The message from Meta is: News content isn't as lucrative as it once was, or it just isn't worth the trade-offs. Ultimately, advertisers want to stay away from controversy, especially at a moment when almost anything can become a culture-war issue. And after the failure of thethe growth of commercial online communities to the shopping malls that sprung up across the US through the second half of the 20th century.
On the one hand, this had a valuable moderating effect. Major companies don't want their ads to be placed alongside explicit material, hate speech, or violent imagery, so if platforms can't moderate these types of content, the business side will suffer.
While Twitter had long been used for informative purposes, it was also a place where people could post fairly freely — and that occasionally caused some problems. There was always a tension about how much to moderate content, not just by users who wanted hate speech cleaned up but also by advertisers who wanted less risk to their brands. Instead of solving these issues while preserving what made it unique, Musk has pushed Twitter further into the free-for-all direction.
As advertisers have fled Twitter in response to Musk's changes, Meta is learning from Musk's mistakes and trying to create the shopping-mall-ified, brand-friendly version of Twitter that the bird site could never succeed at turning itself into. Threads aims to build on the success of Instagram, which has beenamid Facebook's decline.