Editorial: Zuckerberg’s big lie when it comes to news on Facebook

Everyone from the Prime Minister down came out to blast the decision by Meta to pull out of a deal to pay news organisations for the content featured on its social media platform.

Meta, parent company to Facebook, announced on Friday it would soon “deprecate” its dedicated news tab.

However that doesn’t mean that it will be removing news content written by Australian journalists. Meta has simply decided it would prefer not to pay for it.

Anthony Albanese said his Government would “consider what options we have available”.

“The idea that one company can profit from others’ investment, not just investment in capital but investment in people, investment in journalism is unfair. That’s not the Australian way,” he said.

Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones said the Government was “very disappointed” by Meta’s decision and that it was “an abrogation of responsibility” and would do what it could to force Meta back to the bargaining table to pay publishers fairly.

“The Government takes the view that this is a dereliction of Meta‘s responsibility to Australia . . . we want to make it quite clear that we are backing Australian journalism.”

And Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said the decision “undermines the viability of a healthy democratic, open media”.

Meta has justified its move by citing a large decrease in the number of users accessing the deliberately hard-to-find news tab on its platform. To get through to that feature on a desktop, users need to click through and scroll to the end of a drop-down menu few users would know exists.

Finding the feature on a mobile device is almost impossible, meaning the use of the dedicated news tab is entirely useless as a metric. The vast majority of users access news content directly through their feeds — and that’s a metric Meta conveniently left out of its statement.

As Mr Jones told Nine Newspapers: “If you run a restaurant and then close the front door, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense a few months later you complain that you’re not getting any visitors into your restaurant, and something similar has happened.”

Meta is used to getting its way and isn’t above using brute force to do so.

In 2021, and in the middle of negotiations for the news bargaining code, it threw the toys out of the cot by temporarily blocking all news content from feeds in Australia. Potentially life-saving information from emergency services was also caught in the crossfire.

Though that Australian ban was short-lived, Meta in June blocked all news content from Canadian feeds in an escalation of a similar dispute over payment. That ban has remained in place.

In this era of misinformation, Meta should be doing what it can to ensure its platforms carry credible information. This move signals that this multi-billion dollar business simply doesn’t care about truth or the health of democracy — only revenue.

The big media players will survive without Mark Zuckerberg’s money. It’s the smaller organisations, mostly in rural and regional areas, which will suffer most.