Over the past month, Meta has been in the news again for its troubled relationship with news and news publishers in Australia and elsewhere, and several media outlets have asked me to provide some commentary on recent developments. Two major new announcements from Meta prompted this: first, the news that it would not renew its agreements with some Australian news publishers to voluntarily share a small amount of its advertising revenue with them; and second, the announcement that it would progressively downrank news content on Instagram.

This follows on, of course, from the brief ban of all news content on the Australian Facebook in February 2021, after the federal government introduced a law, the News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC), intended to compel Meta and other search and social media platforms to share some of their advertising revenue with news publishers; and from a similar, still ongoing news blackout on Facebook that has been in place in Canada since August 2023 after its parliament passed a bill that was strongly influenced by the Australian NMBC.

I had an opportunity to discuss the Australian news ban and its implications in a foreword I contributed to my friend Jonathon Hutchinson’s new book Digital Intermediation: Unseen Infrastructure for Cultural Production, which I’ve now made available separately here as well. Drawing on Jonathon’s terms, the news ban clearly demonstrates Meta’s power, as a key digital intermediary, over the flow of news and information, and its ability to materially affect this flow within hours; however, the News Media Bargaining Code also provides a cautionary example of how not to go about curtailing that power – for various reasons that have much more to do with politics than policy, it is, in the end, a very poorly designed mechanism, as Australia and Canada have by now found out. The foreword article is available here:

Axel Bruns. “Digital Intermediation, for Better or Worse.” Foreword to Digital Intermediation: Unseen Infrastructure for Cultural Production, by Jonathon Hutchinson. London: Routledge. xv-xxiii.

In the following, I’m going to share some responses I’ve provided to one of the journalists who approached me about the ongoing NMBC saga. There was too much here to use in a news article, but the query was useful in prompting me to outline my views on Meta’s actions in response to the NMBC.

What caused the Australian Facebook news ban?

The next speakers in this AoIR 2023 session are Lauren Rouse and Mel Stanfill, whose interest is in fan communities on Tumblr. The latest overall demographic information for fandom communities is now ten years old, which is not particularly helpful; the team therefore developed a survey covering user demographics that was distributed via the r/Fanfiction subreddit, Tumblr, and Twitter; fans are still mostly cisgender women, but nonbinary gender identities and bisexual, asexual, and queer sexual orientations now dominate in this community.

After a very enjoyable pre-conference on social media election campaigns, it’s now time for the main event to start: Sonia Livingstone’s keynote will open the ECREA 2022 conference, the first in-person ECREA conference since 2018, and the first in a Nordic country. Sonia’s focus, and indeed that of the conference overall (the overall theme is “Rethinking Impact”), is on the pathways to impact for scholarly research, with particular focus on scholarly engagement with the United Nations.

The UN buildings in Geneva are impressive, intimidating, and often empty. Entering the UN compound remains unusual for researchers; yet the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child had recognised the impact of digital media on children’s lives, and in 2014 required scholarly advice on its further research agenda. This also involves consultation with children – a task that is both fascinating and demanding. But what do we as media and communication scholars know about digital media that is of value to the UN and its policy-makers?

The UN process works through a set of documents that are called “General Comments”, which set out the current situation; this is informed by a consultation process involving the various stakeholders. The General Comment addressing the impact of digital environments on the rights of children took a substantial amount of time to evolve, and was published only in 2021.