Social Media Giant Facebook has restricted news to be shared on its platform. The reason behind this is the disagreement with the Australian Government over the new proposal which was passed in late 2020.
The media bargain code passed in December 2020 by the Government will ask the Tech Giant Facebook to support Nation’s media outlets financially for sharing news content on its network.
After this matter came into the limelight, Facebook clearly showed disagreement with this new code, and later started blocking local as well as international news on the platform.
What Media Bargain Code Is?
This is a proposed bill passed in Australia, that will order large tech companies operated within the nation to subsidize media companies over sharing of the news content on their platforms.
Facebook & the Australian Government
This Government’s move was phenomenal in support of local publishers, unfortunately, Facebook didn’t like this behaviour, which will negatively impact their business and relationship with the users.
The Government claimed, publishers generate revenue only when the ad is viewed by the users, and certainly, there is no other option through which they make a penny. In the presence of Media Bargain Code, our publishers will start making money from social media as most of the news is shared on their platforms by users.
After perceiving this news, Facebook seemed uncomfortable and addressed that this creates confusion between Facebook and publishers. Facebook shared the analytics from “Similarweb” (data-sharing platform) where it is clearly shown that publishers received 8-10% viewers from our social media platform.
William Easton, Facebook Managing Director – Australia, New Zealand, shared a blog post, “In 2020, Facebook generated approximately 5.1 billion Free referral users to Australian news publishers which worth around AU$407 million.”
And we discovered that prominent news portals such as Sydney Morning Herald, News.com.au, and others have also gathered around 8% traffic from our site. With this new code, this may harm the amount of traffic as we disown this code.
“This is fundamentally misunderstanding our relationship with publishers, and with no choice left we are discontinuing the sharing of news on our platform by the users,” said, William Easton.
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