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Meta, the News Media Bargaining Code, and the Selective Innumeracy of Australian News Industry Leaders

Now that the Australian federal parliament’s Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society has commenced its hearings, the question of Australian policy towards social media platforms has gained in prominence yet again. The Select Committee is conducting a somewhat poorly defined, multi-issue inquiry into several loosely linked topics, and part of its focus is on the future of Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC) – a policy which seeks to redirect some of the substantial revenues that digital media platforms generate from online advertising to the nation’s financially struggling, often unprofitable news publishers.

There are some serious issues with this idea, and with how the NMBC is constructed, and this already led to an eight-day ban of all news content on Facebook in 2021 that my QUT DMRC colleagues and I covered in previous research – and there’s every chance that government attempts to persist with the NMBC will result in news disappearing from Facebook and other platforms yet again, and this time for longer. In Canada, which made the fateful decision to essentially copy the NMBC’s approach in its legislation, news has been absent from Meta’s platforms since August 2023 now.

Anticipating such changes, I’ve recently accepted an invitation to discuss the NMBC and its consequences in an article for The Conversation, which was published a few days ago:

Axel Bruns. “If Meta Bans News in Australia, What Will Happen? Canada’s Experience Is Telling.The Conversation, 2 July 2024.

In addition, my colleagues and I in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society have also made our own submissions to the Select Committee – these should appear shortly on the Select Committee’s submissions site.

I will say that my involvement in these discussions is also prompted by the egregious selective innumeracy on these matters that has already become evident in the commercial news industry’s comments to the Selection Committee. This was demonstrated most blatantly recently by NewsCorp CEO Michael Miller, as reported in his own company’s media outlets:

European Scenarios for Future Conflicts

The final speaker in this final session at IAMCR 2024 is, appropriately enough, outgoing IAMCR President Nico Carpentier, whose interest is in expert imaginings of the future of conflict and communication technologies. He begins by outlining the patterns of conflict in a very broad sense.

Does Humour Belong in Politics? Fun in the Public Sphere

The second speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Nicholas Holm, whose interest is in the role of fun in the public sphere. In political communication, in fact, humour and laughter often appears out of place; in recent times, however, some playful and humorous elements have come to intrude into political discourse. How can we make sense of this?

Social Media in Political Campaigning in Nepal, Bangladesh, and West Bengal

It’s been a busy week, but we’ve reached the final session of the IAMCR 2024 conference in Christchurch, which begins with a paper by Samiksha Koirala and Soumik Pal on the use of social media in political campaigning in Bangladesh, Nepal, and India. They begin by noting the domination of South Asian politics by long-lived political dynasties; however, the emergence of social media as a campaigning space has begun to disrupt such structures.

How News on Twitch Challenges the Boundaries of Journalism

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Nicole Stewart. Her interest is in the presence of journalism in the informational backwaters of streaming platform Twitch; what functions do its streamers play in the delivery of news?

Good Journalism for a Post-Growth Society

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Yu Ling, whose focus is on news acceleration in China. This relates to the idea that news time in journalism has accelerated; this is part of the broader social acceleration in late modernity, and may be in conflict with the human pursuit of a good life: it threatens the resonance relationship between humans and the world they live in.

A Poetic Inquiry into Journalists’ Experiences of Covering the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Child Abuse

The second speaker at this IAMCR 2024 session is Lisa Waller, whose focus is on how Australian journalists have been converging institutionalised child sexual abuse in regional Australia, following a Royal Commission into such abuses. This takes the form of a poetic inquiry, which builds on transdisciplinary collaboration between journalism research and creative practice and enables a focus on the vivid details of the situated practices of journalism as they are lived in real life.

Patterns in the Coverage of the Norwegian Truth and Reconciliation Commission

And the final day at IAMCR 2024 starts for me with a session on journalism research. The first presenter is the wonderful Eli Skogerbø, whose focus here is on the media coverage of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the injustices perpetrated against the indigenous Sámi people in Norway. This work emerges from the Trucom research project, which importantly also involved Sámi researchers.

Chinese Disinformation Attacks in the 2024 Taiwanese Presidential Election

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Chen-ling Hung, whose focus is on Chinese disinformation attacks on Taiwan during the presidential election on 13 January 2024. Given its exposed position at the frontier between democracy and autocracy, Taiwan is most targetted by foreign disinformation attacks, yet remains a democratic country with the highest level of press freedom in Asia; there is considerable social awareness of disinformation challenges.

No Backfire Effects from Factual Corrections to Misinformation in Taiwan

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Victoria Chen, whose interest is in the influence of political misinformation in Taiwan. There are frequent presidential, parliamentary, and mid-term elections in Taiwan, and political misinformation about political parties is common. This manipulates public opinion, and can lead to polarisation and unconscious bias – the key question here is how people believe in and deal with such misinformation.

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