Facebook is retiring its Instant Articles feature, following the withdrawal of support from its parent company because of user preferences misalignment.
Meta is no longer investing in fast loading articles as it pivots towards being a video sharing platform, and away from political content, Gizmodo writes.
Meta Is Moving Away From News-Focused Products
Last week, Meta confirmed that it is ending support for Instant Articles, which is a proprietary mobile format critical to news sources that debuted in 2015.
Axios reports that Meta spokesperson Erin Miller told them that the format is underutilized, and has been discontinued for a few months already.
Meta claims that this step is in response to Facebook's attempt to improve the mobile web experience by making a content-specific platform.
"Currently less than 3% of what people around the world see in Facebook's Feed are posts with links to news articles," Miller said in a statement.
Miller added that it would not make sense for the company to continue investing in areas that do not reflect user preferences, The Verge says.
In recent months, the company has shifted away from Facebook's News tab and Bulletin newsletter, which will reportedly be shut down completely by April 2023.
Moving forward, Meta is trying to make Facebook's feed appear and function more like TikTok, also focused on recommendations based on algorithms.
It is undeniable that TikTok has changed the landscape of what social media can be, and Facebook is following that track in its development to keep in pace with the competition.
Publishers Have Roughly Six Months To Figure Out Alternatives
The time for publishers on the social media platform is winding down as it is expected that by mid-April 2023, publishers should already have alternatives for Facebook Instant Articles.
Facebook says that this update has been largely unnecessary, which is why its traffic would just go directly to the publishers' web pages instead, Engadget reports.
Social Media Today writes that Instant Articles were initially designed to give publishers a way to have more engaging and fast-loading ways to present articles.
This helped readers maximize their engagement with the app, and expanded the effort to integrate itself better with publishers' complementary news distribution platform to their sites.
However, building publisher relationships have been deprioritized recently along with pushing political content less to the back end of the platform.
Mark Zuckerberg also noted that this step was taken because Facebook users no longer want to engage in political fights that take over the Facebook experience, Social Media Today reports.
According to Gizmodo, this is in light of the criticism the company has been getting because of the role it played in the wave of political misinformation in the 2016 US presidential election.
Meanwhile, The Verge reports that Meta is not the only one to make alterations in their quick-loading article format since Google also changed its Top Stories feature earlier.
