Facebook’s News Tab to be Discontinued in UK, France, and Germany
Meta has shown a clear decline in its commitment to managing news links and discussions on its platforms, and now the company is discontinuing Facebook’s News tab in several countries. The dedicated section will be removed from the UK, France, and Germany in early December.
Unlike in Canada, where the company has blocked news content to oppose a law that would force it to pay the country’s publishers, Meta says news organizations can continue to post links, reels and so on to Facebook in those three territories. Users should also have no problem accessing news content there.
Meta says it will honor existing Facebook News agreements with publishers in the UK, France and Germany. However, it does not renew these agreements or enter into new agreements in these countries. In addition, the company “does not expect to offer new Facebook products specifically for news publishers in the future.”
According to Meta, shutting down Facebook News in these three countries is part of its efforts to direct resources to services and products that users care about more. News makes up less than three percent of what people see in their Facebook feeds, and the company claims that people are more interested in a short video, connecting with other people and discovering opportunities, interests and passions.
The decision does not undermine Meta’s commitment to providing users with access to reliable information on all of its platforms, the company said. It added that it remains committed to working with third-party fact-checkers to combat misinformation.
Still, closing the tab is part of a trend where Meta is weakening the importance of news on all its platforms. First, it switched from human curators to relying on algorithms to place stories in the News tab earlier this year. When it debuted its latest platform, Threads, it said news wouldn’t be a priority there. That’s despite the company designing the service as a direct competitor to X (formerly Twitter), where news and real-time events drove much of the conversation for more than a decade.
Meta’s decision to end news content entirely in Canada has been controversial. Meta has been criticized by many parties for limiting access to reliable information related to serious problems, such as the wildfires that raged across the country this summer.
Last week, the Canadian government said that in order to comply with its Online News Act and continue to provide the country’s users with news content on Facebook and Instagram, Meta would have to pay publishers there about C$62 million ($45.5 million) a year. Meta, which generated more than five times more revenue per day last year, did not withdraw its position.
