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:
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