[ad_1]
Facebook’s Community News scheme was previously described by Sir Nick as something that “keeps journalism sustainable”.
In the UK, Meta invested about £13.5m into creating trainee posts over the past five years.
Sir Nick, who is widely seen as Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg’s right-hand man, said in 2021: “We absolutely recognise quality journalism is at the heart of how open societies function – informing and empowering citizens and holding the powerful to account.
“That’s why we’ve invested $600m since 2018 to support the news industry, and plan at least $1bn more over the next three years.”
The former deputy prime minister spearheaded the launch of the Facebook News tab in the UK, a feature that is now scheduled to be deleted in December.
At the time of the tab’s 2018 launch, Facebook was under fire for allowing Russian troll farms to spread disinformation, including one notorious fake news factory linked to late Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin.
The Community News scheme helped Meta deflect criticism that its dominance of online news consumption as well as the digital advertising market has helped accelerate the demise of independent local news outlets.
Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of News said in June: “News access has for some time been dominated by two giant companies: Google and Facebook (now Meta), who at their height accounted for just under half of online traffic to news sites.”
That position is shifting, the institute said in a report, partly because Meta is beginning to block news publishers from sharing content on its website and apps.
In 2017 Facebook and Google together accounted for more than half of global advertising revenues.
Around a third of people globally get their news from social media, according to the Reuters Institute study, with a fifth using news websites and apps run by reputable publishers.
[ad_2]
Source link