Meta, the company that owns Facebook, announced plans to remove the news tab from the Facebook app in the United States and Australia. The news tab will no longer be available starting in April 2024. Meta said it wants Facebook to focus less on news content because of rules and payment issues around news media.
Meta said short videos are more popular on Facebook than news. Less than 3% of what people see on their Facebook feeds is news content. Publishers who run news websites have also seen less traffic sent from Facebook over the years.
Last year, Meta got rid of the Facebook News feature in countries like the UK, Germany, and France. The company said it wanted to spend more time on the parts of Facebook that people actually use the most. Meta found that in the past year, fewer people in Australia and the US were clicking on the news tab – only 20% as many people compared to before.
Government rules passed in Australia and Canada meant tech companies like Meta had to pay news organizations for using their articles. This led to some drama where Facebook briefly blocked Australians from sharing any news links last year.
While the news tab is going away, Meta noted that existing deals with news publishers will stay in place until their schedule ends. People can still share and discuss news on their Facebook feeds too. Publishers can still manage their Facebook pages and share links. However, Meta said it will not make any new deals with traditional news publishers or create other news-focused products for them going forward.
Removing the news tab seems to be part of Meta’s overall shift away from prioritizing news content on its platforms. When Instagram launched a messaging app called Threads, its head Adam Mosseri said news would not be emphasized there either. It remains to be seen how the loss of the news tab impacts Facebook users and the news industry.
