Meta says “all options are on the table” should the government force the social media giant to keep paying for Australian journalism, including pulling all news from the platform.
Earlier this year, Meta – which owns Facebook and Instagram – announced it would not renew the lucrative deals it signed with Australian publishers in 2021, claiming the Facebook news platform was no longer viable.
Under the news media bargaining code that the parliament passed in 2021, companies can be designated to keep supplying news to consumers.
The country’s biggest news bosses last week united to call on the government to force the social media giant to play ball, but Labor has not yet indicated if it would go down this route.
Appearing before the parliamentary committee on social media on Friday, Meta’s director of public policy in Australia Mia Garlick was asked what would happen if the social media company was designated, including if it would recall all news on the platform like it had done when similar events unfolded in Canada.
She said that given the government had not yet indicated its plans it was hard to play into hypotheticals, but said “compliance would look somewhat different” if the law was enacted.
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“We’ve been very clear on the record from… I think July 2020… that the law was based on sort of misunderstanding the economics of news on our platform, and was wholly unworkable from our perspective,” she said.
“We very much respect the Australian government’s decision to make the laws it thinks is right for Australia, and for commercial enterprises, we need to identify the best way to comply with the law and to manage our commercial exposure under laws like that.”
She said less than three per cent of Facebook users were accessing news on the site – a figure Australia’s three largest news companies disagreed with at the same committee last week – and it was no longer viable for the business.
Ms Garlick confirmed an algorithm change in 2018 de-prioritised news, contributing to the low reach of news content, and that there were other channels where people could get news content.
Earlier this week, Treasury officials – appearing before the same committee – said the department had considered whether Meta could remove all news content from its Australian platform as it had done in Canada, and what the government could do to prevent that.
“We’ve been exploring what might you be able to do to encourage them to continue – encourage or force them to continue – to carry news in those circumstances,” an official said.
“There’s a number of legal as well as policy issues that are associated with that so, as you would expect, we’ve been seeking legal advice on a number of questions.”
More to come.