Meta to phase out Share to, Like on, Facebook social plugins

12 November 2025

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.

Share to social media buttons were a feature on disassociated for a while, back in the day. It wasn’t easy to gauge exactly how many people used them, but I could see they didn’t go untouched.

I only deployed the Share option, rather than Like, as I thought the sharing of posts was of more value. I wasn’t a fan of the buttons that shipped with the plugin — way too much branding for my liking — and preferred to integrate icons I crafted myself, or, for a time, text only share links. I also had a share to (then) Twitter option.

While remnants of the early web continue to whittle away, the demise of the Facebook social plugins could hardly be seen as contributing to this “evolution” of the digital landscape. Thankfully.