Australia to Consult on Meta’s Move to End Facebook News

Rob Verdonck, Bloomberg News

The Threads logo on a laptop arranged in the Brooklyn borough of New York, US, on Tuesday, July 11, 2023. Meta Platforms Inc.'s answer to Twitter Inc. has rocketed to 100 million users in less than a week, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg announced on Monday. Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- Australia will consult with media organizations after Meta Platforms Inc. said it would wind down the Facebook News tab from April.

“The government will look at all the options that are available to us,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Saturday in an interview on Australian television’s Weekend Sunrise program. “Journalism is really important. And journalists need to be paid for the work that they do.”

In 2021, Australia passed a world-first law to force digital companies to pay local publishers for news content, resulting in a news blackout before a compromise was reached. The Facebook News tab, which lets users see headlines and stories, will be “deprecated” in the US and Australia in early April, Meta said in a blog post on Thursday. The company previously stopped promoting news content for users in the UK, Germany and France.

Meta said that fewer users are turning to Facebook for news and that it will not enter into new commercial deals when existing agreements with publishers expire. Facebook users will still be able to share links to news stories, it said.

The current deals with the California-based company are worth almost A$250 million ($163 million) a year for local publishers, the News Corp.-owned Australian newspaper said on Saturday.

Read More: Meta to Wind Down Its News Feature in the US and Australia