facebook's australian tantrum
I had to restart my computer when I sat down to write this newsletter. It doesn’t have a ton of processing power, and it buckled under the heft of a 300,000+ row spreadsheet running in the background and 25 open tabs in my web browser, the carnage of a busy week with little time to sit and digest the coverage I collected in a few idle minutes scrolling social media. “Google Chrome didn’t shut down correctly,” a popup reminded me as I reopened the program. “Restore closed tabs?”
Begrudgingly, knowing that these tabs are likely to meet the same fate as the half-read, forgotten back issues of The New Yorker sitting on my bedside table, I click “restore,” vowing that this time I will read and clear my tab collection before the weekend is through.
My browsing habits are not unique; aside from listening to NPR, which I do every morning and most evenings, most of the news I consume comes directly through Twitter (or, rarely, through Facebook). I follow people I trust and read their posts and the stories they share. I consume breaking news as it’s happening — often by frantically refreshing a few key outlets’ homepages — and read the more thoughtful stuff when I have time. I wish it were a slightly more considered cycle that included an hour with physical print materials and a hot cup of coffee at my kitchen table in the morning light, but most days that’s not reality for me, nor is it realistic or even desireable for millions of other people whose careers don’t involve the news, politics, or the internet.
Social media platforms do offer the average person access to news and information they may not have otherwise consumed. In the process, though, they’ve also upended the news industry and incentivized the spread of disinformation for power and profit.
[🎵 Mood music: “The Arbiter” from the 1984 musical Chess, featuring hilarious music video 🎵]
The Australian Government is attempting to correct this imbalance, and it’s not going very well. This week, the country’s parliament moved towards adopting the News Media Bargaining Code. The law would force companies like Google and Facebook to pay news organizations for links shared on their platforms. I like the way Casey Newton, author of the newsletter Platformer, describes the situation:
For years now, Google and Facebook have benefited from being able to package and display links to journalism from publishers around the world. At the same time, the companies built a duopoly in digital advertising, bleeding publishers of revenue and leading to tens of thousands of journalism layoffs around the world. The Australian bill seeks to restore balance to this equation by forcing the platforms to compensate publishers directly for their work.
The bill is well-intentioned, but not particularly even-handed; if the platforms don’t reach deals with individual publishers, media outlets can then seek arbitration to be paid for their content. In this scenario, the publisher and the platform in question would each make an offer on the price of the content, and the arbiter chooses one of the two offers. Platforms want to avoid this scenario as it favors publishers, so they’ve been negotiating hard with Australian publishers for months.
Google reached several deals with Australian news organizations, including Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp. Facebook simply decided to remove all news links from its platform before the bill had even passed the Australian Senate. On Thursday morning, Australian users could no longer share news links, and a long list of non-news organizations — from its own fact-checking partners, to regional health authorities, to women’s abuse hotlines and support services — were affected by the ban. It could have grim consequences, as Julie Leask, a vaccine expert at the University of Sydney told the Sydney Morning Herald: “Three days before our vaccine rollout, Australians using Facebook as their primary source of news can no longer get access to credible information.”
Facebook, in trying to negotiate, flex its muscle, and demonstrate its power, has once again made itself look downright evil. Van Badham, an Australian playwright, political commentator, and activist, has described the platform’s actions as a “tantrum,” and I agree. Yes, Facebook has the right, as a private platform, to host or block whatever content it likes. As The New York Times’ Kara Swisher wrote, if you cheered Amazon Web Services’ decision to ban Parler after the Capitol insurrection, you cannot criticize Facebook for deciding to ban Australian news: “If Facebook does not want to pay for news links, and the links are not core to its business, it should not have to.”
I do not argue that Facebook lacks the right to make such business decisions, but I do believe that the platform could have acted in a more democratic way, especially if it wants people to buy into the idea that it is on the side of truth, nuance, and civil discourse. Instead, this stunt has gone the way of Facebook’s other attempts at self-regulation, which is to say: poorly thought out and even more shoddily implemented, with real implications for public health, public safety, and democracy hanging in the balance.
That being said, the Australian law is not going to be the Magna Carta of social media regulation. Tiffany Li, a tech attorney and legal scholar specializing in freedom of expression, notes that “laws like this one can have long-reaching effects on the future of the internet. While Big Tech companies may be able to pay fees and comply with cumbersome regulations, small startups, nonprofits and individual users will likely be unable to compete.” The law also doesn’t do much to actually address media concentration, as Lenore Taylor, the editor of The Guardian in Australia writes: “even if you believe firmly that the government should act to increase media diversity…it doesn’t take too much thought to understand the danger of setting a precedent where a government uses competition law to decide which individual publishers it wants to favour and which it does not.”
Taylor suggests that Australia prove Facebook wrong, investing in small outlets and helping journalism flourish without the tech giant. It would take a robust, concerted effort, the likes of which no country (to my knowledge) has launched. Even then, how would publishers match the ubiquitous, targeted reach that Facebook provides? And what would be left in its stead? Cat videos and baby pictures, yes, but also the junk news and commentary that brought us the January 6 riots at the US Capitol and populists around the world. As anyone who has ever monitored a Facebook Group knows, it’s not just links to shoddy off-platform sites that users share; it’s mostly badly photoshopped “news” memes that erroneously claim Nancy Pelosi’s son-in-law is a member of antifa and led the Capitol insurrection, that Trump won the 2020, election, or that Kamala Harris is secretly a man.
Cats, kids, and conspiracies: that’s the type of content Facebook has incentivized for years. And if Canberra, Facebook, and the Australian media don’t reach a deal, it will only gain greater dominance in the Australian information environment.