Technology
Meta’s news partnership head Campbell Brown is leaving the company
Campbell Brown speaks onstage at the Peabody-Facebook Futures Of Media Awards at Hotel Eventi on May 19, 2017 in New York City.
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Meta said Campbell Brown, the company’s top executive responsible for handling partnerships with news publishers, is leaving the company after seven years.
The company said on Tuesday that Brown, who was previously an anchor for NBC News and CNN, will become a consultant, stepping down from the position of vice president of media partnerships.
Brown’s team will be incorporated into another group encompassing media and sports partnerships development and operations, Meta said.
Axios first reported on Brown’s departure.
Brown joined Meta in 2017, when the company, then known as Facebook, was facing stout criticism for its handling of the spread of misinformation in the lead up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Brown was hired for her journalistic pedigree.
Part of Brown’s role was to act as a liaison between the company and the many different news publishers who relied on the platform to distribute articles to readers. Meta has for years had a rocky relationship with news publishers, who were frustrated with some of the company’s various changes, such as deprioritizing the recommendation of news to users in favor of more entertainment and short-form video.
Meta has been investing heavily in its Reels short-video feature to compete with TikTok, underscoring the company’s efforts to deemphasize news on its social apps.
Critics say Meta’s decision to shift away from news is a way for the company to avoid being perceived as a gatekeeper for trusted information. Republican lawmakers have alleged that Meta unfairly censors conservative articles and voices.
More recently, Meta has removed access to news in Canada via its Facebook and Instagram apps over disagreements with a law in the country that requires tech platforms to pay fees to media outlets. The company said the law is “based on the incorrect premise that Meta benefits unfairly from news content shared on our platforms.”
In September, Meta said it would “deprecate” its Facebook News tab in early December for users in the U.K., France and Germany. It characterized the decision as “part of an ongoing effort to better align our investments to our products and services people value the most.”
Facebook News debuted in 2019 as a way for users to stay current with important news in a dedicated space.