Meta Shuts Down Bulletin Newsletter To Refocus On Algorithm To Take On TikTok

Meta has announced to shut down its newsletter product called Bulletin for creators and writers by early 2023.

Bulletin writers will continue to earn subscription revenue until the platform shuts down by early 2023.

Meta has announced to shut down its newsletter product called Bulletin for creators and writers by early 2023. The company said it will refocus resources from Bulletin to work on its discovery algorithm, which the company is building to take on Chinese short-form video TikTok.

In June 2021, the company launched Bulletin, a set of publishing and subscription tools to support creators in the US. A Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch that while this off-platform product itself is ending, "we remain committed to supporting these and other Creators' success and growth on our platform."

Bulletin writers will continue to earn subscription revenue until the platform shuts down by early 2023. The move comes as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has put a freeze on hirings, cut costs and restructure some groups within the company.

Through Bulletin, Meta wanted to support creators, and unify its existing tools with something that could more directly support great writing and audio content from podcasts to Live Audio Rooms all in one place. Facebook had announced to roll out new investments, products and services aimed to support more independent writers and experts.

Bulletin writers were set to get an opportunity to foster deeper connections with their audiences on Facebook. 

Meanwhile, Meta has recently settled a lawsuit for "significant sum" against two companies that were engaged in data scraping operations on its platforms. Israel-based BrandTotal and US-incorporated Unimania, agreed to a permanent injunction banning them from scraping Facebook and Instagram data going forward or profiting from the data they collected.

"BrandTotal and Uninamia also agreed to pay a significant financial sum as part of the settlement," said Meta.

Meta, however, did not disclose the sum paid to the two firms. The social network originally filed the lawsuits in October 2020 in the US against two companies that used scraping to engage in an international data harvesting operation.

These companies scraped data from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Amazon, in order to sell "marketing intelligence and other services. "The actions of BrandTotal and Unimania violate our Terms of Service and we are pursuing legal action to protect our users," Meta had said.

Scraping is a form of data collection that relies on unauthorised automation for the purpose of extracting data from a website or app.

Meta then filed a new complaint in federal court in California against BrandTotal and Unimania after the defendants published a new malicious extension on Google's Chrome Web Store designed to scrape Facebook, in violation of Facebook's Terms and Policies and state and federal law.