Starting in December, the Facebook News subpage will be shut down in the most populous countries in Western Europe, namely 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 2019, that for 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 on it, we will not only use algorithms, but also a team with journalistic expertise.” Although the experimental process took place in America initially, it also involved the largest publisher in Europe, Axel Springer. They won the case. At the time they claimed they “didn’t provide enough entertainment, health, business and sports content”, but four years later they see things differently.
the Read the news on Gizmodo And according to the beginning of December in Germany, France and the United Kingdom, it is possible that the section dedicated to the news of the application, which was not available in Hungary, will no longer be available. The parent company is meta advertisement It is reported that people do not come to Facebook for news. about it 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 discovery is only a small part of the Facebook experience for people,” they now say, though they don’t 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 local law, so Meta thinks its products will still be interesting without such content. Their Twitter clone, Threads, which is not yet available in Europe, also wants to be a non-political 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 has occurred.
(Cover photo: Thomas Truchel/Photothek via Getty Images)
