Meta continues to double down on its pivot away from news, meaning it will no longer try to amplify news articles, journalists and news organizations on its social platforms. This is an ongoing trend in social media as a whole, with even Google recently experimenting with removing news from its search results.
Back in September 2023, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke with the Verge about his intention to shift away from news on Meta’s platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram and Threads. He expressed some of his feelings about hard news when asked about how Threads compares with Twitter.
“Even within news, there’s a whole spectrum between sort of hard, critical news and people understanding what’s going on with the sports that they follow or the celebrities that they follow,” Zuckerberg said. “It’s not as cutting as a lot of the kind of hard news—and especially the political discussion. I think it’s just so polarized that I think it’s hard to come away from reading news about politics these days feeling good, right?”
A month after Zuckerberg’s interview, in October 2023, Meta’s news leader and veteran journalist Campbell Brown left the company. Under her leadership, Meta invested hundreds of millions of dollars on news products, including forming partnerships with news organizations, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and CNN, and adding news features, such as the news tab on Facebook.
Last month, Meta announced that it would be removing the news tab from Facebook in the U.S. and Australia starting April. According to a blog post from Meta, the number of people using the news tab on Facebook in the two countries had dropped 80 percent in the last year. Meta said feedback from users showed that they were uninterested in seeing political and news content in their feeds.
Before that, Meta made plans in September 2023 to deprecate the Facebook news tab in the U.K., Germany and France by the beginning of 2024. Adam Mosseri, the CEO of Instagram, also made it clear when Threads launched last year that it would not amplify news.
An immediate concern about Meta’s turn from news is how mis- and dis-information will be handled on its platforms, especially during an election year. At a panel during SXSW last week, Maxime Prades, Meta’s director of product for integrity, said the company was preparing for the 2024 Presidential election and updating users along the way. According to Prades, a lot of work is being done through partnerships with third-party organizations such as independent fact checkers and non-governmental organizations.
“We need to have this pulse-on-the-ground movement within hours sometimes,” Prades said during the panel. “So we work with all these organizations and external bodies to get that pulse of how things are going and what we should be changing in our enforcement, in our policies.”