Meta’s head of news relations, Campbell Brown, has stepped down

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

As Meta continues to take steps back from news promotion on its platforms, its head of news partnerships, Campbell Brown, is leaving the company, reports Axios. She was hired in 2017 to help news organizations get their content in front of users as the company pushed to make Facebook a major news aggregator.

Brown will continue to “remain affiliated with Meta” as a consultant, according to internal documents Axios viewed. Meta, during her tenure, added a News tab, worked to get big licensing deals with news publishers, and even offered grants through its Facebook Journalism Project to help fund struggling local news outlets.

Brown said in a 2018 Code Conference interview that her job was “not to go recruit people from news organizations to put their stuff on Facebook,” later adding that anyone who “feels this isn’t the right platform for them … should not be on Facebook.”

As governments turned a regulatory eye on what would eventually become Meta, the company did an about-face on its news efforts, with Brown telling employees it would instead “heighten their focus on building a more robust Creator economy.” The company also responded to governments requiring it to pay news organizations for hosting their content with broad bans on news sharing, most recently in Canada.