Meta plans to discontinue Facebook News for users in the US and Australia in early April as part of its ongoing efforts to scale back emphasis on news and political content, as per Bloomberg.
TakeAway Points:
- Meta plans to discontinue Facebook News for users in the US and Australia in early April.
- However, Meta said users will still have access to links leading to news articles, and news organisations will retain the ability to post and promote their stories and websites.
- Also, the Facebook News tab does not affect its fact-checking network or review of misinformation.
Meta to Discontinue Facebook News Tab
This development follows the shutdown of Facebook News tab in the UK, France and Germany last year. Introduced in 2019, the News tab curated headlines from both national and international news organisations, along with smaller, local publications.
The social networking giant assures that users will still have access to links leading to news articles, and news organisations will retain the ability to post and promote their stories and websites, just like any other individual or organisation on Facebook, according to a report by news agency AP.
“This change does not impact posts from accounts people choose to follow; it impacts what the system recommends, and people can control if they want more,” Dani Lever, a Meta spokesperson, was quoted as saying.
“This announcement expands on years of work on how we approach and treat political content based on what people have told us they wanted.”
Meta Verification Still Remains
Meta has further added that the change to the Facebook News tab does not affect its fact-checking network or review of misinformation.
But misinformation remains a challenge for the company, especially as the U.S. presidential election and other races get underway.
“Facebook didn’t envision itself as a political platform. It was run by tech people. And then suddenly it started scaling, and they found themselves immersed in politics, and they themselves became the headline,” said Sarah Kreps, director of the Tech Policy Institute at the Cornell Brooks School of Public Policy who studies tech policy and how new technologies evolve over time. “I think with many big elections coming up this year, it’s not surprising that Facebook is taking yet another step away from politics so that they can just not, inadvertently, themselves become a political headline.”
Rick Edmonds, media analyst for Poynter, said the dissolution of the News tab is not surprising for news organizations that have been seeing diminishing Facebook traffic to their websites for several years, spurring organizations to focus on other ways to attract an audience, such as search and newsletters
Action To Curb Misinformation
To recall, earlier last month, Meta said it was working to identify and label artificial intelligence (AI)-generated images across Facebook, Instagram and Threads as part of its efforts to identify and expose “individuals and organisations actively seeking to deceive people” this year, when both India and the US go to elections.
The Facebook parent announced it was working with industry partners on common technical standards for identifying AI content, including video and audio, at a time when the difference between human and synthetic content is getting blurred, people want to know where the boundary lies, and governments are battling to check the spread of deepfakes and AI-generated content.
The Facebook parent also said it was building tools that can identify invisible markers at scale—specifically, the “AI-generated” information in the C2PA and IPTC technical standards—so that it can label images from Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Adobe, Midjourney, and Shutterstock as they implement their plans for adding metadata to images created by their tools.
