Are We Heading for Another Facebook News Ban?

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?

In February 2021, the (then) Australian federal government introduced a law called the News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC), whose development had been strongly opposed by Meta and Google in particular. Under the Code, the government could 'designate' large platform operators, which would force them into compulsory negotiations with news publishers aimed at determining payments to be made to news publishers in compensation (essentially) for lost advertising revenue. As soon as the law was passed, and even before the government made any decisions about designation, Meta banned all news (and news-like) content from Facebook in Australia, including both Australian and international news sources – such content could not be posted (by news outlets or ordinary users), all existing content became unavailable on the platform, and users could not engage with any such content. This covered all mainstream and minor news outlets, but also news-like content like the Australian Bureau of Meteorology or federal and state health departments (right in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic). We analysed the ban in detail here:

Axel Bruns and Dan Angus. “Facebook’s Australian News Ban: Threat, Impact, and Aftermath.” Long version of a paper presented at the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference, online, 12-16 Oct. 2021.

Eventually, after just over a week, the crisis was resolved when the government committed to not designating Meta under the NMBC, in exchange for Meta negotiating voluntary, confidential, time-limited payments with some news outlets. Some of these genuinely benefitted journalism (e.g. funding new jobs), some went straight to the company shareholders, and some – especially smaller – news outlets missed out on any payments altogether; all of it was completely lacking in transparency. What we do know, though, is that these agreements are now running out, and Meta has stated publicly that they will not be renewed. This is leading to new speculation now that the (new) Australian federal government could now decide to officially designate Meta under the NMBC, and thereby attempt to force it to enter into new negotiations with Australian news publishers.

The current news ban in Canada (since late 2023) is essentially a follow-up on the 2021 events in Australia. The Canadian bill is closely modelled on the Australian NMBC, and the Canadian government was advised in developing it by Rod Sims, former head of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) and one of the chief architects of the NMBC itself. In my view, Sims has consistently underestimated Meta's willingness to take drastic action to remove news content from its platforms rather than be forced to make ongoing payments to news publishers, and the mess in both Australia and Canada is very much of his making. Indeed, in support of his regulatory agenda he has cherry-picked from the scholarly literature about news on Facebook.

Sims's view, according to his public statements, is that news is too important on Facebook for Meta to be willing to remove news content altogether from the platform, but this is fundamentally wrong: having news on Facebook may be important for society, as research shows that many citizens now use Facebook and other social media to inform themselves about the news; but it is not at all important to Meta itself, since Facebook is also used for many other purposes which generate more engagement and revenue than the news. In fact, for Meta news and politics is often more trouble than it's worth: while it might generate some engagement and advertising revenue, it also generates plenty of controversial debate, abuse, hate speech, mis- and disinformation that are costly to moderate.

My sense is that having no news on its platforms would solve a lot of policy and political problems for Meta, so they're not at all unhappy about removing all news from their platforms permanently, as they've now done in Canada and may be doing again in Australia in future. That said, they would probably be just as happy to simply algorithmically downrank and hide news-related content to such a degree that it no longer causes them much trouble, rather than banning all news content outright. This is what they've recently announced they would do on Instagram and Threads, of course.

The original push for the NMBC in Australia (which really was the first such law world-wide) largely seemed to have come from Australian news publishers, and amongst those, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is the most influential in Australian politics by far. As elsewhere in the world, news publishers in Australia have long failed to find a business model that works for them in the digital and social media age, where users largely expect news to be free and advertising revenue predominantly goes to platform operators and not content publishers. The NMBC therefore was a fairly blunt attempt to address this business model failure by forcibly redistributing advertising revenue from search and social media platforms to news publishers; however, largely for political reasons it was constructed in such a way that it introduced compulsory direct negotiations between those two parties, at arms' length from government and regulatory agencies.

A more sensible approach may have been for the federal government to take a cut of the tax revenue generated from platform operators, and to redistribute that money fairly and transparently across quality Australian news media – however, especially the Murdoch press would also have been strongly opposed to any mechanisms that would have required them to prove the journalistic quality of their content, or might have distributed revenue to their competitors in public service media or emerging born-digital news operations. (Plus, this mechanism also assumes that the major platforms actually pay any meaningful tax in Australia, which may or may not be the case.)

So, that is the NMBC we ended up with; in my view, it is a little as if government had decided that, instead of taking tax windfalls from mining revenues to fund the health system, they would prefer the mining companies to negotiate directly and in secret with hospitals about how much money to pay them.

If news content is downranked on Meta platforms, or banned altogether, what impact will this have?

For now, the question is what happens next. As and when Meta's existing payment agreements with Australian news media run out (which will start to happen soon, but will take some time to run its course since these agreements were all struck at different times), the Australian government can choose to designate Meta under the NMBC after all. If they do so, all remaining agreements between Meta and news media are immediately terminated (from what we know, this is a clause in all these agreements), and in my view it is also extremely likely that Meta will again ban all news content from its platforms in Australia immediately. At that point, Meta also has a solid legal argument for challenging any NMBC designation in the courts: why should it be forced to share revenue with news media if there is no more news content circulating on its platforms? So, designation will just speed up the process of news disappearing from Meta platforms, and won't help in making the Australian news industry more sustainable.

If the government chooses not to designate Meta, then the NMBC is effectively dead: it may still be law, but is no longer enforced on the leading platform operator even though that operator is no longer making even voluntary payments to any news publishers. The existing agreements between Meta and Australian news media will run their course and won't be renewed, and Meta will continue with its stated strategy of downranking and effectively hiding news and political content from its platforms in order to reduce its circulation (and thus the ability of such content to cause strife and generate moderation costs). The end result isn't so different from what would happen in the case of designation: news can still be found on Meta platforms if you look hard enough, but will largely disappear from most ordinary users’ feeds, and the financial situation of Australian news publishers is going to be much the same.

Apart from its impact on the financing of quality news content in Australia, my main concern here is for ordinary users of Meta platforms. These are the vast majority of people who don't actually care that much about following news and politics, and assume that important news will serendipitously find them because someone in their networks will share news content they find interesting enough. Historically, that assumption is correct: through the power of social networking, platforms like Facebook have been critically important in informing people with a low interest in the news about what's going on in the world. But Meta's downranking of the news and political content posted to its platforms will fundamentally undermine this as it reduces such serendipitous news encounters – so while it may not much affect those people who genuinely care about the news, and who will look for the news elsewhere if they can’t get it on Facebook, it is the vast majority of citizens who don't care who will be directly impacted upon by this, and that ultimately is a threat to democracy as such (even more so in Australia, where voting is compulsory and even those who abstain from news and political engagement will still have to vote in elections). Also, depending on how Meta actually defines news and politics and chooses what to downrank, it is possible that rumours, conspiracy theories, and other mis- and disinformation will continue to circulate unscathed while genuine news and political content is downranked; this would mean that news avoiders will be proportionally more affected by such deeply problematic content than they are at present.

Is the same likely to happen elsewhere, too?

As I've said, Australia's NMBC was essentially the first legislation of this type in the world, and subsequently copied by Canada – which also meant that Meta responded to the NMBC in the way it did (with a deliberately overreaching news ban) in order to warn off other governments from trying the same. Canada clearly didn't get that message, and as a result they've now lived with a Facebook news ban for half a year or so. I'm convinced that Meta will continue to use Australia as a test case for calibrating its response to similar policies elsewhere in the world – and that the Australian experience (of short-term negative PR from the 2021 news ban, but apparently very limited long-term consequences in terms of user attitudes or behaviours) has emboldened it to reduce the circulation of news on its platforms world-wide. The recent announcement about downranking news and politics on Instagram and Threads is a sign of this longer-term strategy – Meta is getting out of news as best it can without explicitly implementing an all-out news ban, and eventually (so it seems to think) this may save it from being caught up in controversies about 'fake news', conspiracy theories, politically motivated abuse and hate speech, etc.

What can journalists and news organisations do to respond to these developments?

I'm not sure I have an easy answer to this. The business model of mainstream journalism remains in a lot of trouble: there is growing revenue from subscriptions, perhaps, but this does not replace the amount of revenue from advertising that has been lost to the major platforms, and user commitment to subscriptions is very unevenly distributed and often benefits only the leading national and global publishers (New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, etc.) or distinct specialty born-digital outlets. That's great for those news sources, but doesn't guarantee a healthy and diverse supply of journalism. As commercial outlets struggle, merge, and reduce their workforces, this leaves more of the remaining space to be filled by news providers that operate outside of the commercial market: public service media like the BBC, the (Australian) ABC, or the CBC; largely endowment-funded semi-commercial media like The Guardian; but also state-sponsored propaganda outlets like Russia's RT and Sputnik.

One viable solution to this is more government support for public-interest journalism (even including the model I sketched out earlier: taking tax revenue from platform companies and redirecting it to support quality journalism), but – like other forms of publicly funded media – this also raises various problems: how can we ensure that such publicly funded journalism remains free of government interference (this can work, but both ABC and BBC are also examples of occasional anticipatory self-censorship designed to keep government funders happy); how can we determine what journalism is in the public interest and deserves to be supported by taxpayer money; how do we distribute this fairly across established and emerging, legacy and born-digital outlets to encourage journalistic quality as well as innovation; who is ‘we’ in all this, and how do ‘we’ keep these decision-making processes from being captured by political interests?

And having said all this: journalists and their news content must also continue to go where the majority of the audience is, and that’s on social media. Voluntary self-enclosure behind paywalls and subscription systems may be financially sensible, but such paywalled news serves only a very small subsection of the population, while the remainder are left to their own devices in spaces where – in the worst case – only hearsay, rumours, conspiracy theories, and mis- and disinformation continue to circulate. If journalism retreats only to those spaces where it is commercially viable, society (and democracy) overall will suffer. We must find a way to bring the news to those citizens who are not actively looking for the news – even if this means actively working against the steps that platforms like Meta are taking to make this more and more difficult.