Every Australian clicks on 90 news links a year on Facebook, sending $115 million in free value to news publishers, the social media platform’s owner, Meta says, in its first defence of a decision to pull funding from the media.

In a blog post published late on Wednesday, Meta’s local policy team said that it was not the job of major technology firms to fix the news industry’s structural woes, adding that it was wrong to say – as some media executives have – that Facebook was “stealing” news content.