Facebook is threatening to block Australian users and news outlets from sharing content if the federal government goes ahead with a law letting publishers charge the social media giant for content.
“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,” Facebook’s managing director for Australia and New Zealand, Will Easton, said in a statement.
The Australian code followed an Australian Competition and Consumer Commission report which found Facebook and Google wielded significant market power on digital platforms.
There is no equivalent legislation proposed in New Zealand, but local Communications Minister Kris Faafoi has previously indicated the Australian solution was being looked at by officials as a potential long-term approach to structural issues in the media sector.
Eaton said that the proposed Australian law “ignores the financial value we bring publishers.”
“News represents a fraction of what people see in their news feed and is not a significant source of revenue for us,” the social media giant said.
“The ACCC presumes that Facebook benefits most in its relationship with publishers, when in fact the reverse is true."
The social media giant said it already invests millions in Australian news businesses and offered to invest more.
Consultation closed on the Australian media law earlier this week.
NZ outlook
In July, Stuff, NZ's biggest news website, said it would hit pause on all Facebook activity in a trial.
The news outlet said it didn’t want to contribute financially to a platform that made money from publishing hate speech and violence.
Facebook doesn’t have content moderators on the ground here in NZ.
It has a small team in Auckland focused mainly on selling advertising space in the Facebook news feed. Content generated by one of the almost three million active Facebook users in NZ could be moderated in the Philippines or Germany or the US.
An NZ On Air survey released today showed Facebook video is the third-most used platform in NZ, grabbing 36 percent of the daily audience, on par with Netflix and behind only TVNZ's channel 1 and Youtube. Facebook's NZ audience share has grown from 28 percent in 2016.
The survey showed social media posts by news organisations were the fifth most widely-used source of new during the covid-19 lockdown at 15 percent, yet was rated the most trusted source by only 3 percent of respondents. Social media posts by friends and family were even lower with 12 percent of respondents using them to source news and just 1 percent trusting them. No-one relied on community news group's social media posts as their most trusted source, even though 9 percent used them to keep updated.
