Australia Newspocalypse: What You Need to Know, Think About and Be Ready For
On February 24th the Australian government (not so secretly at the urging of Murdoch) passed a law that would require digital platforms to pay news organizations not just for news in any dedicated news but also for any time a new links is posted on the platform- not just the news organizations themselves but anyone.
What followed was chaotic at best.
Facebook, instead of caving, simply turned off all news links in the platform retroactively. Not only could no one post a link to news, but all prior links to the news got scrubbed in what felt like the blink of an eye. Not only did news links disappear, but entire pages worth of content, including a not small number of NGOs across the country had their years of Facebook content unpublished. In fact, many of those pages had their entire page unpublished.
The good news is that a. Facebook worked with organizations to republish said pages and b. the negotiations over this law resumed and this last week Facebook turned news links back on in the platform.
You can learn a lot more about what happened and is happening now at some links I’ll include at the end of this post.
The real reason I’m writing is this is that there still many unanswered concerns and questions that I think we need to be asking, thinking about and preparing ourselves as laws like this are just getting started.
- What about Twitter? Nowhere have I seen any articles talking about how this law impacts or doesn’t impact Twitter. I think it could be argued that Twitter is at least as important on this front as Google and Facebook given that the concept of sharing of news is central to Twitter’s existence.
- Is this likely to happen elsewhere? Yes. It already is. For example, in Spain Google shut down their dedicated news portal Google News in 2015 and it’s recently been reported they are now restarting negotiations in order to bring it back online. Efforts are now underway in the European Union to enact similar legislation- efforts led by Microsoft and 4 of the EU’s big news industry groups.
- So why is this bad? I’m not saying it necessarily it is bad. I don’t disagree that people should have access to the news. I’m also not against the idea of folks paying for that news and in fact personally I have paid subscriptions to several newspaper, online news outlets and news related email newsletters. However I do have concerns about the idea of a money grab by the news organizations and then that money NOT actually being used to propogate the news. Does anyone really think Murdoch’s News Corp is going to use that money to hire more journalists and/or pay their journalists a fair wage with benefits etc as opposed to putting that money right back into Murdoch and shareholder’s pockets?
- My biggest concern in all of this: where does the line get drawn between the platforms as news content vs. news distribution. For example, asking platforms to pay for news they feature in dedicated news sections like Google News or Facebook’s News section on the mobile app. But should the platforms be required to pay a news organization if you or I post a link from the news organization on our own Facebook wall for our friends to see? In other words, there’s a lot of slippery slope here and none of the laws thus far proposed have addressed them.
So what do we do to be prepared? As my friends in Australia have been talking about, start thinking (and really doing) about how you would talk about the news if you couldn’t actually link to it. Could you do a short video talking about what’s in the news and offering your organization’s point of view? How can you use, wait for it, storytelling to offer perspective on the news and how it affects the people in your communities.
The time to start figuring this out is now because this problem isn’t going away anytime soon and it’s only a matter of time before we are forced to do something different.
Links I promised so you can learn more:
Facebook calls Australia’s bluff from Casey Newton
Facebook versus Australia from Tech Policy Press
Paying for News from Benedict Evans
A New-Media Showdown in Australia from Kara Swisher
Facebook’s New Look in Australia: News and Hospitals Out, Aliens Still In from the New York Times
Fake News is Still On Facebook in Australia from Gizmodo
