Decision marks Meta’s move away from news, toward short-form video Company likely to end News tab in UK in 2024 DUBAI: Meta plans to fully automate its UK Facebook News tab, ending all human curation, according to the Press Gazette. The tab was launched in the US in 2019 and in Britain in 2021 as part of a $1 billion global program to support publishers. The company said at the time it marked “the beginning of a series of international investments in news.” At launch, it announced partners such as Channel 4 News, Daily Mail Group, Financial Times and Sky News, as well as existing partners like The Economist, The Guardian, GQ, Cosmopolitan, Glamour and Vogue. Meta is likely to end the Facebook News tab in the UK in 2024 when its three-year contracts with publishers expire, according to the Press Gazette. The company told publishers of its decision to end its curation contract with Upday, which is owned by German publishing giant Axel Springer, last month. An Axel Springer spokesperson said: “The curation of the Facebook News tab by Upday was a fixed-term collaboration that will expire in 2023. However, this collaboration represents only a small part of Axel Springer’s global partnership with Facebook. We cannot comment on what future plans Facebook has for curating its Facebook News tab in the UK.” The decision is indicative of Meta’s shift away from news and toward short-form video. The company is shelving several other news-related projects and features, such as ending support for its Instant Articles feature, which was launched in 2015 to make news load faster on the Facebook mobile app. Instant Articles will be discontinued in April, giving news publishers time to adjust. Traffic from links will instead be directed to the publishers’ mobile websites. Last month, Meta said it would end Bulletin, its newsletter subscription service for journalists and writers, by early next year. In July, the company said it was reducing the appearance of political content in people’s news feeds globally. “Our tests have concluded and demonstrated that placing less emphasis on shares and comments for political content is an effective way to reduce the amount of political content people experience in their feeds,” it said in a statement. Earlier in the year, Campbell Brown, who leads Meta’s media partnerships, told employees that Facebook was reallocating resources to focus more on the creator economy, according to the Wall Street Journal. Meta has previously reported that Reels are the fastest-growing content format across its platforms, and video viewing makes up for 50 percent of all viewing on Facebook On Tuesday, the company released a report that found the creator economy was estimated to be worth more than $100 billion in 2020, an indication of where the company is headed.