Feed: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics
Feed Link: https://www.engadget.com/
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Title: Meta is killing off the external Facebook Like button

Link: https://www.engadget.com/meta-is-killing-off-...

Next year will see the end arrive for two of Facebook's external social
plugins. The platform's Like button and Share button for third-party websites
will be discontinued on February 10, 2026. The blog post from Meta explains
that site admins shouldn't have to take any additional steps as a result of
the change, although they can choose to remove the plugins before the
discontinue date. Any remaining plugins will "gracefully degrade," which
sounds much more dramatic than what will actually happen, which is that
they'll render as a 0x0 invisible element.

Ending support for these features marks the end of an era for Meta and
Facebook. External Like and Share buttons were introduced in 2013. The tools
were promoted as ways for sites to generate more traffic through the social
network, which was a major way that people shared and saw articles at that
time. The company's official line is that the plugins "reflect an earlier era
of web development, and their usage has naturally declined as the digital
landscape has evolved." But Facebook also plays a much smaller role in the
broader Meta business operation than it once did, and anecdotally, it's less
common to see sites running only integrations with a single social network.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-
is-killing-off-the-external-facebook-like-button-205207354.html?src=rss

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