Source: Meta plans to end human curation of its UK Facebook News tab, contracted to a team of ~15 journalists at Upday, and switch to an AI system in early 2023
William Turvill / Press Gazette :
Context & Ripple Effects
The UK News tab was built on the opposite premise of this move: in 2019 Facebook announced it would hire a small team of journalists to curate a Top News section, and the UK operation ended up contracted to roughly 15 editors at Upday. Switching that desk to an AI system in early 2023 makes the human layer a transitional cost rather than a product feature.
Seen against the later coverage, the swap reads as a stepping stone: within two years Meta went from replacing curators with software to deprecating the News tab outright in the UK, France, and Germany and stopping new news-content deals there, then did the same in the US and Australia.
First-order effects
- About 15 Upday journalists contracted to curate the UK tab face the end of their Meta work when the AI system takes over in early 2023.
- UK Facebook users' News tab shifts from editor-selected stories to algorithmic ranking, changing which publishers get surface area overnight.
Second-order effects
- Publishers relying on curated placement in the UK lose their human point of leverage over what appears, just as Meta was already signaling it would not renew news-content deals — the tab's elimination in the UK, France, and Germany followed within a year.
- Meta's own later plan to cut third-party moderation vendors in favor of AI tools (announced in 2026) shows the same substitution pattern extending from curation into trust-and-safety contracting.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform news distribution moves from licensed human curation to fully automated ranking and then to withdrawal — making short-term curation contracts a poor basis for publisher revenue planning.
- Regulators weighing news-payment rules face platforms whose commitment to carrying news is contractual only at the margin, since the curation function itself can be retired by software.
The trend: Platforms are using AI to replace contracted human editorial teams as an intermediate step toward exiting news distribution altogether.