn that the pair fell for one another like tenpins.
A short time later, 20-year-old Lorri Young Lang was married and living in the town of Moorcroft, Wyoming, where her husband worked for the Brown Swiss Jersey Dairy.
Though in love, the transition to life in Wyoming was not easy. Her new Crook County community was small and spread apart, and with few friends to lean on, she became deeply homesick.
At last she found a crutch in a Facebook group called Nebraska Through the Lens, with a collection of wildlife and lifestyle photography that helped ease her sense of loss as she adapted to a new life.
She felt compelled to pass on the favor, and in 2015 created the Facebook group Wyoming Through the Lens (WTL). The favor was well received.
What started as a group of 10 friends has since soared to a community of nearly 465,000 today.
Not only is the group large in number, it has a reputation for prolific engagement. A single post will often get hundreds of comments and thousands of likes within hours, if not minutes, Lang told Cowboy State Daily.
That changed three weeks ago.
A dramatic scene of battle and breeding on the McCullough Peaks Wild Horse Herd Management Area by Eric C. Janzer. (Courtesy Eric C. Janzer, Wyoming Through The Lens via Facebook) 
A Wyoming grizzly shared to Wyoming Through the Lens by Richard Cohen. (Courtesy Richard Cohen, Wyoming Through The Lens via Facebook) 
What Allen Johnson calls "a great day in the 307." (Courtesy Allen Johnson, Wyoming Through The Lens via Facebook) 
Road through rural Wyoming by Michael Brandt. (Courtesy Michael Barndt, Wyoming Through The Lens via Facebook)
Engagement Decimated Overnight
Facebook earlier this month rolled out new algorithms, and for reasons unknown, participation in WTL took a falcon-fast nosedive.
Despite efforts to recapture member activity, engagement remains at next to nothing, putting Lang in a state of growing desperation.
“For the life of me, I cannot figure it out. How do you go from one day you've got thousands of comments and reactions to almost nothing the next day,” she said, offering by example a recently posted photo of a brown bear.
She explained would normally have had thousands of reactions, but instead has fewer than 10.
Neither Lang nor other members profit from the group. It’s a passion project, a mission-driven initiative to create community and help others benefit from a sense of connectedness to the Cowboy State.
For the last three weeks, Lang said she’s lost sleep while spending more and more time attempting to re-engage members, to no avail.
“We’ve done everything we can to try to get people to re-engage, comment and participate, but it's not working. It’s just weird. It’s frustrating,” she said.
Black Box Algorithms
Adding to the frustration, Facebook and its parent company Meta have kept her in the dark. Attempts to contact administrators have gone unanswered, leaving her to feel like a detective on a criminal case with no leads.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, over the last year announced a series of algorithm changes designed to minimize censorship, deprioritize traditional news and bolster the visibility of “connected content.”
In theory, those changes should have boosted engagement for a group like WTL. Instead, it’s done the opposite.
“I think what comes down to is the algorithm is mislabeling things,” said Jerrica Nunly, social media strategist for New York-based digital marketing firm Beekman Social.
In addition to mislabeling, Nunly also suspects the company has increasingly promoted paid content to the detriment of organic and “connected content.”
Yet that doesn’t explain the changes she’s seen in her personal feed, where lately there is noticeably high presence of local group content but little from the brands she follows.
“Overall, I think Facebook has good intentions with things like trying to make it like safer and crack down on misinformation, but I do think that the algorithm is missing the mark when it comes to actually labeling things correctly,” Nunly said.
Zuckerberg concedes the company has missed on myriad priorities over time, and in January said the company plans to issue regular reports on the nature of these mistakes and how they are being addressed.
But that does little to ease Lang’s distress.
“I have gotten nothing from Facebook. I look at my group status and there's no violations, no nothing. I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said.
WTL is not the first to get blindsided by Meta’s obscure operations. Nebraska Through the Lens was also wiped out by an arbitrary change. Yet the solution that group found may be hard for Lang to replicate.
Sand castle at Glendo State Park by Catherine Johnson Morris. (Courtesy Catherine Johnson Morris, Wyoming Through The Lens via Facebook) 
Canada and snow gees at Festo Lake near Wheatland by Neil Suntych. (Courtesy Neil Suntych, Wyoming Through The Lens via Facebook) 
Fishing across from a power plant by Jacob Kuhn. (Courtesy Jared Kuhn, Wyoming Through The Lens via Facebook) 
Pilot and Indian peaks by Lesley Fair. (Courtesy Lesley Fair, Wyoming Through The Lens via Facebook) 
Storm clouds over a farm by Paige Fabris. (Courtesy Paige Fabris, Wyoming Through The Lens via Facebook)
Are Political Connections The Only Solution?
Nebraska Through the Lens is said to be the original “Through the Lens” group, which has become an unofficial brand with a presence in 12 U.S. states along with a handful of regional affiliates, according to its creator, Steve Evans.
Each group is modeled on the same profit-free, mission-driven principles. Though they are not raking in profits, their respective states appear to be.
“People think Nebraska is a flyover state, but we’ve shown people that it’s not because we get comments from people all around the world saying, ‘We want to come visit Nebraska!’” Evans said. “One of my favorite quotes is someone who told us we’ve done more for Nebraska tourism than all the money the state has sunk into tourism here in the last 20 years.”
But similar to WTL, Nebraska Through the Lens was derailed by obscure decisions at Facebook, which deplatformed the group out of the blue in February 2024.
Evans received an email explaining the group had been removed for “intellectual property rights violations.”
“Everything we have is someone's intellectual property. They're posting their photos through our group,” he said. “It was really vague, so I went to get a hold of Meta, but that was next to impossible.”
With no response from the company, Evans began networking and found advocates in the Nebraska Legislature and governor's office, which he believes eventually opened a door for an audience with a Facebook administrator.
Yet the administrator offered little to explain why the group was pegged for the violation and affirmed that once a group was removed there’s no getting it back.
He didn’t stop fighting for reinstatement.
Finally, one day shortly after the Lincoln Star Journal ran a story about the group’s removal, without ceremony or explanation, Nebraska Through the Lens was unexpectedly reinstated.
“All of a sudden, one morning Nebraska Through the Lens just showed back up,” said Evans, who believes it was the result of behind-the-scenes political string-pulling. “One of our state senators who was very interested in us would not admit to anything, he just said, ‘It’s amazing how these things work.’”
The group was thrilled by the reinstatement, but there is still a lingering sense that they’ll never be fully in the clear.
“I have never been able to get an explanation of what the intellectual property violations were, or any definition of what we were doing wrong, nothing at all. Meta is a very hard group to work with,” he said.
‘Breaks My Heart’
Wyoming Through the Lens has not been deplatformed, but for all intents and purposes it feels that way to Lang. She said much is at stake if engagement doesn’t bounce back.
What makes WTL different from other online groups is its combination of hyper-inclusivity and robust engagement. It’s a place where amateur and professional photographers post back-to-back as well as interact and learn from each other.
“It’s become a community, and a lot of people have become friends. It breaks my heart to see what’s happened to it,” Lang said.
Lori Fredrickson, a group member from southwest Wyoming who specializes in owl photography, said that through the group she’s made friends and been promoted by people from all around the country.
“It's been a far-reaching page. I think it's been good for our state, promoting our wildlife and our lifestyle. I think it promotes tourism too,” she said. “I hope they figure [the algorithm problem] out.”
At first, she speculated the algorithms had deprioritized group content because a large number of its members are located outside the state, but she lost confidence in that logic when realizing the site was failing to show up in her own feed.
For Lang, WTL's greatest purpose is not promoting tourism, it’s connecting people to their home, from deployed military members and out-of-state college students or those like her who may be carried elsewhere by marriage.
But over the years, she’s realized it can also help those who are carried in, as it fosters a sense of connectedness that helps make new places feel like home.
“It was really tough coming out here,” she said. “I didn't really like it. But then you start to really see it, and I came to love it a lot. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else now.”
Zakary Sonntag can be reached at zakary@cowboystatedaily.com.
