As I predicted, Facebook has walked back its news content ban in Australia. It banned Australian users from sharing news content, it banned news from Australia being shared worldwide, and perhaps most egregiously, it banned Australian Pages, not all of which were actually Pages of news media.
But I’m not happy to be proven correct.
Spinning the story
Everything Facebook has done in the past week has been disingenuous, hostile, and a PR stunt. They absolutely didn’t have to do anything. The Media Bargaining Code was not yet law (explained in more detail here)—it passed the House and still had to go through the Senate. This was a public outrage campaign intended for Australians to show wrath towards the government. I would argue this did not go down the way Facebook hoped it would, but since Facebook has removed the ban, suddenly the story has become a victory for Google (seriously bizarrely, considering they just bargained to give AUD$125 billion to five Big Media companies) and the government, which is completely untrue (not all media publications overseas have seen through this either).
Facebook’s talking points are just … empty. Publishers might make money from the clicks given to them by Facebook, but it’s not that simple. The following analogy is on point:
Imagine you loaned your car to a friend who then started to use it for their ride-share business, but didn’t want to pay for it. To start, they promised to drive you (in the car that you paid for) wherever you wanted to go ‘for free’. As time went on, they would only drive you places that suited them, unless you paid. You could always take your car back, but by then they’d imposed an outrageous toll on the road that you use to get to work every day.
The mainstream media is spinning on this too—it makes big media companies like 7 and 9 look like victims and doesn’t show Facebook as the threatening menace to democracy and society that it is. There’s an interesting and compelling argument that monopolies reproduce themselves—when a monopoly forms, all the other participants in the supply chain have to monopolise or lose out, so the press, already highly concentrated, is doing just that. But the real people who lose are the small, regional media players who likely aren’t going to be paid.
The mainstream media has portrayed the Code as a “link tax”, which it is not. And the Code (and clearly a reason why this has not been reported in the mainstream media) does not benefit journalism. The Code allows for a form of arbitrated collective bargaining to correct an imbalance of negotiating power as a result of a monopoly. Big Tech like Google and Facebook all regularly lie about the reach, performance, engagement of their ads, so they rig markets, price-gouge, and collude. And they weaken publishers, not just advertisers, because ad-tech spending is a bubble even if the data shows the spend isn’t worth much at all.
Publishers do get ripped off by Google and Facebook, and when they complain, Google and Facebook just use their combined search and social and ad tech to retaliate. This would be forbidden under the Code, and it would force Big Tech to be more transparent about the data it harvests from publishers and how it uses that data.
But who are the publishers? Well, that’s up to the government, and guess who the government is cozy with. Publishers report on the government, and the government decides whether the publishers can participate in negotiations. So while the arguments about the Murdoch media are likely credible, there’s something even more fundamental in this media vs government conflict of interest. (For the record, I firmly believe social media platforms are publishers as well. The key is in the word itself, ‘media’.)
So the Australian government is being lauded for supporting journalism. Be honest, neither Facebook nor the government is doing so, and the Code will just continue to concentrate power in the hands of the few. And it worries me that this is very tick-the-box of the government and not many other reforms will happen.
The good thing for the social media consumer is we get less clickbait. I don’t think it is good we get news from social media generally because let’s be honest (and I do this too), we only read the headlines. But I also live in reality and realise something like 40% of Australians get their news from Facebook (I’m over on Twitter for the most part though).
More fundamentally though, there’s a reason we deplatform rather than move to different social media platforms. By taking away real news sources, the potential for disinformation to float around Facebook without constraint is very, very real, and I think that for Facebook to say that they support journalism and not misinformation, is a spectacular abdication of responsibility and power.
The thing is, this is Facebook’s business model (and also explains their infuriating refusal to add features people actually want). More engagement means higher ad rates means better stock prices. So they won’t do anything about disinformation and fact-checking. And the Code doesn’t do anything about that either, other than leaving a gaping hole for blatant lies.
And Facebook would rather a huge showdown over something like negotiations rather than scrutiny over its monopoly under antitrust law. Because Facebook (and Google) relies on and collects most of its data when users are on products that they don’t actually control and users don’t intend to interact with them.
More questions, no answers
I also have a huge question about what Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg knew, and whether he knew Facebook was going to suddenly ban news content in Australia, considering the Sunday before the ban went into effect on the Thursday, before being walked back a week later.
From what I can tell, Facebook used both its Page Categories function and algorithms to determine which Pages to ban. But it blocked Pages like 1800 RESPECT from advertising and, in the middle of bushfire season and a pandemic, Pages from the Bureau of Meteorology and Health Departments in South Australia, Queensland, and Western Australia. Not to mention other small businesses and NFPs who are not news media at all.
Facebook argued it was because of the broad interpretation that could be applied to the term ‘media’ in the Code I call that out. This was absolutely deliberate and CRUEL. They were very clearly trying to teach the Australian government, and governments around the world, a lesson. Australia is a comparatively small market (plenty of businesses scope out Australia before launching in other global markets), so it doesn’t matter to Facebook if we’re cut off from the rest of the world. And their algorithms are not that terrible.
And it left social media managers in the lurch without any warning at all considering the Bill passed the House pretty late the night before the ban, many of whom are not professionals or have harm minimisation training, filling out paperwork and stressing out to employers, and now all of that is for nothing. It doesn’t hurt Facebook, nor does it hurt the big media, nor does it hurt the (not completely resourceless) government. In fact, somehow the government is being praised, which I just do not understand at all.
And it was hilarious and also absolutely not hilarious to see every news outlet and media organisation panicking and asking everyone to follow on email, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Reddit, TikTok, and download the app too while you’re at it! For all this talk of moving from social media to websites, has it not occurred to anyone that your website also literally depends on another Big Tech infrastructure called Google indexing???
What next?
What should really happen is the duopoly of Facebook and Google needs to be broken up (these two Big Tech companies are bigger than everything else, though I’d argue Amazon is also up there). Privacy laws (including the EU GDPR) have been strangled because they were too late, and other competitors have been stifled because they weren’t economically viable. And so the power of Facebook and Google just keeps accruing, and public interest journalism seems to be dying an even faster death. An awful choice sounds about right.
I’ve seen arguments that Google has capitulated and Facebook did the right thing. So Australia’s Code could be seen in legislation elsewhere around the world. Firstly, while democracy does seem to be in a bit of a downward spiral right now, I do think there are smart people in policy, if not in government overseas. And, I actually think Google has a lot more to bargain with (in terms of back-end infrastructure and data at least) and are playing a much longer game. Google has a monopoly on advertising; Facebook has a monopoly on networks. There’s a difference between the two that most people miss out on.
We’re the one’s being squeezed. We the people have been gaslit by Facebook. We counter monopolies through the democratic state. But they’ve failed to counter this monopoly since the Internet began (and remember, the Internet is supposed to democratise literally everything). And remember, the rest of the world is watching.
Yes, something is better than nothing. Every little bit counts until we get to the point where we can break up this monopoly. And I do think scalping as much money off Facebook and Google as possible is a good thing. But now Facebook’s bargaining will happen behind closed doors, and
At the end of the day, neoliberalism has failed us, in more ways than one, and it has taken a long time for us to wake up to the fact that it’s not just bad for economic trade and social welfare, it’s also bad for democracy itself. Big Tech has mined our personal lives, even arguably our very own selves, for immense profit, at a huge cost to society. So the government is just leaning into this system of surveillance capitalism. Nothing has really changed.
So the people of Australia have been thrown under the bus by everyone else and no one seems to recognise it. Who wins? Who loses? Who tells the story? The big media, that’s who.