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Facebook Bans, Then Un-Bans News In or Out From Australia

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Facebook's Sign-In page. The part about connecting to the world is crossed out, with a note reading, "Unless you're Australian." In the U.S. alone, 16,000 journalists lost their jobs over the past year. Journalism is suffering around the world, as decreasing revenue from ads and increased competition from disinformation sites threaten quality journalism.

In Australia, The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission decided to combat this by going after advertisers. While Australian news sites are faltering, Facebook and Google are explosively successful. The two, through monopolistic practices, have managed to maintain near monopolies of social networking and search. However, they have a nearly outright duopoly in one common area: ads. Websites usually have to use or accept ads from one or both of these sources to get by. While they scrape pennies together from views and clicks on those ads, Google and Facebook remain some of the wealthiest companies in the world.

To combat this, Australian politicians wrote up a law. Basically put, if Google or Facebook were to host links to Australian news sites or republish Australian publishers’ content, they would have to pay those publishers. They could reach deals on their own, but a government arbitrator would decide which proposal to accept if there were disputes. Facebook and Google would each have to inform publishers of changes to their algorithms that could hurt readership 28 days in advance.

Google, largely reliant on the news, went along with the deal, and has struck deals with a number of companies. They found a way to increase Google interaction through a “News Showcase” feature.

Facebook, however, decided to ban all news in Australia. No Australian user could post news from any source, both Australian and international, and no users could share news from an Australian publisher.

Effectively, Facebook has banned all news in or out of Australia on its platform. Only days later, they reversed that decision.

News Media Bargaining Code

The basis of the Media Bargaining Code is fighting a duopoly. Google and Facebook own the online ad space. They also send the most referrals to news websites, a struggling industry. While journalists struggle, Google and Facebook rake in money. Obviously, the percentage of the advertising revenue Google and Facebook share with publishers isn’t equatable if such large companies can make so much money from the same ads that can’t keep much smaller news websites afloat.

The plan is simple: if Google or Facebook host links to Australian news websites, they have to share some of their profits with those news publications. How much do they share? That’s less simple, and a point of contention. Platforms have a set time period to make a deal. The deals can be made without authorization of an Australian regulating body, but, if a deal cannot be made, a mediator steps in. This will be the Australian Treasurer, not a judge, not an unbiased source. In fact, they’re not allowed to negotiate. Instead, the pick a proposal from either the platform or the publisher. Seeing as the platforms are both large United States mega-corporations, and the publishers are struggling Australian businesses, it’s easy to see who they will likely side with.

Again, Facebook protested. While Google found a way to work with publishers, Facebook refused to. Then, they shut news down in Australia.

Facebook Banned the News

Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Hughes. The New York Times, Opinion, It's Time to Break Up Facebook

Left: Mark Zuckerberg. Photo Jessica Chou/NY Times. Right: Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook. Photo Damon Winter/NY Times.

 

So, rather than follow the new law, which still hasn’t gone into affect anyway, Facebook decided to block all news in Australia. It was more to send a message than it was to avoid any legal trouble. The message was quite clear. No one in Australia could share news. Users wouldn’t see international news and they couldn’t share it either. Australian publishers couldn’t share anything, and all of their old posts were hidden. No news was getting in or out of Australia via Facebook.

More Important Than They’re Saying

Facebook said banning the news was fair. According to Facebook, news makes up only 4% of their content, while they’ve driven 5.1 billion referrals to news websites. Still, those views aren’t making them money, in part because of Google and Facebook’s monopoly. There’s another detail Facebook’s not sharing, and that’s the news feed. Sure, only 4% of Facebook is news, but how much of that news drives interaction on Facebook? 39% of Australians report they get their news through Facebook, and 49% say they use it for COVID information. News is a huge part of Facebook’s business, despite making up only a small amount of their content.

Facebook has been working on a News Tab for the mobile app. It could roll out to web eventually. Right now, it’s a bit of a hack to enable, and only works on the mobile app in the U.S. and U.K. Facebook says they wanted to bring the News tab to Australia as well, but if that’s the case, why isn’t it a more finished product? Why do a rollout of a feature that you’re hiding from the public unless it’s supposed to be an excuse or band-aid for a problem you created? It sounds like Facebook is trying to tout what they’ve done for journalism, but what they’ve done is introduce something that is hidden from nearly all users. Perhaps intentionally so, as it could give more revenue to publishers instead of Facebook.

In 2016, Facebook tweaked their algorithm to reduce the amount of news people saw in their feeds. Despite that, many users use Facebook as a source of news. When that dries up, they’ll go elsewhere.

Or perhaps they won’t even realize the real news dried up right away.

Information Vacuum

A screenshot from ABC New's Facebook page. The Australian news site has an empty page after Facebook's ban.

When Facebook took down the news, they did so indiscriminately. It seemed they tried to use AI at first, however this lead to Facebook’s own page disappearing. Their next method wasn’t much better. Facebook took down sites that weren’t news sites, but were instead of vital importance for Australians’ health and safety.

Among the wrongly removed pages was the Department of Fire and Emergency Services Western Australia. It may be easy to forget for those in the United States, but it’s summer in Australia. Remember what last summer was like for Australia? The big news story of January, 2020? The Australian wild fires. You didn’t forget, did you? It was just over a year ago.

What a year.

During fire season, Facebook cut their users off from important alerts and information from the fire department. But there’s more. Because you remember the big news story after the Australian fires, right? That’s right, COVID-19! It’s still with us, folks, and more dangerous than ever! And if you were looking for information on COVID-19 restrictions or vaccination sites from ACT Government or Queensland Health, you were out of luck. Facebook removed those sites. They even took down the Bureau of Meteorology.

I suppose they’d rather people just look outside?

Facebook removed legitimate sources of news along with important sources of information. What they left behind was even more dangerous.

Disinformation Pages Flourish

“Misinformation spreads in a vacuum of factual information.”

– Professor Leask, adviser to World Health Organization (WHO)

The absolute smallest publishers were able to sneak by. I hate to insult myself, but, let’s be honest, this website could likely sneak under the radar. Still, only the absolute smallest news websites with few readers could sneak under the ban. But that was nothing in comparison to fake news sites. Facebook left websites for the spread of disinformation under the guise of news alone.

A page with over 200,000 followers lead by far-right figure Avi Yemini, who was previously banned on Facebook for hate speech and promoting the anti-lockdown movement, was still up on Facebook. One user posted (all text exact), “Omg you gus are the only news left for Australians .. all have gone.” On an anti-vaccination website with over 20,000 users, someone shared, “[The government] won’t be able to distribute their COVID-19 fear-mongering and propaganda to the Australian public.” These sites still self-defined on their pages as news. If Facebook had simply banned all websites that categorized themselves as news, they would have banned these fake news sites. Instead, they protected them.

Facebook wanted to fuel the chaos in Australia, and they did so with dangerous disinformation pages. The company showed its true colors once the real news was gone: a site for radicalization, hate speech, and conspiracy theories.

Facebook Brings News Back

The day the ban went into effect, the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) put a banner on their news homepage. Here, they directed users who missed seeing their posts on Facebook to their app. Users flocked to the App Store to download the Australian ABC News app. In fact, it became the #1 news app in the App Store overnight.

It was then that we began to realize that Facebook’s news ban could lead to more consumption of news from verifiable sources. Facebook, perhaps, realized that people can only stare in their phones for so long. If they’re not looking at Facebook, they’re not able to collect their data or show them advertisements. Facebook just pushed users to a competitor.

Alongside that, Australia’s government responded by tweaking the law. Platforms like Google and Facebook now have two months, twice the time, to form a deal with publishers. When making their decision during arbitration, the Australian government will take into account other deals Facebook may have made with similar publishers when making their decisions. This locks publishers in from setting prices far higher than other publishers for their content on Facebook, and could put smaller publishers at a disadvantage. These are small concessions, but, at this point, it was the excuse Facebook needed to turn the lights back on.

“Going forward, the government has clarified we will retain the ability to decide if news appears on Facebook so that we won’t automatically be subject to a forced negotiation. We have come to an agreement that will allow us to support the publishers we choose to, including small and local publishers.”

– Campbell Brown, Facebook VP of Global News Partnerships

In the coming days, news from Australia will be available around the world on Facebook again, and Australians will be able to get their news on Facebook… if they still want to.

I still prefer a simple RSS feed aggregator and apps for my news.

Where Should the Law Go?

This doesn’t have a singular answer. The truth is, there are multiple problems here, and, while they do interact, they’re not completely related:

  1. Facebook and Google control most of the ads on the web.
  2. Facebook and Google control what news most internet users see.
  3. News publishers have found revenue slipping due to poor ad revenue from Facebook and Google, as well as reduced viewership.
  4. People don’t pay for their news anymore, they expect it for free, and challenging that concept has proven next to impossible.

Considering these four things, it’s easy to see that there are two separate problems here, one of a duopoly on advertising, and another of revenue from advertising and a lack of paying customers. But people need the news. The same way they need fire fighters, schools, bridges, or healthcare.

You may have already figured out what I’m suggesting. Or, at least, one of the things I’m suggesting, as it’s only a small part of the solution to a much larger problem. Taxes and subsidies. This is what France has done, and it can be one part of solving the problem. First, ad revenue for for platforms like Google and Facebook are taxed. Then, that tax money is divided up in the form of subsidies for news companies.

A Small Part of the Huge Problem

It’s an imperfect solution. It solves the money issue, but not the problem of limited competition in social networks or the ad space. It doesn’t drive up readership, paying readership, that is, it only makes what little readership valid sources of news are seeing slightly more profitable. However, it does solve the problem that Australia is trying to fix as well, with one tiny difference: Facebook already agreed to it in France.

France’s law gives small publishers the same bargaining power and financial aid as the larger companies, as it does out tax money. Australia’s law doesn’t do that. If anything, Australia’s law will continue to benefit their largest publishers. In the case of Australia, that’s News Corp, former owner and founder of Fox News, as well as The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, NY Post, Barrons, The Australian, Sun, The Times, and many others. It’s Rupert Murdoch’s conservative news empire, spreading bias in the form of news wherever it goes, in varying degrees.

A Privacy Nightmare

Ads are terrible. Before the internet, ads weren’t so bad. Everyone got the same ones. Then a few companies got clever. Information on who was viewing the ads was vitally important. They found as much as they could about people and started figuring out patterns. Soon, ads were an entire industry driven by violating our privacy to send us hyper-targeted advertising. Google and Facebook will track where you’ve been, what you’re searching for, what you’re buying, what you’re buying with your credit card, where you travel throughout the day, who your friends are, what their interests are, what music you like, your gender, your sexuality, your race, religion, nationality, everything. They know everything about you, right down to your waist size.

You’re likely very uncomfortable with that. Who wouldn’t be? So what do you do about it? You block ads, block tracking cookies and trackers, and you use a VPN to confuse your location. Fire up Firefox, load webpages in different containers, and enjoy the fact that, to many networks, you just haven’t been online in a long time. But this means less revenue for the companies, the publishers, who have come to rely on those ads. Suddenly, they’re getting fewer ad impressions and fewer interactions with those ads. They’re making less money. All because their only options for advertising are these privacy violating measures. If advertising wasn’t so invasive, perhaps publishers could make more money from ads as people would be more likely to whitelist their websites.

But that would hurt the business of Facebook and Google. It would introduce the potential for competition. Companies would spring up that don’t need extensive information about individuals to deliver relevant ads. They could start off ready to compete with Facebook and Google. Soon, the tables would be turned, Google and Facebook would find themselves being more creative with revenue gathering while journalism enjoys increased funding through healthy competition in the ad space.

A lack of privacy due to Facebook and Google’s control over the advertising space is a huge part of the problem not only for journalism, but for all websites. Everyone is taking a hit on revenue to prop up this duopoly. If governments really want to make a difference on the web, they need to make it private again.

Chaos in an Already Bad Situation

Journalism has been struggling. Australia’s law was meant to help that, but it will likely only help large publishers. Frankly, it’ll mostly help Rupert Murdoch. It won’t reduce Facebook or Google’s duopoly on advertising. It won’t dramatically change the web. We need to break up big tech companies like Facebook and Google, as well as Apple and Amazon. We need to release the web from the stranglehold of monopolies. And we need to save journalism.

It’s too hard to write the news for profit. Only large companies are successful right now, and only because of their gigantic readership. Small competitors and local news can’t even begin to compete. We could subsidize the news, as we do other industries that are necessary but not profitable. We could try to cause a shift in advertising so ads can be a better source of revenue. The truth is, we have many options. While Australia’s plan doesn’t solve all of their problems, it well help some journalists, but not enough. It may even hurt small publishers. Instead, we have to focus on making the internet better for real news.

Otherwise the only news you get will be the kind of news that spreads on Facebook: fake news.

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