Front Burner - Why Facebook banned news on its platform in Australia

Episode Date: February 23, 2021

As Canada considers ways to make big tech pay for news, Wired digital editor James Temperton outlines some lessons it could take from Australia's fight with Facebook.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, Jamie Poisson here. Hi, Jamie Poisson here. Wowzers is all I can say about this story for so many reasons. Big news in Australia.

Well, I guess no news if you're looking on Facebook. Facebook has blocked users in Australia from seeing and sharing news. This follows a fight with the Australian government, which wants tech giants to pay for the news on their platforms. James Temperton is digital editor at Wired UK and host of the Wired podcast. Today, he's here with me to explain Facebook's Australia news ban and what Canada can learn from it. Because right now, Canada is considering a similar move. Hi, James. Thanks so much for joining me. No worries. So if I was in Australia right now, and I opened up the Facebook app on my phone, what would be missing from my feed? News, all of it, right? So every news story, every op-ed, anything from a news publisher anywhere in the world is completely blocked in Australia.

So everything, any piece of news, you won't see it. Anger is growing this morning at social media giant Facebook. This has moved from being a threat to democracy to an attack on democracy. And his business model is stuff. Facebook bending news is terrible, actually. They're so big and so widely used by Australians. People will just revolt against it. And I understand that globally, too, Australian news publishers have vanished as well, right? So here in Toronto, I won't see any links from like, I don't know, the Sydney Morning Herald.

That's right. Yeah. So within Australia, all news is completely blocked. And outside of Australia, Australian news publishers are completely blocked as well. So it's a really, really extreme measure that Facebook has taken and effectively means that Australian media no longer exists on Facebook. There had also been reports that like government websites, ones providing COVID updates have been missing as well from the feed. Is that intended to happen? Did Facebook want that to happen? So the scale of what Facebook's done here made it quite a complicated thing to achieve. And Facebook, as you might imagine, tried to achieve that by rather than having human beings going through and find all the news published in Australia, it used an AI to track down news publishers in Australia and

block them. The problem being, as we've seen an awful lot with Facebook's AIs, they didn't do a particularly good job. So Facebook blocked itself in Australia, which was kind of funny. It blocked a bunch of, as you said, government pages on Facebook. A devastating bushfire season, scores of homes claimed. Yet this morning for hours, Facebook banned the Department of Fire and Emergency Services from sending out alerts. Health pages, including Perth Children's Hospital, Peel Health Campus and the Telethon Institute, also blocked. It blocked here in the UK. A couple of big news publishers based in London were blocked as if they were Australians.

So sort of ignoring all the issues with censorship, it was a very badly handled technical operation from Facebook. And it's been kind of running around trying to undo some of the mess that its algorithm made over the last few days. around trying to undo some of the mess that its algorithm made over the last few days. Okay, I know this original move to block news was a decision that Facebook made ahead of the Australian Parliament passing this new bill that would require online platforms like Facebook, like Google, to negotiate with news outlets to pay them for displaying and linking to their content. And so in response to that, Facebook is saying, look, like, you want to make us pay news organizations for posting and sharing links, we just won't publish them at all. And can you tell me about the forces that led to Australia moving forward with this law? So Rupert Murdoch is a fairly substantial force in all of this.

It's basically the Australian media versus big tech is the simplest way of framing this. And when we talk about the Australian media, a huge figure over there, I mean, he is in an awful lot of the Western media, but especially in Australia is Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. So what's happened over the last several years is Murdoch and his organisation have been a particularly vocal critic of the amount of money that big tech platforms are making, they argue, at the expense of them. So they're hoovering up all of the advertising revenue and some of that should be going to the media companies that supply the content that we go to these platforms to read. So people use Facebook to find news. They don't anymore in Australia.

So what's happened over the last couple of years is pressure has been put on legislatures. And we've seen in Australia that actually turn into law or it's about to turn into law for the first time. So what's been proposed and what will almost certainly get voted through in Australia is that big networks like Facebook and Google have to pay a fee to carry news on their platform and that fee is per link. So every time a news organisation posts an article on Facebook or every time Google indexes a news article and makes it available for people who are searching for the latest news, effectively what the legislation says is they have to pay a tax on that link so facebook and google have to pay a tax on each individual piece of content

that they use to reimburse news publishers for that hard work so what facebook said was no thank you not worth the expense we'll just cut news off our platform altogether we had a statement today from facebook executive campbell brown contrary to what some have suggested facebook does not steal news content publishers choose to share their stories on facebook i hope in the future we can include news from people in australia once again what google said which is potentially a more challenging decision is it did a deal with ruupert Murdoch and News Corp and a bunch of other large publishers in Australia a pay-to-play deal if you like so Google decided that it was important that news should still be on its platform so it paid for that news

to still be accessible within Australia. Facebook just blocked it. I want to loop back to Google's decision with you in a minute. And I also just want to note for our listeners that there has been a similar debate playing out here in Canada. The Canadian government is considering a similar law. With me now is Stephen Gilbo. He's the Minister of Canadian Heritage. I mean, Facebook didn't just cut link to news outlet, but also to government websites. And I saw a Facebook spokesperson say that it was an oversight.

Hold on a second here. An oversight? I mean, if we needed a clear example of why these companies need to be regulated, Facebook just handed this to us on a silver platter. Other governments are too. And I know that there's been some talk about several countries coming together and possibly announcing something together in the near future. But if we could just talk a little bit about the reaction to Facebook's decision.

Yeah, the general consensus is, and it's important to note that this hasn't been passed into law in Australia yet. So Facebook didn't have to do this. It's very much doing this to make a point. And politicians in Australia have accused Facebook of essentially spitting its dummy out. One politician compared Facebook's behaviour to that of North Korea. Mark McGowan calling on the US government to intervene. They shouldn't condone a company behaving like a North Korean dictator. It's outside the spirit of the relationship between Australia and the United States.

So the rhetoric has gotten fairly charged around this. And one would imagine it's interesting that you mentioned Canada here in the UK as well. There's talk of not copycat legislation, but using the situation in Australia as encouragement to go after these big tech platforms and come up with regulation that does force them to be more friendly to the news media and to be more supportive of the news media. What we've seen over the last several years is effectively self-regulation. So Facebook and Google have announced a bunch of policies to support and partner with news organisations, but self-regulation is so rarely good regulation and no country has managed to come up with an effective way of dealing with

this issue. So Australia has really gone first. It might not have done exactly the right thing, but it's at least shown intent. And Facebook has kind of shot itself in the foot by doing something that, to anyone looking at this from the outside, seems incredibly draconian. Why do you think Facebook made the decision to essentially take their ball and go home here? I mean, that's what they've done. Yeah. Google's decision is smarter in a way. It's potentially more troubling, but it's smarter, right? What Google said is,

fine, we'll pay the money. We'd rather not have the pain of regulation in this space because in the long term that will probably cost us more money and have more of an impact on our bottom line facebook has come out fighting um or as you say has just decided to walk away from the fight altogether the problem with that is it leaves itself exposed right i imagine the reason that facebook has done this is it doesn't have a great deal of respect for the news media. In its statement issued after Australia announced that it was going to move forward with this legislation, Facebook said, well, news items make up just 4% of what people see on their news feeds. Now, it's important to realise that just 4% of Facebook is still hundreds of billions of items appearing in the news feed, but it's still a small percent of Facebook. So Facebook

has essentially said that news isn't a huge part of what Facebook is anymore. So we don't need you and we're not willing to pay for the kind of content that you put on our platform. So we'll walk away from it and you can find another way of reaching the billions of people who are on Facebook. But could I flip that argument on you for a moment? Like if it's only 4% of their total newsfeed, why not just do it? Like why not just comply with the law? Why is this such a big deal for Facebook? Why are they coming out fighting? They don't want to be regulated, or they want to have more of a say over the terms of that regulation. So let's not make a mistake, this was bad legislation, what's being proposed in Australia. It's not the right way to do this, because on the one hand, the Australian government is saying, okay, you have to pay for every piece of content that news publishers put

on your platform. Now, in Facebook case, that's that's quite interesting, right? Because news publishers could essentially game Facebook by putting loads and loads of stories on their platform to try and get as much return as possible. To discuss is Kevin Chan. He is the head of public policy in Canada for Facebook. We don't ask people to share news onto websites. It is publishers, news publishers who voluntarily put things on Facebook. You can see how if we aren't able to have any kind of control over how much publishers share, then we actually don't control what kind of price we would pay. In Google's business model, it's slightly different, right? Google automatically indexes the entire internet,

unless you put a piece of code on your website's backend to say, don't index me, but that would be commercial suicide. So Facebook's argument is that, well, publishers choose to put things on our platform. So we can choose for them not to put stuff on our platform and to come back to this issue of what is effectively a link tax what australia's proposed is a fee for each and every link well if publishers are asking facebook to pay them each time they put a post on their platform facebook can rightly say well normally we ask you to pay us to put things on our platform, Facebook can rightly say, well, normally we ask you to pay us to put things on our platform. That's called advertising. So this really isn't a particularly elegant way of

dealing with a legitimate problem. And Facebook has kind of seen bad regulation coming and rather than pay to make it go away, which is kind of what Google's done, it's thrown its toys out the pram and run away. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections.

Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen So then what would you like to see done if you don't think that this is the solution? It's a really difficult question. And we don't really have an especially elegant answer.

If there were an elegant answer then a country somewhere in the world would be moving forward with this kind of legislation so and you may have seen these sort of arguments play out in the press where people pick up on facebook with its tens of billions of dollars in revenue and in local markets it only pays very very small amounts of tax so what some governments are proposing is this digital services tax, which starts to answer the question of who should benefit from Facebook's commercial operations and Google's commercial operations. And it should be at the point where that value is extracted. And it's a question of unpicking that tax question. And then once a government has that new tax in place it should

if it's doing the right thing for the news media anyway it should be moving that money back into journalism right so a big problem that this is all born out of is the hollowing out of the news media that's occurred over the last decade or so because of the success of these big online platforms like Facebook and Google and the amount of advertising revenue that they suck out of the system. There's just not enough money left rattling around for, for example, local journalism, which has hugely suffered. And a government that cares about the free and open press needs to find a way of extracting tax from these big digital platforms and reinvesting it in the local journalism that is really, really important in a functioning democracy. Right. You know, I take this point and going back to the Google deal, I feel like there are lots of concerns being raised about that, that now these private platforms have the power, right, to choose who they want to do business with. And there could be lots of negative repercussions connected to that and connected to the journalism that comes from that.

But what about people who just think that this is not Facebook and Google's problem at all? That, you know, large media organizations have not pivoted properly here, and that they have failing business models, and that even small digital startups are starting to show people how they can be a real solution here, without having to step in without having all this, you know, government intervention. Yeah, so the first part of your question was about the deal that google has done with large media organizations in australia and another reason why the australian legislation is bad is it doesn't account for the little guys so this was very much a piece of legislation that was lobbied by the likes of rut Murdoch to strengthen their position in the market. So as well as making money from links that are shared and used on Facebook and Google,

there's also a cutoff point. And the smallest media organisations would fall below that threshold. It would put them on the back foot. They wouldn't be able to compete with the incumbents. So that's problematic. And also, as you say, why should it be Facebook and Google are as platforms. So one criticism laid at the Australian legislation is that it's an attack on the open web. And when we talk about the open web, you can trace that back sort of 30 plus years to the founding of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and this

sort of academic endeavour to make information freely shareable. And there are still core tenets of that open web ideal that any of your listeners can see today. It means that anyone can send an email to anyone else, for example, and it just works. It means that you can go on Wikipedia and click on a link and be transported to any website anywhere in the world and it just works. It means that you can go on Wikipedia and click on a link and be transported to any website anywhere in the world. And it just works. That's the open web in action. People conflate that open web with Facebook and Google, which have become for so many people the web. But they're not the open web. They're essentially closed advertising ecosystems. They're essentially closed advertising ecosystems.

So it's unfortunate that we've arrived at a moment in history where the responsibility for disseminating almost all information in the world, outside of China and Russia, is within the hands of two giant advertising companies. And of course, it's not in their commercial interests to do that in a way that's not compatible with serving more ads. Facebook and Google are in the business of serving lots and lots of adverts. They're not in the business of supporting the news media or even supporting democracy. So just to come back to the argument that governments may need to take a different role here, and that governments are in the business of supporting democracy, and that perhaps they could take revenue from these companies and disperse it to media organizations. Do you see problems with that approach as well, that now it's the government making the decision about what constitutes a news organization? And it's the

government giving money or funneling money to news organizations that then have to cover these governments? Yeah, and there are questions, you know, if you essentially start giving handouts to businesses, how effectively are those handouts used? You know, in an ideal world, they'd be invested in grassroots journalism and training the next generation of reporters to hold local council officials to account, right? But in a lot of instances, that money might be misused. And it's certainly not a solution to fall back on state intervention to solve problems that the market can't solve by itself. Another way of thinking about this is if we go back 15 years, an awful lot of competitors to Facebook, when Facebook was being founded, had an opportunity to develop their own technology. So why didn't a collection of news organisations get together

and build a platform that they see as suitable for sharing news articles? And there doesn't exist a platform today that can compete with Facebook and Google, which are effectively an advertising duopoly that we also depend on to keep us informed, to encourage a good public debate about really important issues. And particularly with Facebook, we've shown that it is massively incapable of fulfilling that role. But it is massively incapable of fulfilling that role. It's encouraged the rise of QAnon conspiracy theories, white supremacism and anti-vax propaganda, amongst other things. And that's specifically as a result of the way that Facebook is designed.

You know, a lot of your listeners will have heard terms like clickbait. They might have heard terms like the attention economy. And when we talk about the attention economy, this is a really core part of how an awful lot of these major technology platforms operate. They make more money, the more time you spend on them. And that's entirely their prerogative. Facebook wants you to spend more time on Facebook. And why wouldn't it want you to spend more time on Facebook? That means it can serve you more ads. And it just turns out that people spend more time on Facebook if they're in QAnon conspiracy theory groups, or if they're falling into an anti-vax propaganda wormhole, or rabbit or robber. So then it falls back on the news media to say, okay, well, how do we build a platform that does allow us to serve this content? And there's been an interesting little nugget of information that's come out of Australia

in the wake of all of this. Australians can no longer access news on Facebook, and maybe they weren't anyway. You know, a lot of people weren't seeing news in their news feeds or had walked away from Facebook altogether. The most popular app in Australia at the moment is a news app, and it shot up the App Store charts specifically because people want to engage with news. So in that instance, a little bit of good has come out of this. And so James, where do you see this all going?

Like, do you think that we will just remain to be stuck with what we've got and kind of bumble along here? Do you think bigger things are coming? It's incredible to think that 15 or so years ago, Facebook was a glint in Mark Zuckerberg's eye. Now it's ended up as something that can potentially unleash a violent mob on the U.S. Capitol. You know, these things scale so quickly. And in some countries, Facebook is the internet and, you know, Google is a verb. So I think it's foolish to think that we're stuck with what we've got. There are so many smart people looking at these kinds of problems.

And we are now at a moment in history where politicians need to grapple with this problem and say to these companies, OK, if you want to keep on being giant advertising platforms, that's fine. We're going to tax you properly. We're going to regulate you effectively. And out of that, if people want to find news, then, hey, maybe they go and download an app that just serves them news and isn't based on these attention economy metrics that they're based on facts. At the moment, that platform doesn't exist. Or if it does exist, it's very, very small compared to Google and Facebook. And until we start to build these platforms to have a more sophisticated way of distributing information digitally, we are stuck with two very, very large, powerful advertising networks. Okay. Thank you so much for this conversation, James. It was so fascinating. Thank you. You're very welcome. All right. So before we go today, on Monday, by a large margin,

the House of Commons voted to formally recognize that China is committing genocide against its Muslim minorities including the Uyghurs. Notably Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and almost all of his cabinet did not participate in the vote. Foreign Affairs Minister Mark Garneau was the lone minister present and he abstained on behalf of the government of Canada. The motion also calls on the government to lobby the International Olympic Committee to move the 2020 Winter Games out of Beijing. We recently did an episode on this subject. You can find it in our feed. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you tomorrow.

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