Facebook will block Australians from sharing local and international news on Facebook and Instagram if the news media code becomes law, the digital giant has warned of a landmark plan to make digital platforms pay for news content.
The sharing of personal content between family and friends will not be affected and neither will the sharing of news by Facebook users outside of Australia, the social network said.
The mandatory news code has been backed by all the major media companies including News Corp Australia, Nine Entertainment and Guardian Australia, as a way to offset the damage caused by the loss of advertising revenue to Facebook and Google.
“Assuming this draft code becomes law, we will reluctantly stop allowing publishers and people in Australia from sharing local and international news on Facebook and Instagram,” the managing director of Facebook Australia & New Zealand Will Easton said in a blog post on Tuesday.
“This is not our first choice – it is our last. But it is the only way to protect against an outcome that defies logic and will hurt, not help, the long-term vibrancy of Australia’s news and media sector.”
It was the company’s first comment since Google also took an aggressive approach to the looming legislation, although the search giant has stopped short of saying it would block search functions in Australia.
The ACCC has been approached for comment.
Facebook said the competition regulator “misunderstands the dynamics of the internet” and will damage the media companies it is trying to protect with the bargaining code which would see Google and Facebook sharing some of the revenue they get from advertising using news content.
“When crafting this new legislation, the commission overseeing the process ignored important facts, most critically the relationship between the news media and social media and which one benefits most from the other.”
Easton denied the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s claim that the digital giants make money from news, saying “the reverse is true” in the case of Facebook.
He said in the first five months of 2020 Facebook sent 2bn clicks from Facebook’s News Feed back to Australian news websites “at no charge”, traffic that was worth an estimated $200m to Australian publishers.
In the incendiary post Facebook branded the scheme devised by the ACCC as one which allowed publishers to “charge us for as much content as they want at a price with no clear limits”.
In a separate post, the vice president of global news partnerships for Facebook, Campbell Brown, said the company’s commitment to journalism had not changed and listed the projects Facebook had launched globally.
“And we hope to once again count Australian news publishers among our partners in the future,” Brown said.
Brown said the company was “disappointed” by the outcome in Australia which did not produce regulation which helped the relationships between technology companies and news organisations but one which hindered it.
Facebook told users it was updating its terms of reference next month, apparently to include the ban on Australians sharing news. The new line in the terms is: “We also can remove or restrict access to your content, services or information if we determine that doing so is reasonably necessary to avoid or mitigate adverse legal or regulatory impacts to Facebook”.
source https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/sep/01/facebook-instagram-threatens-block-australians-sharing-news-landmark-accc-media-law
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