Meta plans to remove Facebook's News tab in the U.S. and Australia, seeking to distance itself from the regulatory and payment complexities associated with news media. The company announced today that this product will be discontinued in April 2024.
Last year, Meta stopped offering Facebook News in the UK, Germany and France, saying it wanted to allocate resources to “our products and services that people value most.” The tone of this presentation is similar.
The social media company announced that the number of people using Facebook News in Australia and the US fell by 80% last year.
“This is part of our ongoing efforts to better align our investments with the products and services that people value most. As a company, we want to include short-form videos that people want to see more of on our platform. “We need to focus our time and resources on those things.”
Last year, Mehta said news made up less than 3% of the content people saw in their feeds. Most likely, the user will not notice this depreciation. In recent years, publishers have also experienced a decline in their referral traffic from Facebook.
The fate of Facebook News' closure is due to regulatory moves and Meta's withdrawal from investment in new products. Legislation passed in Australia and Canada requires authorities to require platforms to pay online publishers for their content. The company started blocking news links for Canadian users last August.
Meta said today's announcement does not affect any current agreements the company has with publishers until they expire. Additionally, in Australia and the US, people will be able to share news in their feeds, and publishers will be able to manage their own pages and post links there.
The company emphasized that it has no plans to invest in new news-related products.
“Furthermore, as we continue to invest in products and services that drive user engagement, we will not enter into new commercial deals for traditional news content in these countries and in the future we will create a new Facebook page specifically for news publishers. We don't even offer products.''
Meta consistently retreated from focusing on news. “We're not going to amplify news” on Threads, the social network the company launched last year, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said last year.