The hearing was convened out of concerns about the negative impacts social media platforms have upon our community, including the recent decision by Meta to no longer pay news publishers for content posted to the company’s platforms.
That announcement has been met with anger, frustration, disappointment, worry and concern among news publishers, and the news industry shares the concerns of the broader community over Meta’s outrageous behaviour that has had such a damaging impact on so many sections of the community.
Facebook particularly has evolved into an antisocial entity that has provided a haven for toxicity, fake news, scams, blackmail, cyberbullying, doxing, revenge porn, trolling, deep fakes, political interference, surveillance capitalism and the spread of mis and disinformation that has caused so much damage within our communities.
The live-streaming of massacres, images of unrealistic so-called beautiful people and conspiracies are also part and parcel of social media today.
In the case of the news industry, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland has said Meta’s decision to no longer pay for news content in a number of jurisdictions “represents a dereliction of its commitment to the sustainability of Australian news media,” a comment CPA endorses wholeheartedly.
Meta has shown complete disdain for Australian media outlets, the News Media Bargaining Code and the Australian Government by announcing its intention not to renew agreements with publishers.
Meta has been deemed an unavoidable trading partner, and as such, is expected to conform to the same standards and expectations as the rest of us.
In short, we believe Meta fails to meet those standards, and that the company long ago ceased to be just a provider of social media platforms.
To suit its narrative and justify its agenda, Meta claims its users don’t go to Facebook for news. However, the University of Canberra’s Digital News Report: Australia 2024 released in June found that 49 per cent of Australian users of Facebook use it for news and one in four rely on it as their main source of news — our trusted, independent and professionally written news Meta no longer wants to pay for.
The digital news report shows this year, there was actually a surge among young people turning to social media to get news.
Sixty per cent of Gen Z say social media is their main source of news, a 17-percentage point increase on last year.
In line with the increase in the use of social media platforms for news, concern about what is real and what is fake on the internet has skyrocketed to 75 per cent. This is an increase of 11 percentage points in the past two years and echoes an increase in the global rise of six percentage points over the same period.
It suits Meta to claim Australians don’t use the company’s platforms to read the news and for it to be allowed to continue to ride roughshod over our communities.
But it suits the rest of us for Meta to be held to account.
— Andrew Schreyer, President of Country Press Australia
