As Meta turns its attention toward doing battle with TikTok, its record of bad-faith behavior toward newsrooms continues with the demise of the Facebook News tab in the US and Australia.
Facebook’s News tab—which you possibly didn’t even know existed—will vanish in early April for users in the US and Australia.
An unsigned post from Meta calls the move “part of an ongoing effort to better align our investments to our products and services people value the most”—specifically, “short form video.” As in, the News tab hasn’t been helping Facebook stop people from opening TikTok.
Meta also says people have been ignoring the News tab in general, citing an 80% drop over the last year in the number of people using Facebook News in the US and Australia.
It does not, however, note that it’s not even possible to add the News tab to Facebook’s desktop site or the iPhone and iPad apps. The former doesn’t allow changes to the default tabs (sorry if you, too, have no use for the Gaming tab), while the tab-customization interfaces for the mobile apps described in a support article no longer exist.
