I remember well the morning Meta briefly switched off news content in Australia in 2021 while negotiating with the Morrison government, a scare tactic that spectacularly backfired. I was an administrator of The Conversation’s Facebook page at the time, and I initially panicked as our articles kept failing to post. In blocking them — some of which were from epidemiologists providing vital health information — and other quality sources on a platform already swamped by mis- and disinformation during a deadly pandemic, Meta quickly came off as a ghoulish villain. This emboldened the government to double down on its code and forced Meta to a strategic settlement for public relations’ sake.
Last week, Meta (owner of Facebook and Instagram) announced it does not want to renew its funding deals with Australian news outlets, which it eventually struck voluntarily in 2021 to head off being forced to negotiate under the Morrison government’s news media bargaining code. The big question now is whether the Albanese government will officially designate Meta under the code and force it to the negotiating table. If it does so, many expect Meta will simply remove news content from its platforms, as it has done in Canada to avoid similar legislation.
The code’s design — heavily influenced by News Corp, Seven and other big media players — was always shoddy. And, aside from the brief public shaming effect after Facebook’s own goal, the code never removed the latent possibility that Meta would walk away from news entirely. Its logic was that Meta commercially benefited from having news content on its platforms, and thus should contribute to funding it. This may once have been true, and Meta certainly courted news publishers to use its platforms in the 2010s.
But by 2021, Meta was already turning its back on an industry it had deemed too troublesome. The company now claims news makes up just 3% of people’s feeds. By painting Meta as a leech, the government and media industry were kidding themselves as to how much the platform needed journalism in the long term. Cat videos and photos of your cousin’s wedding would suffice.
The code’s coercive contractualism created another problem: it incentivised clickbait. If Meta was meant to be compensating for the commercial value it extracted from content (as opposed to the public good of journalism), then the biggest contracts ought to go to the news outlets with the most posts and interactions, as this is what Meta monetises. Thus the largest media companies got the biggest deals, and Facebook’s news tab was filled with sensational stories about gruesome crimes and celebrity breakups.
And what about the organisations not covered by Facebook’s deals, such as The Conversation and SBS? What about the independent journalists on Substack? They, of course, weren’t important to the Morrison government — and Meta knew it, so it left them out.
Given these flaws, many are now unsympathetic to the media industry’s pet project. Indeed, some have questioned the code’s whole premise, with nominally left-leaning people making odd bedfellows with Mark Zuckerberg. In Crikey, Bernard Keane asked why the tech giants should be penalised for disrupting the advertising revenues upon which the media once relied, depicting media moguls as “gangsters whose rich target has stopped paying protection money”.
On the ABC, technology reporter James Purtill asked “why should a general-purpose communications service like Facebook have to prop up the news industry?” “It’s a bit like taking mining royalties to fund kindergartens,” QUT professor Axel Bruns told Purtill.
While I agree the code is flawed, I disagree with the notion that media proprietors are simply sore losers. It’s quite normal and justified for governments to make an industry pay for its “negative externalities”. Those who reject such an obligation — “that’s just capitalism” — should be ignored. Unfettered capitalism is bad, and we should regulate it.
Just as factories should be made to pay for their pollution, social media platforms should be made to address the mis- and disinformation their systems proliferate. This should not just entail stricter moderation, but also active investment in quality sources of information, especially when their businesses’ success has made such sources less independently viable.
Frankly, taking money from immensely profitable multinational corporations and directing it towards a public good is desirable, even absent an internal justification. We should take mining revenues to fund kindergartens.
The issue is the code funds the public good of journalism indirectly, via the dubious proxy of commercial value — which was convenient for certain large media outlets, which produce increasingly little “journalism” worthy of the name.
Plus, the Morrison government skipped over the obvious Economics 101 solution to negative externalities — taxes and public expenditure. Where a privatised arbitration system is complicated and inequitable, taxes on revenue are relatively simple and public spending can be targeted to the greatest need.
That’s why, before the code was even on the table, The Conversation’s editor Misha Ketchell (my then-boss) and I made a submission to the Senate inquiry into media diversity calling for “a fund that is arms-length from government to allocate contestable grants for innovative, quality journalism, in a similar manner to the Australia Council for the Arts” to be funded by “a tax levied on digital platforms (Facebook and Google) … should sufficient funds not be available through consolidated revenue”. Lawyer Lizzie O’Shea proposed some similar public-spirited alternatives.
Such a fund could be governed independently and give out grants based on the quality and public value of the proposed journalistic projects, as opposed to the ad revenue they generate for Zuckerberg. And the tech giants couldn’t just avoid their responsibilities by ditching news. The tax would apply regardless of how they generate their revenue.
Indeed, there is an argument for going further and requiring these social platforms to carry news prominently and pay for it. Their significant capture of audience attention alone justifies the imposition of content requirements, in the same manner as TV and radio stations. In Canada, misinformation has flourished on Facebook since news was banned. Meta should not be allowed to shrug off responsibility for such malign uses of its tools.
With the Albanese government looking likely to designate Meta under the code, we will probably go the way of Canada and become a news-free zone on Facebook. This would be Meta’s fault alone — it can well afford to cough up more cash. But the government should not stand idly by, nor carry on with Morrison’s model from sheer path dependency. They ought to go beyond the embattled code and contribute more public funding for what should be, at heart, a public good.
Disclosure: Private Media, the publisher of Crikey, has a news content licensing agreement with Facebook, which will expire following Meta’s funding commitment.
While I can understand the desire of people in the media industry for funding that makes their income more secure, some sort of levy on Facebook is not going to be the answer. If the management of Facebook don’t want to publish your journalistic endeavours, they should not be forced to. And if the users want to share news excerpts or links, then surely they (rather than Meta) should be paying?
The underlying problem here is not Meta or Alphabet, or TikTok or whoever. It’s the fact that the internet was envisioned as an academic resource and commercialisation has been bolted (also nailed, glued, velcro’ed, and other shoddy methods of attachment) on. Again, the problem isn’t the enormous corporations – it’s us, the users.
Crikey, The Guardian, News Ltd, The Conversation, Patreon… all try to solve the revenue problem in different ways. All approaches (including Crikey’s) are kludges and only work to varying degrees. Look, I subscribe to Crikey (hence my ability to comment). I read Crikey 5 times a week, read most of the articles. For this privilege I pay an annual subscription. But where’s the payment scheme for that one article I might want to read in The Saturday Paper or Justinian? How do I get occasional access without signing up as a subscriber? How much revenue does each site lose every day when someone clicks on a link, hits a paywall, and closes the tab because they’re not that interested?
What’s the solution? First we users need to be trained out of the “internet content should be free” mindset. Peers sharing stories or anecdotes is one thing, reading a professionally written article is another. Then we need a payment system (micro-transactions). You want to read the article? You pay for it. The lunch ain’t free! Actually, a takeaway is a good analogy – you go in, order a sandwich, pay and get the food. You don’t have to hand over a subscription for a year’s worth of sandwiches.
None of this is easy or quick, but it will be necessary eventually. You need a price listed before you continue. You need someone to take the money from you and distribute it to the site in question. Sites probably need to work on a price list differentiating their premium content from their clickbait. Not easy, but worth doing and a better way of doing things than governments taking money from one company and handing it over to another.
Hmm. No, don’t see that as a way forward.
Easily said, but while you do that you might as well solve Australia’s various addiction problems by training people not to want them either. Perhaps get the public to think of consuming advertising as bad for their health, like alcohol or tobacco. If people try hard to avoid exposure to advertising, the basis for the ‘free’ bits of the internet begins to crumble.
You pay for food because without it hunger is uncomfortable, then agonising and eventually you starve to death. Reading news articles is, however, discretionary. (Plenty of people, before literacy was common, went through their whole lives without reading any news, even when newspapers or similar were widely available.) Under your suggestion the wealthy would read as much news as they wanted, the poor would do without or with very little. Subscriptions have the great advantage that the marginal cost of each article read becomes zero. To go back to your food analogy, it is something like an all-you-can-eat buffet, although that’s even more like buying one print newspaper. Or a better analogy, it is like paying for your home to be connected to piped water where the major charge is the connection, and the charge for the water used is comparitively insignificant. If access to public interest journalism should be seen as a public good, then like clean water it should be available to all so far as possible. Your PAYG model for reading decent journalism would ensure the people who need it most have the least chance of seeing it. Which, to be fair, is the same as it ever was.
You’re right. Accurate news content should only be available for those who are able to pay for it. I’m sick of poor people thinking they have a right to know what’s happening in the world. /s
Pretty sure this is what Aaron Swartz died trying to fight.
Tend to agree, and if we can avert our gaze and balame game from OS social media sites we need to look at the elephant in the room.
Over decades we have been passively observing the active creation of a RW MSM PR cartel inc. three main players, that sucks the bandwidth from any diverse, deep and broad system to inform Australians; boiling frogs…… vs. hey look over there Fbook etc. yet other nations manage differently (esp. in EU where there is increasingly more and apt regulatory guard rails eg. anti-SLAPPs).
On paid access, think Slovenia’s capital Ljubljana’s all purpose transport etc. card can be used to pay for a joint subscription for access to multiple media outlets.
What a lovely thought. But why would any government, run by the sort of politicians we know and love, be even slightly interested in doing that? It’s right up there with all those other things they should do but never will, such as outlawing political donations and putting a stop to ministerial rorting for partisan politcal advantage.
Back in the real world, there’s a fine article in The Atlantic by Paul Farhi, ‘The Media Are Getting Easier to Push Around: At a time of financial weakness and flagging public support, government officials are emboldened to bully the press.’ Even with the First Amendment, independent news media in the USA that attempts real investigative journalism is getting hammered, and if that does not work it is getting bought and gutted by billionaires who want it to run propaganda and not news. We’re not so different, and our media is a lot more vulnerable thanks to our def—mation laws.
public spending can be targeted to the greatest need.
When did this happen? Be interesting to see the ratio of public good spending versus politically targeted spending.
There’s a good (long) piece over here, about the current supreme court case in the US about the government’s right to regulate social media, or does free speech trump all: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/did-google-facebook-and-amazon-endorse
I was never a fan of the news media bargaining code because it seemed too contrived, too definitional, and not based on any reasonable universal principles. At the time it seemed to me an impost that Facebook should be forced to carry news at all, if its editorial intent was not to, let alone have to pay for it. (I don’t have a Facebook account, so it doesn’t matter to me directly one way or the other).
However the article I’ve cited above, and yours here, have convinced me that Facebook should have to carry news, if it wants to have any cover at all as a common carrier, from the mean things that it users say (and it does). As a common carrier, it should carry all who aren’t actually breaking the law or otherwise misbehaving (there’s an increasingly blurry line around misinformation and disinformation that is worthy of arguing about). To block “news” requires defining and identifying “news”. And to me that seems increasingly fraught. After all, you would be hard pressed to describe most content on Crikey as “news”, as it’s mostly opinion and commentary on other people’s actual reportage. Good and worthwhile for the most part, but…
To block news certainly seems like an editorial decision that say, a publisher would make – as opposed to a common carrier.
Carry news, pay for it as described in Ben’s article, and charge users to access if this is all too great an impost.
Otherwise be liable for suits brought in re the mean things that users post.
Except that Facebook (et al) is not a common carrier. A common carrier is a company who, subject to regulation by a government, provides a general and to some extent guaranteed service to the public. Telstra might be a common carrier, Facebook assuredly is not.
Bu de jure that’s just what it is, whatever opinion you may have of its de facto status. In US federal law Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act 1996 states:
‘that internet platforms — dubbed “interactive computer services” in the statute — cannot be treated as publishers or speakers of content provided by their users. This means that just about anything a user posts on a platform’s website will not create legal liability for the platform, even if the post is defamatory, dangerous, abhorrent or otherwise unlawful.’
You can easily find many articles about it, why it was enacted and why it should be reformed.
That’s certainly what they want you to believe, but that’s not what the law that they hide behind (the famous section 230) says.
It’s actually a really interesting argument, and one that is going to become increasingly important as more of life moves online. I don’t mind them exercising editorial control, but then they own what they publish, and should be accountable for everything. That way lies magazines and newspapers.
Or they can be a general communications mechanism and not beholden to what their users say, and then they’re common carriers and must carry everyone, and everyone may have an account.
It is, in a sense, the argument of the age. Both alternatives have bad outcomes, so one suspects that a workable future is going to be curly and not suit everyone or, indeed, anyone. The outcome that Meta, et all are arguing for is the one where anyone, politician or simply crank, can have their accounts cancelled with no recourse or avenue of appeal (to the courts or to government). Do we want a world where it’s near-impossible to argue against the status-quo? That’s not especially democratic, is it?
There’s nothing to stop news organisations having a social media page/presence. Pure and unadulterated straight from the source. The sun isn’t going to come up on a day when I trust third party providers/aggregators. Remember the purpose of SM algorithms.
On a related note, the MSM conspired to exclude MWM from the parliamentary press gallery. That’s where the algorithm starts. Exclusion of diversity and a fear of the truth.
The author is not for the first time completely conceptually confused.
Yes there are bazillions of negative externalities associated with social media (as indeed there are with Google) that yes ought to be regulated.
But the idea that these platforms are somehow stealing the revenue of news organisations by posting links to those organisations’ websites and sending traffic there FOR FREE is just completely afactual, and it is absolutely not any form of externality.
To state that “taking money from immensely profitable multinational corporations and directing it towards a public good is desirable, even absent an internal justification” is absolute juvenile nonsense. Policy works to effect behaviour change only when it is aligned with the behaviour you’re looking to disincentivise. You may as well say you’re going to use a mineral resources tax to fund better journalism, for all the sense it makes.
And it completely misses the opportunity to have a much-needed discussion around the ways in which tech companies ought properly to be regulated.
That discussion involves the creation of an effective GLOBAL regulator around issues such as privacy, online safety, advertising standards, etc. and national governments faffing around with performing industrial rent-seeking on behalf of politically influential industries purely because they are politically influential is both a travesty of governance, and a great way of ensuring the required global discussions never even find a table to get placed on.
But targeting Meta and Google to cover up the failings of a separate industry sector which is wholly responsible for its own malaise (and WHERE exactly is the quality journalism in the NineFax publications the rent-seeking dosh was supposed to have funded?) is just weird, internally-contradicted coporate socialism.
Governments are already funding journalism – that’s what the ABC is for. The other agenda that is being missed here is that organisation needs a root and branch cleanout at bopard level and an entire new mission statement that sees it cease aping all the content already available on commercial networks and gets back to the core business of public broadcasting – in depth current affairs and investigative journalism, state based current affairs, local news, ethnic language programming, big ticket local drama, arts programming, etc etc
Instead we get a tepid News corp lite, where every proper journalistic passion is stymied by false balance imperatives, pumping out cheap quiz shows, reality TV, real estate porn and 24 different digital radio stations nobody listens to.
Fix these things. Increase the tax base to do it however you see fit. regulate the bejeezus out of Google and Facebook, but don’t ask them to stump up for things on a totally spurious basis just because you’ve swallowed the whole jug of News Corp’s rent seeking Kool Aid.
Historically we’ve seen government defund and dumb down the ABC, that is quite deliberate and unlikely to change.
It may be possible to create protection for the ABC but I haven’t read or seen any ideas that do. I suspect it would allow the broadcaster to patrol its own boundaries and actively defend itself. ,which is currently friends of the ABC. It keeps it alive but that’s about it.
I don’t have a Facebook account and nor do I want one. But I would consider signing up for a social media account on a platform run by the UN. That is, a general carriage service rather than a private road.
Well explained and thank you,
“convenient for certain large media outlets, which produce increasingly little “journalism” worthy of the name.”while this may have suited a Morrison government nicely it provides no service to those that use it.
While I applaud many of the themes you have going here I suspect that this government has its hands tied when it comes to protecting fair argument and discussion.
It is protecting people from what purports to be fair and balanced information that very much isn’t.
This is the biggest problem of our age, I’d love to think a government could be smart enough to legislate for standards and funding for media, but I suspect the resistance would be astonishing in its ability to turn the policy into something that was anti competition and therefore unaustralian among other descriptions. I think buying a stake in free to air even if its dying would be more feasible. A government can help that but can’t be the owner or another SBS or abc , even to fund fair media.
I think it has to be in collaboration with the public service/universities etc but has to be privately supported also. That’s because msm isn’t just journalism, its a cultural enigma of its own and capitalism is very much ensconsed, msm must have competition or it doesn’t work by capitalism ‘s own standards. I deal with the unnecessary fearmongering and or envy that msm drives everyday, this control of politics and culture that unchecked capitalism has been allowed to build a nest in is extremely damaging.
Thank you for the article, some ideas , excellent.
Facebook, meta etc will put anything on their platforms an alternative to our oligarch owned msm will also be accepted and build likes according to the quality of its content.
Organised healthy competition, privately owned big enough to compete alternative is what is currently missing .