Facebook News

» see facebook.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Facebook News never came to turkey. That is the cleanest fact i have about it. It launched in a short list of countries, the United States first and then a handful of others across Europe and the anglophone world, and turkey was never on the list. So for me it was always a feature i read about in tech coverage, a tab i could not have opened even if i wanted to.

The idea was earnest for a moment. In October 2019 Facebook opened a dedicated News tab, a separate feed from your normal one, meant for the day's actual journalism. At the top sat a Top Stories section chosen by a small team of human editors rather than the algorithm, and behind it Facebook had signed licensing deals to pay publishers for their work. For a company that had spent years insisting it was not a media outlet, it was a notable turn.

The turn did not hold. Facebook had built its whole machine on posts from friends and, later, on video that kept you scrolling. News was a small and expensive corner of that, and the company's own numbers said users were not there for it. In Australia the news question turned into a full political fight, a 2021 law meant to force the platforms to pay newsrooms, and for a week Facebook simply switched off news in the country rather than comply. It was not the behavior of a company that loved the product.

The ending came in stages. Facebook killed the News tab across the United Kingdom and the European markets in December 2023, then announced in early 2024 that the United States and Australia, the last holdouts, would lose it in April. The stated reason was blunt, use of the tab had fallen by around eighty percent in a year, and the company would rather put its money into short video. i watched a feature i had never been allowed to use get switched off, which is its own kind of distance, mourning something you only ever saw in screenshots.

~ the case file ~

~ the news fight ~

The Australian episode is the part worth remembering. In 2021 the country passed a News Media Bargaining Code, a law designed to make the big platforms pay local publishers for the news that traveled on their sites. Facebook's answer was to pull all news content in Australia overnight, a hostage move that also blocked government and health pages by accident in the middle of a pandemic. It backed down within days and cut deals, but the message was clear. The company hosted news because it was pressured to, not because it wanted the job.

~ what carried over ~

Facebook News proved a thing the news industry keeps having to relearn. A platform will carry journalism only as long as journalism serves the platform, and the moment the math turns, the tab disappears and the deals lapse. News did not vanish from Facebook, you can still paste a link, but the dedicated place where it was meant to live, curated and paid for, is gone. What is left is the ordinary feed, where a headline and an ad scroll past at exactly the same weight.

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