News
9 July, 2024
Time for Meta to face music
By Andrew Schreyer, CPA President: Last month, Country Press Australia (CPA) – the largest representative association of newspaper publishers in Australia, appeared before a joint hearing in Canberra into social media and its impacts on Australian society.
The hearing was convened out of concerns about the negative impacts social media platforms have upon our community, including the recent decision by Meta to no longer pay news publishers for content posted to the company’s platforms.
That announcement has been met with anger, frustration, disappointment, worry and concern among news publishers, and the news industry shares the concerns of the broader community over Meta’s outrageous behaviour that has had such a damaging impact on so many sections of the community.
Facebook particularly has evolved into an antisocial entity that has provided a haven for toxicity, fake news, scams, blackmail, cyberbullying, doxing, revenge porn, trolling, deep fakes, political interference, surveillance capitalism and the spread of mis and disinformation that has caused so much damage within our communities.
The live streaming of massacres, images of unrealistic so-called ‘beautiful’ people and conspiracies are also part and parcel of social media today.
In the case of the news industry, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland has said Meta’s decision to no longer pay for news content in a number of jurisdictions “represents a dereliction of its commitment to the sustainability of Australian news media,” a comment CPA endorses wholeheartedly.
Meta has shown complete disdain for Australian media outlets, the News Media Bargaining Code and the Australian Government by announcing its intention not to renew agreements with publishers.
Meta has been deemed an unavoidable trading partner, and as such, is expected to conform to the same standards and expectations as the rest of us.
In short, we believe Meta fails to meet those standards, and that the company long ago ceased to be just a provider of social media platforms.
Just last month, the US Surgeon General called for social media to have warnings attached to it over mental health concerns for users.
It’s one of the great paradoxes of our time that rather than tackle unacceptable elements and accept responsibility for the damage caused by providing the habitat for such scornful matter, Meta has instead opted to diminish the presence of the real news and of truth by continually adjusting its algorithms and rendering public interest news content more and more difficult to find.
The federal government has the News Media Bargaining Code at its disposal, a mechanism established to ensure social media platforms can be held to account and that media organisations are treated fairly in their dealings with the tech giants.
Should the government designate Meta under the Code, the company is likely to block news sites from its platforms just as it has done in Canada. And in that country, it’s been regional and rural publishers who have been negatively impacted the most.
In this instance we encourage the government to insert a ‘must carry news’ clause in the code forcing them to negotiate with publishers or impose a 20 per cent tax on Meta’s Australian revenue.
If Meta refuses, they should be banned from Australia.
To suit its narrative and justify its agenda, Meta claims its users don’t go to Facebook for news, however the University of Canberra’s Digital News Report: Australia 2024 released in June found that 49 per cent of Australian users of Facebook use it for news and one in four rely on it as their main source of news.
It suits Meta to claim Australians don’t use the company’s platforms to read the news and for it to be allowed to continue to ride roughshod over our communities.
