Starting in December, the Facebook News subpage will be discontinued in the most populous countries in Western Europe – Germany, France and the United Kingdom. According to Meta, this only affects a small portion of users, but it could be an important signal for publishers.
Mark Zuckerberg It was announced in the fall of 2019For the first time in Facebook’s history, “there will be a dedicated space in the app dedicated to high-quality journalism. To help select the content in it, we will not only use algorithms, but we will also use a team with journalistic experience.” Although the pilot operation took place in America initially, it also involved Europe’s largest publisher, Axel Springer. They won the case. At the time they claimed they “didn’t provide enough content in the areas of entertainment, health, business and sports”, but four years later they see things differently.
the Read the news on Gizmodo Depending on the beginning of December in Germany, France and the United Kingdom, it is likely that the section dedicated to the app’s news, which was not available in Hungary, will no longer be available. The parent company is Meta advertisement He states that people do not come to Facebook to get news. About that They also spoke in 2021When they decided to reduce the weight of political content on the platform. “News makes up only three percent of the content that appears in the News Feed, and discovering it is only a small part of the Facebook experience for people,” they say now, though they do add that the composition of the news feed depends primarily on the company’s decisions.
The announcement stresses that news content will remain available regardless, and that their existing agreements with publishers will not be affected by the changes. Meanwhile, in Canada, a few weeks ago, they removed news from the site as is so they wouldn’t have to pay for it under a local law, so Meta believes its products will still be interesting without such content. Their Twitter clone, Threads, which is not yet available in Europe, also wants to be an apolitical service. In contrast, publishers have relied heavily on Facebook in recent years as a platform to recruit readers and users An important source of news Service occurred.
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