Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has announced that users in the U.K., France, and Germany will no longer have a dedicated section for news articles on the platform starting in December. This move is part of Meta’s strategy to focus its investments on products and services that users value the most.

Meta stated that it will “deprecate” the Facebook News tab in these European countries, emphasizing its intention to allocate more resources to short-form video content, such as its Reels feature, which is similar to TikTok. News content currently constitutes less than 3% of the content that users see in their Facebook feeds, according to Meta.

While Meta intends to honor its existing commitments to news publishers in these countries, the company has no plans to enter into new agreements or introduce new products specifically for news publishers.

Facebook News was introduced by Meta in 2019 with the goal of bringing users closer to stories that impact their lives. However, this decision to deprecate Facebook News is part of a broader shift away from the news business.

In a more recent development, Canada also enacted legislation known as the Online News Act, which had a similar aim. However, Meta’s response to this Canadian law was to block access to news content from publishers for Canadian users. This decision raised questions about why Meta couldn’t negotiate agreements with Canadian news outlets as it had done in Australia. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau criticized Facebook’s actions in this regard.

Critics, including news experts, expressed concerns over Meta’s decision to block users from viewing or sharing news links in Canada. They suggested that this move could lead to an increase in misinformation and have negative repercussions for local news organizations.