Meta to Discontinue ‘Facebook News’ Feature in UK, France, Germany

Announcing the shutdown, Meta said that its users do not use Facebook to gather news and political content but to connect with people and discover new opportunities

Meta Platforms, the parent company to social media giant Facebook announced that it would soon be discontinuing the ‘Facebook News’ feature on its application in the UK, France and Germany, sometime later this year.

Created as a dedicated space for people who want to keep up on daily headlines and news articles, ‘Facebook News’ is only available for Facebook users in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia and France.

Shutting down the ‘Facebook News’ feature later this year, Meta will still allow users to view links to news articles, while also allowing news publishers to continue accessing their Facebook accounts and Pages.

Facebook, however, will stop offering new commercial deals for all news content on ‘Facebook News’, while also putting an end to product innovations for news publishers in these countries.

“News makes up less than 3 percent of what people around the world see in their Facebook feed, so news discovery is a small part of the Facebook experience for the vast majority of people,” said Meta while discussing the closure in a blog post.

Meta in its blog says that the decision to shutdown ‘Facebook News’ comes as it wants to enhance its products and services after discovering that users do not use Facebook to gather news and political content but to connect with people and find new opportunities.

Other unmentioned reasons for its dissociation with the news feature could be the increasing pressure from lawmakers around the world, who are asking social or internet giants to pay up larger sums of their advertising revenue to news publishers.

Read more:

• China to Launch $40 Billion State Fund to Boost its Semiconductor Industry
• Spotify Tests Making Lyrics a Premium Only Feature