Facebook's parent company, Meta, has decided to stop offering its dedicated news tab in several European nations, including the UK, France, and Germany, beginning in early December.
This action aligns with Meta's claim that news makes up less than 3% of the information in user feeds and that users mostly use the site for personal relationships and interests.
While Meta claims that the social media platform will still have access to news, the specific news page will be gone. News organizations will still be able to post news stories and other information for users, according to Gizmodo.
However, worries have surfaced since reports claim that Meta has covertly decreased referral traffic to media sites, which has resulted in a drop in digital income for the UK news industry.
Will Facebook Completely Eliminate News Content?
The decision fits with Meta's larger strategy to move away from emphasizing news material on its platform and toward short-form video content more comparable to TikTok.
To concentrate its efforts on creator-generated video content, Meta already stopped supporting Instant Articles earlier this year and stopped paying US publishers to promote their material in Facebook's News tab.
Notably, Meta earlier this year removed the Facebook news button in Canada in response to a regulation requiring digital firms to pay news organizations for their material, signaling the company's changing position on news content.
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While claiming that media outlets' material would still be available on Facebook in the impacted European nations, Meta stresses that it will not enter into any new business agreements for news content or roll out new products for regional news publishers, per The Verge.
Agreements already in place with publishers will be maintained until they expire. On its platforms, Meta is still dedicated to providing people with accurate information.
Additionally, Meta is apparently looking at paid memberships in Europe that are ad-free, which may allay regulatory worries about data collection and privacy in the EU.
Social Media News Consumption Slows Down
Meta's decision reflects how social media platforms prioritize information, which may have long-term effects on the news industry and consumers.
According to a CNA article, some experts believe these changes in social media might result in lower-quality news as newsrooms put user engagement ahead of in-depth reporting.
The prominence of social media as a news source has diminished, primarily due to Facebook's worldwide retreat from news content, as reported by Axios.
The increase in news consumption on vertical video platforms such as TikTok and Instagram has not matched the decline in news consumption on Facebook on a global scale.
Social media's role in news consumption reached its peak in 2020, as indicated by the annual Reuters Institute Digital News Report. Presently, it slightly lags behind the 2020 peak but has rebounded from the levels seen in 2022 when news consumption on social media dropped to pre-pandemic levels.
Amid these changes, some are hopeful that it will motivate newsrooms to concentrate on producing higher-quality content and attract readers directly to their websites rather than entirely depending on social media platforms for referral traffic.
There are still worries that if society continues to depend largely on social media for news consumption, it may become less informed.
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