Facebook Is Getting Rid of the News Tab In the UK, France and Germany

Starting in December, Facebook users in the U.K., France and Germany will no longer see a dedicated section for news articles. CNBC reports: Meta said Tuesday that it is plans to "deprecate" the Facebook News tab in early December for users in those European countries as "part of an ongoing effort to better align our investments to our products and services people value the most." The company added that it plans to spend more time and money on short-form video, as best exemplified by its TikTok-like Reels product.

News represents less than 3% of what people see in their Facebook feeds, Meta said. Meta said it would honor the Facebook News obligations it had made to publishers in those countries, but said it won't enter into new deals and has no plans to offer new products for news publishers. In June, Meta removed all news content from Facebook and Instagram for users in Canada, following the passage of a bill requiring big tech companies to compensate news businesses when their content is made available on their services.

What fucking news tab?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have used Facebook in the UK since 2008 and have literally never seen a news tab. I have a feed, then some tabs I never fucking use like one to list a load of people Facebook thinks I want to be friends with, and some shitty video feed that's always full of bottom of the pile irrelevant content to me.

But I've never seen a news tab.

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[Going_Digital]

Absolutely correct, there has never been a news tab in the Facebook app, possibly one on the web I suppose. But apart from a few groups that are stuck in the Facebook walled garden, I no longer have any use for it.

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[mjwx]

Have used Facebook in the UK since 2008 and have literally never seen a news tab. I have a feed, then some tabs I never fucking use like one to list a load of people Facebook thinks I want to be friends with, and some shitty video feed that's always full of bottom of the pile irrelevant content to me.

But I've never seen a news tab.

I've never seen this "News" tab either, then again I run with Ublock Origin, Privacy Badger and FB Purity at an absolute minimum.

I have a small heart attack when I see how bad it is when people browse without them.

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[Bradac_55]

Congrats on being one of the few old people still using Facebook, your a quickly dying breed.

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[thegarbz]

I thought this was an American thing. I'm in America now, still see no "News" feed. WTF?

Interesting

[NoWayNoShapeNoForm]

I guess there is nothing going on in the EU that FB finds newsworthy. /sarcasm

No News Tab Here In USA

[zenlessyank]

O well, no news is good news.

News from fb?

[lunadude]

Why would you want to get news from fb? Algorithmically driven group think is not a good source.

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[RedK]

Facebook doesn't publish news. But like any business, News Organisations can register to Facebook. Then you as a user can follow them. Then their social media manager posts links to their website and you see them on your feed.

Basically, you can use Facebook like a big RSS aggregator to follow multiple news organisations, instead of browsing each of their sites seperately.

That's how people "Get news from Facebook", bunch of links to outside news websites. It's a good way to drive users to News organisati

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[martin-boundary]

Never had a facebook account. Don't think I will (isn't it called meta now anyway?). Usually inspect the HTML or do other javascript tricks to read something on there in the rare cases that I absolutely want to. I've been on the internet before fb existed. Also before google existed. TBH I'm not sure either of those companies are going to be around long enough to make it worth my while to explore them.

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[AmiMoJo]

Good point, why are you on Slashdot where the news is limited to what people submit and vote for? It's not quite an algorithm but it's just as bad.

I'm going to guess it's because you like discussing news with other people, the same as Facebook users do.

And nothing of value was lost

[0xdeaddead]

Lol

Facebook is NOT ...

[MpVpRb]

... a news source!

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[thegarbz]

No it's a news aggregator to actual sources. Or at least I think it is, I've never seen the news tab.

Just checked it again ...

[angel'o'sphere]

My Facebook page does not have such a tab, and I think it never had.
My old places on FB are Germany and France. So no idea.
ATM I'm in Thailand, perhaps it checks my location ... and removed it?

As far as I know to get news on FB, you have to join a group for news, aka the FB group/page of the relevant newspaper or TV station.

This is news to me ...That there was a News Tab ..

[JasterBobaMereel]

I didn't know there was one .. and why would I bother getting news via Facebook?

The writing is on the wall

[juancn]

Facebook is making it very clear that news is not valuable to them, anywhere (hence the 3% traffic number), to the point that it's slowly phasing out news completely from its platforms and showing that it could wholesale block news altogether if they keep extorting money from them.