Facebook is getting rid of the News tab in the U.S. and Australia

Meta said Thursday that it would remove a dedicated section for news articles in April that will affect Facebook users in the United States and Australia.

The social networking giant characterized the decision to shutter the Facebook News tab as "part of an ongoing effort to better align our investments to our products and services people value the most," according to a corporate blog post.

"As a company, we have to focus our time and resources on things people tell us they want to see more of on the platform, including short form video," the blog post said. "The number of people using Facebook News in Australia and the U.S. has dropped by over 80% last year."

Meta's decision to remove the Facebook News tab comes after the company said in September that it would eliminate the news section for Facebook users in the U.K., France and Germany. It marks another step in Meta's efforts to distance itself from the news industry following several years of controversies related to how it addresses misinformation and enforces other content-moderation-related policies throughout its family of apps.

Although the social networking company debuted Facebook News in 2019 as a way to "bring people closer to the stories that affect their lives," it's been reallocating its resources into short-form video content via its Reels product as it faces competition from the ByteDance-owned TikTok social video app.

Despite Meta shuttering the Facebook News tab in various countries, it said in the blog post that people can still view links to news articles on the core Facebook app and that news publishers will still be able to access their Facebook accounts and Pages, "where they can post links to their stories and direct people to their websites, in the