Meta said Friday that it will discontinue Facebook’s news feature for US and Australian users in April – setting up a possible showdown with lawmakers in both countries who have ripped the tech giant’s treatment of the media industry.
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.”
Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant said getting rid of Facebook’s “News Tab” was “part of an ongoing effort to better align our investments to our products and services people value the most.” The company said the number of people using the News Tab in both countries dropped by more than 80% in 2023.
“As a company, we have to focus our time and resources on things people tell us they want to see more of on the platform, including short form video,” Meta said in a blog post.
The move came after Meta got rid of the News Tab in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany last year. Meta said the changes would “not impact the terms under our existing Facebook News agreements with publishers in Australia, France, and Germany,” and that its deal in the US and UK had already expired.
Meta informed outlets in Australia that it would not renew their deals at the same time the blog post went live on Friday, The Guardian reported. The country’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, blasted Meta’s decision, telling reporters it was “not the Australian way.”
“We know that it’s absolutely critical that media is able to function properly and be properly funded,” Albanese said. “Journalism is important and the idea that research and work done by others can be taken free is simply untenable.”
“Nobody should be under any doubts about the government’s resolve to ensure that we have a viable media industry in this country,” added Australia’s assistant treasurer Stephen Jones.
The Post has reached out to Meta for further comment.
Media outlets will still have access to their Facebook pages and Meta’s products and services will otherwise be unaffected, according to the blog post. That means users will be able to view news articles within the Facebook app.
But the company has been criticized for years by government officials who say it hasn’t properly compensated the media industry for the traffic generated by its news content.
A recent study said that in a conservative estimate, Facebook should pay news outlets nearly $2 billion per year for their content based on its overall digital ad revenue, The Post reported last November. The same study found that Google should pay anywhere from $10 billion to $12 billion annually.
In 2021, Facebook signed a series of publishing deals after Australia passed a law requiring tech firms to negotiate with publishers. The company temporarily pulled news content from its platform before returning to the negotiating table.
Last year, Facebook discontinued the News Tab in Canada in response to a similar law.
Meanwhile, in the US, Meta threatened to pull news content for Facebook and Instagram users in California last year after the state advanced legislation that would require “online platforms” to pay a “journalism usage fee” to outlets whose content appears on their sites.
Facebook has pulled back from news services as it faces a wave of government scrutiny over its business practices – including its failure to protect kids from online horrors ranging from sexual exploitation to anxiety, depression and even suicidal thoughts.
The company has denied wrongdoing and touted various tools it has released to protect users.
The crisis led Sen. Lindsey Graham to declare at a high-profile Senate hearing earlier this year that Zuckerberg has “blood on his hands.”