Meta To Discontinue Facebook News Tab As It Scales Back Political Content

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.

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.

Source : Getty

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, the media has reported. 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, says 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 Fact Checking Will Not Be Affected

Meta has further added that the change to the Facebook News tab does not affect its fact-checking network and review of 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, and people want to know where the boundary lies and the governments 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 as well as Shutterstock as they implement their plans for adding metadata to images created by their tools.