Moanes Hawas wrote on Wednesday, September 06, 2023 02:32 AM
Meta plans to discontinue the News tab in the bookmarks section of Facebook in a number of countries including the United Kingdom, France and Germany, and the changes are supposed to take effect in early December, according to Meta.
This is Facebook’s latest measure to make news a lower priority on its platform. It’s also another step towards emulating short video content on TikTok.
“As a company, we have to focus our time and resources on the things people tell us they want to see more of on the platform, including short video,” Meta said. Meta announced in July that it would stop paying US publishers to put their content on Facebook’s News tab.
Last year, the company also said its engineering and production teams would focus more on video content from creators than on the News tab.
Facebook News was only available in the US, UK, Germany, France and Australia, and after the changes take effect in Europe in December, it will only be left in the US and Australia. News accounts for less than 3 percent of what users around the world see on their Facebook feed, according to Meta.
People will still be able to see links to news articles on their feeds, and news publishers in Europe will still be able to access their accounts and pages after the changes take effect in December.
Meta also appears to be encouraging news organizations to focus on short video, saying in its statement that: “They can also still leverage products like Reels and our ad system to reach broader audiences and direct people to their website.”
The company also says it will honor commitments under all existing Facebook News deals with publishers in the UK, France and Germany through December, but will not sign any new content deals on Facebook News or offer new products to news publishers in those countries in the future.
Meta is also said to be exploring paid, ad-free subscriptions in Europe, and this could be one way to overcome EU regulators’ concerns about data collection and privacy.
2023-09-05 23:32:00
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