Meta announced that it plans to “deprecate” the News tab in Facebook’s bookmarks section in the UK, France and Germany. This feature is not a feature that is used or liked very much by users. According to Meta, the changes are expected to happen in early December.News tab is being removed from Facebook
“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,” the company said in a press release today.
This change is also the latest step by Facebook to make news a lower priority on its platform. At the same time, the “short video” side mentioned in the statement means another step towards TikTokization. Additionally, in early July, Meta announced that it would stop paying US publishers to place their content on Facebook’s News tab. The company said last year that its engineering and product teams would focus more on video content from creators instead of the News tab.
Active in the US, UK, Germany, France and Australia, News accounts for less than 3 percent of what users around the world see in their Facebook feeds. Users will still be able to see links to news articles in their feeds, and news publishers in Europe will still be able to access their accounts and pages after the changes come into force in December. Meta also appears to be encouraging news organizations to move toward short-form videos. Meta is also reportedly exploring ad-free paid subscriptions in Europe.
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