Meta's Mark Zuckerberg plans to visit South Korea and schedule key meetings during the trip, according to a statement from Meta on Wednesday, which did not provide further details. Zuckerberg is reportedly expected to meet with Samsung Electronics CEO Jay Y. Lee later this month to discuss AI chip supplies and other generative AI issues, according to South Korea's Seoul Economic Daily, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter. The command.
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dead Facebook said Thursday it will remove a section dedicated to news articles in April that will impact Facebook users in the United States and Australia.
The social networking giant described the decision to close the Facebook News tab as “part of an ongoing effort to better align our investments with the products and services people value most,” according to a post on the company blog.
“As a company, we have to focus our time and resources on the things people tell us they want to see more of on the platform, including short video,” the blog post said. “The number of people using Facebook News in Australia and the US fell by more than 80% last year.”
Meta's decision to remove the Facebook News tab comes after the company said in September that it would remove the News section for Facebook users in the UK, France and Germany. This represents another step in Meta's efforts to distance itself from the news industry after several years of controversy over how it handles misinformation and imposes other content moderation policies across its suite of apps.
Although the social media company first launched Facebook News in 2019 as a way to “bring people closer to stories that impact their lives,” it has reallocated its resources to short-form video content via its Reels product as it faces competition from ByteDance. Owned by the social video app TikTok.
Although Meta has closed the Facebook News tab in many countries, it said in the blog post that people can still view links to news articles on the core Facebook app and that news publishers will still be able to access their Facebook accounts and pages, “where they can.” Post links to their stories and direct people to their websites, the same way any other individual or organization would.”
The update will also not affect any of the existing Facebook News agreements Meta has with publishers in Australia, France, and Germany; The company noted that “similar news-related deals have already concluded in the US and UK,” according to the blog post.
However, Meta said it “will not enter into new commercial deals for traditional news content in these countries and will not introduce new Facebook products specifically for news publishers in the future.”
Meta said it “will continue to invest in products and services that drive user engagement” and that “news organizations can also still leverage products like Reels and our ad system to reach broader audiences and direct people to their website, where they keep 100% of the revenue.” Derived from outgoing links on Facebook.”
Earlier in January, CNBC reported on the adverse effects for publishers who saw a significant decline in referral traffic as Meta continued to exit the news distribution business. Last summer, Meta said Canadian Facebook and Instagram users would no longer be able to access news on Facebook after a dispute between the company and the Canadian government over the passage of the Online News Act, which would require tech companies like Meta to pay fees to news publishers in the country.
Analytics firm Chartbeat conducted an analysis of 1,930 news and media sites from more than 370 companies on behalf of CNBC, which showed Facebook represented about 33% of these publishers' total social traffic as of December 2023. A year ago, Facebook accounted for about 50 sites. % of social media traffic.
A similar study by analytics firm Sameweb also revealed that Facebook referral traffic has declined significantly for the top 100 global news publishers after years of continuous decline.
Facebook's referrals for the nonprofit news publication are down 99% since 2017 when publishers were facing an overwhelming amount of referrals from the social networking giant, Mother Jones CEO Monica Bauerlein said. Although the Mother Jones Facebook page has amassed a larger following than ever before, users are seeing fewer of the news stories the publication shares on the app, Bauerlein added.
“At this point, it seems pretty clear from the comments made by Facebook and Meta executives that they've just decided that news is more trouble than it's worth and that they're going to show people a fairly small amount of it,” Bauerlein said at the conference. time.
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