Mark Zuckergerg, head of Facebook, and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg
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You can’t say Australia wasn’t warned. Last September, Facebook responded to Canberra’s plan to make tech giants pay for news content with a threat, or perhaps a promise: if the current draft becomes law, we will be forced to ban all Australian news from our service.
That has not happened, but the House of Representatives did approve the bill on Wednesday. That seems to have been enough for Facebook, which hit the nuclear button in the small hours of Australia’s morning.
As of that time, Australian news publishers are banned from posting on Facebook and users across the world will be prevented from sharing their links and posts. What’s more, Australian users will be unable to share any news at all, no matter its origin – assuming that Facebook’s automated filters function correctly. Instagram will not be affected.
It is a radical piece of brinksmanship, with little precedent in the company’s 17-year history. It contradicts chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s stated mission to "connect the world" and increase free expression. It also cuts against the company’s historical pattern of maximising the content on its service, even when that causes trouble.
Facebook seems to be hoping that the Australian government and media will be forced into concessions, perhaps because of outraged audiences or perhaps because their money starts to dry up. Sending a message to other countries may be another motive, given that executives have made similar (if less plausible) threats in the EU.
This morning, I had a constructive discussion with Mark Zuckerberg from #Facebook.
He raised a few remaining issues with the Government’s news media bargaining code and we agreed to continue our conversation to try to find a pathway forward.
— Josh Frydenberg (@JoshFrydenberg) February 17, 2021
The company’s argument is that Canberra "fundamentally misunderstands" social media, which gives news outlets access to millions of users without any fee. It says that journalism has a "minimal" upside for its business, marking about 4pc of the content its users see on their news feed, and that it has no obligation to pay for what it "didn’t take or ask for".
There is also a fair case that the law will function mainly as a subsidy for Australia’s clubby media industry, which is among the most concentrated in the world. It will particularly benefit Rupert Murdoch’s globe-spanning News Corp, which controls an estimated 52pc of the newspaper market, 27pc of free-to-air and 27pc of online news.
In narrow terms, Facebook may be right: publishers do depend on it to reach their audiences, and the network would probably be fine without them. But here Facebook itself seems to "fundamentally misunderstand" its own role in the media landscape.
Most publishers would rather not need Facebook so much. Its ever-changing algorithms are hard to second-guess, and frequently suspected of political bias. One lawsuit, which Facebook agreed to settle in 2019 for $40m (£29m) without admitting wrongdoing, accused it of inflating video viewing statistics by as much as 900pc, supposedly skewing some outlets’ strategic bets.
Yet for years, traditional media felt it had no choice. Facebook has succeeded in centralising users’ attention, and therefore the advertising market. That process laid waste to the old news business model, crashing advertising prices and making Facebook a global hyper-gatekeeper.
Some would say that this is fair dinkum, arguing that Facebook won because people like to use it and that it cannot be blamed for massive historical trends unlocked by the internet. Others, such as the US Department of Justice, say it achieved its dominance through unfair means, and many accuse it of wrecking democracy along the way.
In some sense it does not matter who is right. Of Australia’s roughly 19m adults over 14, more than 17m use Facebook. Social media is the country’s third biggest news source after TV and radio. Some theorists argue that Facebook is so big it is effectively a public utility, not just a private concern free to do as it please – and that is what makes this moment so dangerous.
Dig into the criteria that Facebook will use to define what is "news" and it’s easy to see where misinformation peddlers could find loopholes. Its machine learning systems have been trained to search for features that fake news sites often lack, such as clear citations and editorial transparency.
Anyway, much of the news now shared on Facebook comes in the form of images – screenshots of articles, videos or tweets that may obscure the identity of the original author and make fact-checking harder. Conspiracist movements such as anti-vaxxers often use this as a tactic to evade censorship. Will Facebook’s anti-news robots catch that too?
The company’s history provides few good omens, with automated systems struggling to reliably recognise political groups or adverts. Indeed, the robots already appear to be malfunctioning, hitting public health pages, firefighters, trade unions, domestic violence services and the national weather office.
The BOM's Facebook page was restored at approx. 12.30pm AEDT today.
While social media is one way BOM engages with the community, it's important to get the latest weather and warnings information directly from https://t.co/4W35o8i7wJ or the #BOMweather app https://t.co/waAsVeWsu7
— Bureau of Meteorology, Australia (@BOM_au) February 18, 2021
By contrast Facebook will have no trouble recognising established media companies, and probably credible smaller outlets too. That creates a risk that the entire network will be skewed towards misinformation and conspiracy theories at exactly the time when clear facts about Covid and vaccines could mean the difference between life and death.
If neither side gives in, this will be a living experiment into how powerful Facebook really is – as well as whether there is life after Facebook for publishers attempting alternative business models. Yet the cost of those answers may prove far higher than mere missed revenue.
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