“As a company, we need to focus our time and resources on things people tell us they want to see more of on the platform, including short-form videos,” the blog post said. “The number of people using Facebook News in Australia and the US fell by over 80% last year.”
Meta’s decision to remove the Facebook News section comes after the company said in September that it would remove the news section for Facebook users in the UK, France and Germany. It marks another step in Meta’s efforts to distance itself from the news industry after several years of controversy over how it handles misinformation and enforces other policies related to content moderation across its family of apps.
Although the social networking company debuted Facebook News in 2019 as a way to “bring people closer to the stories that affect their lives,” it has been reallocating its resources into short-form video content through its Reels product as it faces competition from ByteDance – owned social video app TikTok.
Although Meta has shut down the Facebook News tab in various countries, the blog post said people can still view links to news articles in the main Facebook app and that news publishers will still have access to their Facebook accounts and pages , “where they can post links to their stories and direct people to their websites the same way any other individual or organization can.”
The update also won’t affect any of the existing Facebook News agreements Meta has with publishers in Australia, France and Germany; the company noted that similar news-related “deals have already expired in the US and UK,” according to the blog post.
However, Meta said it “will not enter into new commercial deals for traditional news content in these countries and will not offer new Facebook products specifically for news publishers in the future.”
In 2021, Meta reversed a decision to “restrict publishers and people in Australia from sharing or viewing Australian and international news content” after reaching an agreement with the Australian government on a law that would require tech companies to pay content fees to news outlets .
Meta said it will “continue to invest in products and services that drive user engagement” and that “News organizations can still use products like Reels and our ad system to reach a wider audience and target people to their website where they keep 100% of the revenue they receive from Facebook outbound links.”
Earlier in January, CNBC reported on the damaging effects on publishers, who have seen a huge drop in referral traffic as Meta continues to exit the news distribution business. Last summer, Meta said Canadian Facebook and Instagram users would no longer be able to access Facebook news following a disagreement between the company and the Canadian government over the passage of the Online News Act, which requires tech companies like Meta to pay fees to news publishers in the country .
Analytics firm Chartbeat conducted an analysis of 1,930 news and media websites from more than 370 companies on behalf of CNBC, which showed that Facebook accounted for about 33% of those publishers’ total social traffic as of December 2023. A year ago, Facebook accounted for about 50% of social media traffic.
A similar study by analytics company Similarweb also revealed that Facebook referral traffic declined sharply in 2023 for some of the top 100 global news publishers after years of steady decline.
Mother Jones CEO Monica Bauerlein said the nonprofit news publication’s Facebook referrals have dropped 99% since 2017, when publishers had a huge amount of referrals from the social media giant. Bauerlein added that while Mother Jones’ Facebook page has gained more followers than it ever had, users are seeing fewer of the publication’s news stories it shares on the app.
“At this point, it seems pretty clear from the comments that Facebook and Meta executives have made that they’ve just decided that news is more trouble than it’s worth and that they’re going to show people a relatively minimal amount of it,” Bauerlein said. in time.
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