• Mark Zuckerberg considered acquiring a major news outlet between 2017 and 2018.
  • Facebook was facing intense scrutiny over its role in the 2016 election and misinformation.
  • Zuckerberg’s focus turned to funding The AP and using it as a direct news source for Facebook.

Before Meta stepped away from nearly all its dealings with the news industry, Mark Zuckerberg considered getting more entangled with it than ever.

Between 2017 and 2018, the founder and CEO of Facebook, as it was still known, seriously considered acquiring a news outlet. His focus eventually turned to The Associated Press, the storied news agency service, according to three people familiar with internal Facebook talks surrounding the idea. The people spoke to Business Insider on condition of anonymity.

As The AP is a news cooperative, an outright acquisition would have been essentially impossible, so something like a permanent subsidization of the agency was discussed inside Facebook. The initial idea was for Facebook to be the entity behind it. Zuckerberg doing it as an individual, as Jeff Bezos did with The Washington Post, or through his philanthropy, The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, was also considered, the people familiar said.

At the time, Facebook was still reeling from the politicization and related manipulation of the platform during the 2016 US Presidential Election, which led to Donald Trump becoming president for a term. After initially dismissing Facebook's role in politics and its influence on voters, Zuckerberg shifted his tone.

In a 2017 memo, he laid out how Facebook was dedicated to improving as a platform with responsibility to its users and the news industry. "Giving people a voice is not enough without having people dedicated to uncovering new information and analyzing it," Zuckerberg wrote. "There is more we must do to support the news industry to make sure this vital social function is sustainable."

Internal talks of permanently subsidizing The AP, which Facebook would have wanted to access and directly use as a constant stream of high-quality, reliable news for its platforms, were serious, two of the people familiar said. The company's mergers and acquisitions team became involved to lay out how it could happen. Ultimately, the idea was abandoned for fear of such a deal drawing unwanted regulatory scrutiny, one of the people familiar said.

A spokeswoman for The AP told BI: "If there were talks, they didn't involve AP." She also said that, as a cooperative, the agency "cannot be bought or sold."

Around this time, Zuckerberg weighed another option for Facebook to start a news organization, the three people said. The company would have hired top journalistic talent by luring experienced professionals with big paychecks to produce original news content. This idea was also ultimately abandoned, mostly due to concerns about public blowback and trust in Facebook at the time.

A spokesman for Meta declined to comment.