The system no longer provides FB the same value it previously did. So they're taking it down, now that they've collected billions of images. Will they be deleting the trained models too? All artifacts and inferences? Hell no.
I believe it because facebook has nothing much to gain by lying about this small thing(after all they still have all the tracking data) and hell lot to loose by lying this straight face among employees.
And if, in a year an employee speaks out and leaks that FB never deleted the data? What would happen then? I don't think anything would happen, they wouldn't lose much, and no one would be too surprised.
Fortunately Facebook pays for the Cognitive Dissonance Deluxe package which is about $250k-$400k year. They've got plenty of padding to mislead their employees right to their face.
It does not say they've stopped doing facial recognition. It just says they've shut down one program.
They also specifically reference the "usage" of facial recognition, not the act of facial recognition.
My guess is they are still being paid by governments to collect this data but are just not exposing it.