Facebook parent company Meta to stop paying Australian media for content

Premier Steven Miles has blasted Facebook’s parent company after Meta revealed it would stop paying for certain content used on the social media’s site – draining tens of millions of dollars from a critical industry.

Premier Steven Miles has blasted Facebook’s parent company after Meta revealed it would stop paying Australian media for content used on the social media’s site – draining tens of millions of dollars from the critical industry.

Mr Miles used the latest galling move by the technology behemoth to call for an investigation into the power social media companies hold over Australian consumers.

He said Meta, the company helmed by multibillionaire Mark Zuckerberg that owns Facebook and Instagram, along with its contemporaries, drained enormous amounts of money from the Australian market.

“Those social media companies are out of control,” Mr Miles said.

“They are making trillions of dollars and they do not care about the communities that they are in.

“They don’t care about the importance of local reporting.

“They don’t care about the crimes that they promote on their platforms – they are literally profiting off those things.

“It’s about time we had a really good look at the power of these social media companies, how much money they’re making here, and how little they care about Australians.”

Premier Steven Miles has slammed Meta’s decision to stop paying Australian media for content. Picture: John Gass

On Saturday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the federal government was looking at “all the options that are available to us”.

Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones has already requested Treasury and the ACCC give him advice on whether Meta ought to be designated under mandatory bargaining code passed by the Morrison government because of the market power it wields.

If the advice it receives is the same as the advice the Morrison government received, Mr Jones is expected to quickly notify Meta that he intends to designate them under the code within 30 days, which is likely to result in it being forced into negotiations with media companies.

Meta has argued that news accounts for only 3 per cent of its users’ interactions with its Facebook platform. But the media companies are likely to dispute the way the company calculates this number.

The total number of times News Corp Australia’s content has been accessed on Facebook increased by 5 per cent between 2022 and 2023.

This includes News Corp Australia’s images, videos, other forms of posts as well as links to news stories.

The PM said journalists and the content they produced play an important role for Australians “and in order to be able to do that, you need to be paid for what you do.

“Now, what Meta are saying is, ‘We’re this global giant, we should just get a free ride’. Well, we’ll look at every option that’s available to us. We’ll consult with media organisations as well. But we think that a fair thing is for people to pay for any product that is the result of people’s hard work. It’s just fair.”

Originally published as Facebook parent company Meta to stop paying Australian media for content