Facebook is removing the News tab in Australia and the United States
Mark Zuckerberg of Meta intends to travel to South Korea and has scheduled important meetings for the trip, the company said in a statement on Wednesday. No other information was provided. The South Korean newspaper Seoul Economic Daily, citing anonymous people knowledgeable with the topic, reports that Zuckerberg is expected to meet with Samsung Electronics chairman Jay Y. Lee later this month to address AI chip supply and other generative AI issues.
On Thursday, Meta said that starting in April, it will no longer have a specific section for news articles that impact Facebook users in the US and Australia.
In a corporate blog post, the social networking behemoth explained that the closure of the Facebook News tab was “part of an ongoing effort to better align our investments to our products and services people value the most.”
As a company, the blog post stated, “We have to concentrate our time and resources on things users have told us they would like to see more of on the platform, including short form video.” “Over 80% fewer people in Australia and the United States used Facebook News last year.”
After announcing in September that it will be removing the news area for Facebook users in the UK, France, and Germany, Meta has decided to delete the Facebook News tab. After years of controversy over how it handles disinformation and implements other content-moderation-related standards across its app family, this is another move in Meta’s efforts to break away from the news sector.
Despite launching Facebook News in 2019 with the goal of “bringing people closer to the stories that affect their lives,” the social media giant has been refocusing its resources on producing short-form video content through its Reels product in order to compete with ByteDance’s TikTok social video app.
News publishers will still be able to access their Facebook accounts and Pages, “where they can post links to their stories and direct people to their websites, in the same way any other individual or organisation can,” according to a blog post by Meta, despite the fact that the Facebook News tab had been closed in a number of countries.
Additionally, the upgrade won’t affect any of Meta’s current Facebook News partnerships with German, French, or Australian publications. The business stated in a blog post that comparable news-related “deals have already expired in the US and the UK.”
But Meta declared that it “will not offer new Facebook products specifically for news publishers in the future” and that it “will not enter into new commercial deals for traditional news content in these countries.”
Once Meta and the Australian government worked out a deal on a bill that would have required tech companies to pay content fees to news outlets, Meta reversed its decision from 2021 to restrict publishers and people in Australia from sharing or viewing Australian and international news content.
News organisations can also still leverage products like Reels and our ads system to reach broader audiences and drive people to their website, where they keep 100% of the revenue derived from outbound links on Facebook,” Meta stated, adding that it will “continue to invest in products and services that drive user engagement.
CNBC covered the negative consequences earlier in January, highlighting how publishers have suffered from a sharp decline in referral traffic as a result of Meta’s ongoing withdrawal from the news distribution market. Following a dispute between the company and the Canadian government over the enactment of the Online News Act, which mandates that tech companies like Meta pay fees to news publishers in the nation, Meta announced last summer that users of Facebook and Instagram in Canada would no longer be able to access news on the social media platform.
For CNBC, the analytics firm Chartbeat analysed 1,930 news and media websites from over 370 firms. The results indicated that as of December 2023, Facebook accounted for over 33% of these publications’ total social traffic. Facebook accounted for roughly half of the social media traffic for media outlets a year ago.
According to a similar analysis conducted by Similarweb, an analytics business, some of the top 100 global news publishers saw a significant reduction in Facebook referral traffic in 2023, following years of persistent declines.
Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein reported that since 2017, when publishers were receiving a tonne of referrals from the social media behemoth, the nonprofit news publication’s Facebook referrals have dropped by 99%. Although Mother Jones’s Facebook page now has more followers than it has ever had, Bauerlein continued, users are seeing fewer of the news pieces the publication posts on the app.
“Based on the remarks made by Facebook and Meta executives, it appears that they have recently concluded that news is not worth the trouble and will only display a small portion of it to users,” Bauerlein stated at the time.
