Facebook’s Like and Comment buttons on external websites are officially being discontinued, marking the end of one of the earliest attempts to merge social media engagement with the broader internet. Meta announced that these features will be removed on February 10 of next year, signaling the company’s shift away from tools that once defined the social web era.
For many, it has been years since they clicked a “Like” button or left a Facebook comment on a non-Facebook website. Yet, these plugins—remnants of Facebook’s early expansion strategy—still exist across parts of the web. Meta’s decision to retire them acknowledges their fading relevance and the company’s move toward a more streamlined and privacy-conscious ecosystem.
Introduced in 2010 as part of Facebook’s Open Graph initiative, the Like and Comment buttons allowed users to interact socially across different sites. This system was designed to create a mutually beneficial relationship: websites gained more traffic through social visibility, users enjoyed a connected browsing experience, and Facebook received vast amounts of behavioral data.
At the time, Facebook envisioned a more social web. As journalist Dan Fletcher wrote for Time in 2010, “Facebook wants to make the Web more social, and in the process increase the information you’re willing to share.” The idea was that every Like and comment would feed back into Facebook’s ecosystem, showing friends what users endorsed and creating a seamless link between web activity and the social network.
However, data privacy scandals, most notably Cambridge Analytica, exposed the darker implications of this system. Users became more aware of how their online actions were being tracked, analyzed, and monetized, leading to growing distrust of cross-platform integrations like these plugins.
In its blog post announcing the change, Meta explained that these features “reflect an earlier era of web development,” adding that usage has declined as the digital landscape evolved. Developers won’t need to take any action—once the shutdown occurs, the buttons will simply disappear or be rendered as an invisible “0x0 pixel” to prevent website errors.
Not all of Facebook’s legacy plugins will vanish, though. The familiar “Share on Facebook” button—commonly seen at the end of articles—will remain active. Meta has not indicated any plans to remove it, keeping at least one link between the modern web and the early days of social media integration alive.
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