The next year will see the end of two background plugins for Facebook. The platform button similar to the button for third-party websites will be discontinued on February 10, 2026. The blog post from meta explains that additional steps due to the change, although they can choose to remove plugins before the end of the day. Any remaining plugins ‘clean up fine,’ which sounds a lot more impressive than it actually will, ie they’ll give it as an invisible 0x0 object.
Ending support for these features marks the end of the meta era with Facebook. External buttons like share were introduced in 2013. The tools were promoted as a way for sites to generate more traffic through social media traffic, which was the main way articles were shared and seen at the time. The company’s official line is that plugins “reflect an earlier era of web development, and their use has naturally declined as the digital landscape has evolved.” But Facebook is also playing a much smaller role in the wider business meta than ever before
