The Australian government has done the world a huge favour. Recognising the devastating impact of Facebook and Google on the media industry, they imposed a strict new requirement for the two big tech giants to "pay back da money".
Google blinked, Facebook didn’t. Even for Facebook, with its perverse talent for public relations disasters, this was a new low. Not only did it ban all news operations, but a list of essential services and government pages as well. It banned its own corporate page. If ever proof were needed of Facebook’s inept internal processes, this was it — and it is just as inept at managing its outward policies, as we’ve seen many times.
As they grew, Google and Facebook managed to convince media organisations that expropriating their content for free and displaying it on their sites would be a vast driver of internet traffic. This was true until Facebook realised that everything in the new feeds was news (or misinformation or clickbait websites) and not the wholesome sharing of personal anecdotes originally envisaged. This was when I stopped paying attention to Facebook. I wanted to know what was going on in my friends’ lives, not what they were reading.
In his 2019 new year’s resolution post, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook was pivoting to "privacy" and would focus on groups, among others. It would no longer make shared news as important. It changed its algorithms and all of a sudden the news organisations, jubilant at receiving heavy traffic from Facebook, started getting very little. For Facebook, the experiment was over. For the newspapers, it was devastating.
Facebook and Google account for about 80% of all online advertising globally (it varies by country), but they don’t perform any of the useful functions that the media does. Known as the Fourth Estate for good reason, the media is a critical and essential part of society. SA’s state-capture shockers, the R255m Free State asbestos scam, #GuptasLeaks and the Nkandla fire-pool would not have been exposed without the media. Many of apartheid’s most dastardly acts would not have been uncovered but for the courage of the journalists on great newspapers like the Weekly Mail and Vrye Weekblad.
So, it’s hard to listen to Google and Facebook complain about Australia’s insistence that they pay news organisations for displaying their content. Between them, they have destroyed the advertising market that supported the media industry. It’s been replaced with disinformation, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theories and people who truly believe the Earth is flat.
As Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison ironically posted on a Facebook page after the ban: "Facebook’s actions to unfriend Australia today ... were as arrogant as they were disappointing."
His totally true kicker: "It may be changing the world, but that doesn’t mean it runs it."
- Shapshak is publisher of stuff.co.za and Scrolla.Africa
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