As part of its continuous attempts to reduce focus on news and political material, Meta is to stop offering Facebook News to users in the US and Australia in the early months of April, according to reports in the media. This comes after Facebook News was taken down in Germany, France, and the UK earlier this year. The News tab was introduced in 2019 and features headlines from smaller, local media as well as national and international news organizations.

According to an AP report, the social media behemoth guarantees that users will still be able to click on links that take them to news items, and news organizations will still be able to post and advertise their stories and websites on Facebook, just like any other person or organization.

A Meta representative, Dani Lever, was cited as stating, "People can control if they want more. This change impacts what the system recommends, not posts from accounts people choose to follow."
"This announcement expands on years of work on how we approach and treat political content based on what people have told us they wanted."

Meta has clarified that its fact-checking network and disinformation review are unaffected by the changes made to the Facebook News tab.

Recall that earlier this month, Meta announced that as part of its efforts to find and expose "individuals and organizations actively seeking to deceive people" during this year's elections in both the US and India, it was attempting to identify and label images generated by artificial intelligence (AI) on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

The parent company of Facebook said that it was developing common technical standards for identifying AI content, including audio and video, in collaboration with industry partners. This comes at a time when people are becoming more confused about the line separating artificial intelligence (AI) from human content, governments are fighting to stop the spread of deepfakes, and technology is creating more and more content.

In order to label images from Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Adobe, Midjourney, and Shutterstock as they carry out their plans for adding metadata to images created by their tools, the parent company of Facebook also announced that it was developing tools that can identify invisible markers at scale. Specifically, these tools are meant to identify the "AI generated" information found in the C2PA and IPTC technical standards.