Name: 4 Ways Australia’s News Experiment Benefits Everyone But You | by Eliz Mizon | Chompsky | Feb, 2021 | Medium
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4 Ways Australia’s News Experiment Benefits Everyone But You | by Eliz Mizon | Chompsky | Feb, 2021 | Medium

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The first post I wrote for Chompsky’s launch last year was , a brief explainer on the country’s proposed ‘’ that sought to force the Big Tech ‘’ of Facebook and Google to give back some advertising revenue to news outlets. One response in the comments cited Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: “any headline that ends in a question can be answered ‘no’”.While I wasn’t entirely naive about the code’s limited ability to revolutionise the news, media, and tech industries for good I was hopeful about the development.Yesterdy, as the code was days away from being enshrined in law, Facebook all Australian news links on the platform causing a global stir. On the same day it was that Google would tread the opposite path, agreeing to deals with major news conglomerates, the first of which was Murdoch’s News Corp.In addition to its news outlet blackout Facebook blocked links from charity sites, political candidates, and government departments leading Prime Minister Scott Morrison to accuse them of “” Australia entirely.Anyone following the story since the summer can see that this effort to revitalise news is not as straightforward as anyone had hoped, except perhaps the bigger media conglomerates. A bigger spotlight is now being given to critics who can explain the ways in which the code is profoundly limited.After Facebook’s overreaching, “” blackout Damian Cave, NYT’s Sydney bureau chief, three responses from Australians: “It’s Facebook’s Fault and It Was Intentional”, “The Law Is Terrible”, and “Mate, Maybe It’s for the Best”, the latter of these being the most hopeful (i.e. it may result in people spending less time on the platform.)Identifying the faults in Oz’s experiment may help to set the stage for equivalent but improved legislation in other countries.So, here are 4 of them:Lawyer and tech author Lizzie O’Shea that the code has “several design problems”. While brokering revenue deals may help the news industry in a general, macro sense the sector of the news industry that most needs helping — local, small outlets— is not prioritised:“…the proposed code was not about protecting the many organisations that generate content and are now contending with blank Facebook pages. Instead, this was tech policy-making driven by large news media companies who saw the opportunity to extract value from an unpopular opponent.”NYT’s Cave also highlights this imbalance, the links between the largest media conglomerates and the Australian government:“…many of the most powerful media figures, including Mr. Murdoch, are closely aligned with the conservative politicians who run the country. […] Josh Frydenberg, who as federal treasurer would have enormous discretion over the new legislation, has media ties of his own. In 2016, he was , who is a son of Kerry Stokes, the billionaire owner of Seven West Media, one of the companies that have reached a deal with Google.”Some other countries appear to be considering the ‘bargaining code’ route already, Canada being one (the UK appears to be to the idea but hasn’t yet implemented anything). The US is forging a different legislative route to combating Big Tech’s advertising monopoly: .Cave that some economists argue “better ways to finance journalism” and that many companies who formerly advertised in papers have “fled not to the giant platforms but to real estate apps and other sites”. Any look at the market cap of real estate apps vs Google should put that argument down, but it’s true that the code is by no means the only way an economic restructuring of ad revenue is going to work.In addition, Mike Masnick of TechDirt offers an about the economic inevitability of this ‘tax’:“…most importantly, as any economist will tell you, taxing something doesn’t just bring in revenue, it decreases whatever you tax. This is why we have things like cigarette taxes and pollution taxes. It’s a tool to get less of something. So, in this case, Australia is saying it wants to tax links to news on Facebook, and Facebook responds in the exact way any reasonable economist would predict: it says that’s just not worth it and bans links. That’s not incompatible with democracy. It’s not bringing a country to its knees. The country said “this is how much news links cost” and Facebook said “oh, that’s too expensive, so we’ll stop.”If legitimate news sources are removed from Facebook, what will be left? One might be tempted to look back to a rose-golden age of Facebook: all inane status updates, lolcats, and poking. But today’s reality is that it is likely to worsen the site’s focus on vitriolic opinion and dangerous misinformation.Yesterday, Australians on Facebook found that while numerous neutral, useful links had been blocked what remained :“…pages dedicated to ; one for a community group called ; and plenty of conspiracy theories, some falsely linking 5G to infertility, others spreading lies about Bill Gates and the end of the world.”Similarly, the inclusion in the code of an obligation to give news outlets 28 days notice of any algorithmic changes is likely to encourage clickbait, Masnick:“Facebook and Google may make multiple algorithm changes every day, just to keep their services running. Having to tell newspapers (and them alone) about those changes with a few weeks notice is basically giving those news organizations the keys to the kingdom: it’s telling them how to game the algorithms. If you think bogus clickbait is a problem now, just imagine what it’s like when all of the Australian press get to know the secrets behind the algorithm, and get to prepare for any changes.”There’s always the possibility, of course — as in Cave’s Mate, Maybe It’s For The Best field of criticism — that if the full effects of the above are felt, Facebook will be shown up once and for all as the conspiracy breeding whinge-fest it’s become, and decrease mass interest in the platform. (But given how much power Facebook has it holds in the world, let’s not fall into a rose-golden idea of the future.)This issue is perhaps the clearest representation of the issue with the code as a whole: it doesn’t centre the rights of the average person. There was a sense that this code was supposed to protect journalism from its global erosion as a safeguard of the public and democracy. But in practice critics say that Google agreeing to deals is a commercial rebalancing in favour of the Murdochs, and little else.Lizzie O’Shea reminds us that by aligning the interests of media and tech conglomerates, the media companies now have even more of a vested interest in selling their users’ data for ad dollars:“What does it say about tech policy in this country that the human rights of users were almost entirely left out of the conversation? Or that the invasive and exploitative practices of surveillance capitalism, which many people deeply resent, were not merely left untouched by the media code, but indeed entrenched, given that media organisations would have a vested interest in partaking in them?”Misinformation and user privacy was a of the original government report into the issue:“…the that led to the legislation also included recommendations for laws that would give people more control over their personal data and do more to force platforms to manage misinformation.”Equivalent legislation, which may well appear in other countries soon enough, must pay attention to these issues as a priority:While the ongoing issue with the code currently rests with how Google and the news outlets’ deals pan out, Facebook’s response may end up backfiring, especially as ever more comes to light about the company’s shady activities. The Financial Times reported today that the company has been its advertising clients (again):“The world’s largest social media company has since 2018 been fighting a class-action lawsuit claiming that its executives knew its “potential reach metric”, used to inform advertisers of their potential audience size, was inflated but failed to correct it. According to sections of a filing in the lawsuit that were unredacted on Wednesday, a Facebook product manager in charge of potential reach proposed changing the definition of the metric in mid-2018 to render it more accurate. However, internal emails show that his suggestion was rebuffed by Facebook executives overseeing metrics on the grounds that the “revenue impact” for the company would be “significant”, the filing said.”Now that the companies are now fighting lawsuits and legislative battles on several continents, whether they will continue to be a desirable option for advertisers remains unclear. If anti-trust lawsuits manage to have any success, it could be that the global landscape is changed significantly for journalists. But if equivalent codes are implemented in other countries, they are going to need to centre different priorities than Australia’s.Politics and culture writer. Editor of Chompsky. Media reform advocate. UK/US.The best UK media jobs, news, and other media and politics ephemera in your inbox, every Friday! Get this newsletterBy signing up, you will create a Medium account if you don’t already have one. Review our for more information about our privacy practices.Check your inboxMedium sent you an email at to complete your subscription.Quick updates and meticulous long reads about media, politics, culture, and society.Get the Medium app

The first post I wrote for Chompsky’s launch last year was , a brief explainer on the country’s proposed ‘’ that sought to force the Big Tech ‘’ of Facebook and Google to give back some advertising revenue to news outlets. One response in the comments cited Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: “any headline that ends in a question can be answered ‘no’”.While I wasn’t entirely naive about the code’s limited ability to revolutionise the news, media, and tech industries for good I was hopeful about the development.Yesterdy, as the code was days away from being enshrined in law, Facebook all...

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Eliz Mizon

Medium is an online publishing platform developed by Evan Williams and launched in August 2012. It is owned by A Medium Corporation. The platform is an example of social journalism, having a hybrid collection of amateur and professional people and publications, or exclusive blogs or publishers on Medium, and is regularly regarded as a blog host.  Williams, previously co-founder of Blogger and Twitter, initially developed Medium as a way to publish writings and documents longer than Twitter's 140-character (now 280-character) maximum.

4 Ways Australia’s News Experiment Benefits Everyone But You | by Eliz Mizon | Chompsky | Feb, 2021 | Medium

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