• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, March 4, 2024

For avid social-media users looking for truthful, journalist-stable news content on the biggest social-media platform in the future, that job just got harder.

In keeping with the effort to trim sometimes less splashy, but important traditional news content, Facebook now says it won't enter into new deals with publishers in the U.S. and Australia. 

Facebook says a “dedicated tab” for news content on the social-media site dropped more than 80% last year.

That's great news. More iffy information to come for the masses -- a slew of unconfirmed rumors, conspiracy stories, and other dubious material. Expect increased efforts around lesser and/or newer sources of information news sources to continue to pop up doing their own thing for attention.

Facebook's News tab launched in 2019 with millions of dollars in content deals for publishers. No longer. For example, it was reported The Wall Street Journal got $10 million, while The New York Times got $20 million and the CNN TV network $3 million.  

Meta says it will “deprecate” Facebook News in the U.S. and Australia in April 2024. Facebook's parent Meta says news content is less than 3% of what people consume on its platform. 

So what are we left with for all media platforms? Boring news accounts on many linear TV networks and their associated digital platforms, as well as on print, radio and -- oh yeah -- on X/Twitter. Don't forget, we also now have “citizen” journalists. 

This perhaps shouldn't come as much of a shock: Facebook has already pulled back from other news content; its Instant Articles effort.

Still, Facebook will be inviting publishers to keep posting on their own pages and using Reels and other Facebook products to do that -- where publishers can theoretically benefit from all that promotion.

Facebook News offered this perspective when it started up in 2019: “We hope this work aids in our effort to sustain great journalism and strengthen democracy.” Ah, that!