Meta on Thursday announced it will stop providing Facebook News in the U.K., Germany, and France starting in early December.

The social networking giant said that was part of its "ongoing effort to better align our investments to our products and services people value the most.".

Facebook News, for those who don't know, is basically a news section for publishers, launched by Meta in 2019 that exists independently of the larger Facebook interface. It was first announced in its home U.S. market before launching internationally, starting in the U.K., Germany, Australia, and France. The company had said it wanted to bring the service to Brazil and India, but it looks as though those launches never came to fruition.

Facebook News features local and global news for each market's area, it was introduced in an early version having algorithmically determined suggested articles, but a "top stories" section was human-crafted.
Last year, Meta said it was going all-in on making the whole section algorithmic.
No news
Today's announcement is pretty much consistent with what Meta has been doing elsewhere in the online news landscape. While news sharing long has been a major component of Facebook, it appears that the company has been de-emphasizing this over recent years for many reasons. This includes the polarized nature of some stories, but more particularly those of a political bent which steer the company more toward so-called creator economies. Part of this included renaming its news feed to just "feed" last year.

But on a larger scale, there has been an industrial and legislative pushback against the role that Big Tech plays in distributing news. This led to new legislation in countries such as Australia that dictates that online platforms should compensate publishers for their content-a move which seems to have worked as the big tech companies subsequently negotiated deals with many publishers.

More recently, Canada passed similar legislation under the Online News Act, though this only prompted Meta to block Canadians' access to stories from news publishers. Some questioned why Meta couldn't do the same thing it did in Australia with the Canadian outlets involved, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ran a full court press at Facebook on the matter.

Elsewhere, similar mandates are working their way through their various legal channels, including the U.S. Meanwhile, in Europe, the EU Copyright Directive has also led Meta and Google to sign various licensing deals in the past couple of years.

More broadly, publishers across the spectrum have reported a decline in referral traffic from Facebook in recent months, a trend that dovetails with Meta's publicly stated long-term goal to distance the platform from news. In any case, the company has previously said that news makes up less than 3% of the content people see in their feed, a number it reiterated today with the announcement of its plans for Facebook News in Europe.

We know that people don't come to Facebook for news and political content — they come to connect with people and discover new opportunities, passions and interests, the company wrote.

With the U.K., Germany and France, Meta is quick to stress that it's not blocking links to articles or publishers' pages — it's merely getting rid of the dedicated News tab.

"European news publishers will remain able to use their Facebook accounts and Pages, where they can post links to their stories and send users to their websites in ways available to any other individual or organisation", a company statement explained.

And if there was any residual uncertainty about Meta's plans for news publishers' futures, it seems to have quelled that by saying it "does not expect to offer new Facebook products specifically for news publishers in the future."

For now, though, the Facebook News tab remains active in the U.S. and Australia. For how long, though, is anyone's guess.