Australia’s news division has been gutted, with Meta Australia’s managing director Will Easton confirming the job losses.
“A number of roles in Australia’s news team were recently impacted by Meta’s global restructure,” Easton said.
“This is not a reflection of the great work these groups have done, but what we need going forward as we shift our resources onto a smaller number of high-priority growth areas.
“While we have maintained news partnerships resources in Australia, user preferences have shifted to creator-driven content in products such as Watch and Reels, and this is where we will focus moving forward.”
Meta has made it clear it won’t continue funding news journalism, with Meta’s director of international news partnerships, Jesper Doub, among the 11,000 workers fired last week.
Asia Pacific’s director of news partnerships, Andrew Hunter, has kept his role, for now. But it is clear that whatever news media bargaining agreement Australia has with Meta is on borrowed time.
Meta informed Australian publishers earlier this month it will be reverting to automated news content, removing all human editors and putting future news media bargaining agreements at risk.
“Along with European curation deals expiring, we plan to end our in-house curation of Facebook News in Australia by the end of the year,” Andy Hunt, Meta Australia’s news partnership boss told local media.
“This update will have no impact on our commercial deals and the Facebook News product will still be accessible in Australia.”
Facebook famously bristled against the bargaining code when it was introduced in Australia last year, going so far as to pull all news from its feed to avoid having to kowtow to the legislation.
While the company eventually agreed to commercial deals with a number of Australian publishers, internal leaks showed Zuckerberg resented being strongarmed.
Meta terminated a three-year deal with US media in July, and has suggested it will not sign one with Canadian outlets.
