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:

Mr Miller said the claim by Meta and other social media companies that their users were not interested in news was “absolutely not true”.
“Meta says that news makes up less than three per cent of what people see on Facebook. That is also not true,” Mr Miller said.
“Actually 48 per cent of Australians get their news using a Meta platform.”

Miller’s argument was equivalent to wondering why, if 48% of Australians are getting tomatoes from Woolworths, tomatoes still make up on 3% of the total range of products sold by the supermarket (and I have the great Nancy Baym to thank for that analogy). The answer here is as obvious to us as it should be to Miller in the case of Facebook: we also go to the shops for a wide range of other products – just as social media users are using these platforms for many other purposes than to follow the news.

The news industry chose to give its product away for free when it began to publish its news online in the mid-90s; as a result, audiences now expect news to be free and are unwilling to start paying for it again. The fact that advertising revenue is going mostly to the major platforms simply reflects the fact that these general-purpose platforms have much larger user bases than news outlets (which are of interest only to a fraction of Web users). No surprise there. Of course they're more interesting to advertisers than news sites; whatever the news industry keeps claiming, social media didn't somehow siphon away advertising revenue from their sites. That advertising money was never going to news sites in the first place.

That's not to say Australia shouldn't provide subsidies for genuine quality journalism if that journalism doesn't pay for itself; of course it should. But we need to do this on a principled, transparent basis, not through the frankly weird NMBC mechanisms. The explicit aim here must be to support public-interest journalism: we can’t simply subsidise without checks and balances. News media must provide an undertaking to use such subsidies appropriately – and this needs to be audited rigorously, e.g. by ACMA. Australian commercial news media will inevitably hate this model: it holds them to the higher standards that so far apply only to our public-service media organisations, ABC and SBS – which not coincidentally are the most trusted media outlets in the country.

A stronger quality framework for private-sector news media would also be extremely popular with the general public, so this is win-win-win, really. Make it happen already.