Facebook bans Australian news article sharing

This is the answer to the bill for payment to the media.

The Australian government has submitted a bill to Parliament that requires major tech companies such as Google and Facebook to pay royalties to companies that provide news content.

Facebook announced on the 18th that it will ban news article sharing in Australia. Access to trusted news sites via Facebook has been cut off in Australia.

According to the statement, news is less than 4% of the content people see on Facebook. The law, which requires payment to publishers, requires that Facebook impose a penalty on content that it does not acquire or request.

From Facebook's point of view, Facebook made "about 5.1 billion free referrals" last year alone, and the service is "estimated at A $ 407 million." The publishers are grateful and feel that the penalties are not the same as the penalties.

Facebook and Google have been in direct negotiations with the government over the past few weeks. Therefore, the bill is still in the final stages. Lawmakers argue that the two biggest tech companies have robbed the press of advertising revenue over the past few years, and that the general public has become dependent on the platform as a news portal.

Google, on the other hand, has taken a repulsive stance, saying, "If this becomes a law, there is no choice but to choose a realistic option to make Google search in Australia unavailable." Signed the right to share articles with media mogul Rupert Murdock (publisher of Wall Street Journal, New York Post, etc.). Google will be posting content from at least seven of Australia's top publishers on the News Showcase.

It is not possible at this time to determine whether Facebook's ban on sharing news content in Australia is good or bad. Losing Facebook as a source of news will force users to look for news elsewhere.

Facebook claims that news distributors are profiting from links in news feeds, but that it ignores the fact that it has prompted users to see Facebook as a waypoint to get news. You can say that.

However, it is undeniable that news content may have become unpleasant for company executives as a result of the widespread sharing of inappropriate information on Facebook.

Australia has a population of only about 26 million, but Facebook has about 1.85 billion active users per day worldwide. It would be meaningful in terms of experiments to measure the impact of the ban on news sharing on the platform.

Of course, if an Australian publisher suffers a big loss, it will pressure lawmakers to negotiate with Facebook.

What I can say now is that it would be great to have some form of discussion about the relationship between news and social media.