David Penberthy: The bigger question you have to ask yourself as a news consumer is how, and where, you will find your news.
It says a lot that Facebook’s tantrum came faster than its moves to shut down videos of the Christchurch massacre, writes David Penberthy.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
It says a lot about Facebook as a company that it moved faster and wider in disabling Australian news content today than it did to prevent the live streaming of the Christchurch mosque massacre.
More than 4000 people watched that day as a white terrorist gunned down innocent New Zealanders while they were at prayer.
Days and weeks after the event, there were sickos and psychos reposting links to it, prompting Mark Zuckerberg to admit, lamely, that his company – valued at about $525bn – was having a tricky time getting its artificial intelligence software to keep what was effectively a snuff movie off its distribution channels.
Facebook showed this morning that it makes a different response when its commercial operations are threatened.
The social media giant took down everything in its path, from embedded links to major news sites, to the reposting of individual stories from private users.
Even our silly little Facebook live stream of our radio show was black-banned until, in a genius move, our cunning young producer rebranded our station as a gift shop, meaning Facebook’s robots missed the trick and let us stream again anyway.
It was a bullying and scattergun response against the media. You could also describe it as blackmail against our Federal Government, where this monopoly player went nuclear overnight in a bid to show the Commonwealth just what it thought of the proposal to charge social media and search giants for their use of evidence-based journalism.
I say evidence-based because this is the key difference between the information that is provided by news websites and the information that is provided willy-nilly by Facebook.
Zuckerberg has said for years, especially since the previous US election, that his company is serious about weeding out fake news. Well, today, Zuckerberg declared that fake news is now the official language of Facebook.
The tactics of this company were so over the top as to be dangerous – and especially dangerous in these times we inhabit with a global pandemic still under way.
Facebook is the chief repository of crackpot conspiracy theories going to vaccination, the so-called pandemic, mad plots involving Bill Gates, global child-exploitation networks, 5G gamma rays, chem trails – all that demented bunkum that proliferates across social media.
The worst example of what Facebook did was the closure of the SA Health site.
In the midst of a pandemic – when tens of thousands of South Australians have come to rely on its Facebook site for announcements, involving COVID-19 cases, social-distancing rules, and where many people log in weekly to hear from chief public health officer Professor Nicola Spurrier as her press conferences are live streamed – Facebook was reckless and derelict in shutting down SA Health. A moment of sanity prevailed when the page was later restored.
It is worth remembering, too, that, in contrast, every news site in Australia that now charges a subscription fee will always leave publicly vital content covering things such as pandemics and bushfires free, so that the community can still access such important information.
This is not so much a story about the viability of the media, even though I have a personal vested interest in that – as we all do – insofar as so many journos, producers and support staff have been made redundant as revenues have tightened across TV, radio and print.
It is more about the ability of the public to remain informed and to sift through the chaff that proliferates online and find meaningful and reliable information written by locally based reporters with locally based sources who provide an accurate picture of what’s happening in their community.
The actions of Facebook have been exposed as nothing more than self interest now that Google has come to the table and creditably agreed to pay a content fee to the media companies who provide it with news content. The media has not been whingeing or carping about the historic use of this information by these digital giants.
We have simply been pointing out that, given that all this news content, which is expensive to produce, is central to the brand proposition offered by Facebook and Google as one-stop shops for reliable information, it is only fair that we get reimbursed for it. Google has now recognised that. Facebook is in denial.
Its actions are akin to a major department store that realises it does not have enough quality product to fill its shopfront display windows, so sends out teams of people into the night to steal items from other stores – and then turns around and argues that they are only borrowing them, not aiming to cash in from their sale.
It is one of the key reasons the mainstream media has been suffering commercially.
The other reason for these financial pressures is that the repurposing of news content by digital companies is also central to their ability to create an advertising-friendly environment online for commercials across Google and Facebook.
The perverse double-whammy of this is that news organisations not only lose control of their content, they also find it harder to sell ads as eyeballs shift elsewhere.
The bigger question you have to ask yourself as a news consumer is how, and where, you will find your news.
If you are going to take the health reporting of a Brad Crouch out of the equation, and be prevented even from watching Prof Spurrier on the SA Health live stream, you’re going to be left with a factually challenged, factually bereft world where Pete Evans sells lava lamps to cure COVID-19.
The company that says it is serious about stamping out fake news has now gone professional with it.
More Coverage
Being rich today is about much more than money
If your total household wealth is close to $600,000, you are richer than around 50 per cent of the population. See how you measure up.
Trump running out the clock while Harris swings for the fences
The polls say the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris is tied, and Tom Minear argues the way they are campaigning shows they have different views about what that means.