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Tag: Facebook

  • Refriended in Defeat: Australia Strikes a Deal with Facebook

    The Australian Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, was unconvincing in his efforts to summon up courage.  The Australian government had been left reeling in the wake of Facebook’s decision to scrap and block Australians from sharing and posting news items on hosted pages. The company’s target of opprobrium: the News Media Bargaining Code.

    The Code’s ostensible purpose is to address the inequalities in the news market place by pushing digital giants and news outlets into reaching commercial deals.  Failing to do so will lead to final offer arbitration between the parties, where the independent arbitrator selects one of the deals on offer.  That selection would be binding on both parties.

    Facebook was having none of it, with its managing director for Facebook Australia and New Zealand William Easton stating that the scheme “fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content.”  Left with “a stark choice” – to either comply with the law drafted in ignorance of such realities, “or stop allowing news content on our services in Australia”, Facebook preferred the latter option.  The main objective, then, was for Facebook to press the Australian government to abandon the code altogether or, what was more likely, soften the terms of its application.

    On February 23, after a five day digital siege which saw outrage from numerous community, charity, media and political organisations across the country, Frydenberg announced that Facebook had “re-friended” Australia.  He was resolute on the point that the amendments did not take away from the Code’s central features: it remained mandatory, was “world leading” and “based on a two way value exchange.” It retained a final offer arbitration mechanism.  The Treasurer also thanked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for “the constructive nature of the discussions” and asserted that the object of this whole exercise was “to sustain public interest journalism in this country.”  For a government that has encouraged the prosecution of whistleblowers and threatened the prosecution of journalists for engaging in that very journalism, dark ironies continue to bubble.

    Facebook would have been softly chuckling at the amendments or “clarifications”, as Frydenberg preferred to call them.  The joint press release from the Treasurer and Paul Fletcher, the Minister for Communications, outlines what can only be regarded as capitulations.  Whether the digital platform in question will be designated by the Treasurer as one needing to cough up the appropriate remuneration will depend on whether it “has made a significant contribution to the sustainability of the Australian news industry through reaching commercial agreements with news media businesses”.  At this writing, Facebook is doing that very thing.

    The platform will receive notification by the government that it has been designated prior to any final decision, with a one month notice period.  Non-differentiation provisions will not be triggered where commercial agreements yielded “different remuneration amounts or commercial outcomes that arose in the course of actual business practices”.  The brutal market knows best.

    Finally, resort to final offer arbitration will only take place as a matter of “last resort where commercial deals cannot be reached by requiring mediation, in good faith” after a period of two months.

    Whether expressed in a fit of delusion or disingenuousness, the ministers also make the unsubstantiated claim that the amendments would “strengthen the hand of regional and small publishers in obtaining appropriate remuneration for the use of their content by the digital platforms.”

    Sue Greenwood of York St. John University based in the UK argues that the opposite outcome is more likely, with the proposed law leaving “smaller or local news providers in a weaker position”, disadvantaged relative to those who “deliver content which gets more clicks and shares on Facebook”, thereby improving their negotiating position.

    While the predatory practices of Big Tech are to be lamented and loathed, this Code is a sprawl of potential failings.  It has puzzled and alarmed the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee for “breaching a fundamental principle of the web by requiring payment for linking between certain content online.”  Gratis linking, “meaning without limitations regarding the content of the linked site and without monetary fees – is fundamental to how the web operates.”

    It has induced much head scratching on the part of economists, not least because the Code seems to encourage failing industries and potentially benefit other media giants, such as Rupert Murdoch’s unsavoury News Corp.  This is the unrepentant view of former Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd.  “The problem with the government’s current response to the challenges of the digital media marketing code is that it seeks to solve one problem … by enhancing the power of the existing monopoly – that’s Murdoch.”

    The Code has also caused consternation to digital activists for not addressing privacy concerns.  It does nothing to counter the concentration of information and relentless data extraction known as surveillance capitalism, defined by Shoshana Zuboff “as the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data.”  That data is sold, in turn, to corporate players to target human behaviour in a predictive way.

    The other digital giant no doubt doing a jig in light of these announcements will be Google, who, despite bullying threats to withdraw its search engine from the antipodes, preferred frenetic negotiations.  To date, the company is boasting of striking deals with dozens of Australian media outlets as part of its News Showcase.  It can already make a good argument for not being “designated” for contributing to the sustainability of the Australian news industry.

    A victory, then, for the digital giants.  A tail-between-the-legs capitulation from Canberra, and a single, dagger directed blow at the barely breathing body of Australian democracy.  And just to add appropriately salted insult to wounding injury, Facebook promises that it may well do it again.  The digital brutes have been emboldened.

    This article was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2021 at 11:22pm and is filed under Australia, Facebook.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Facebook Unfriends Australia: The Triumph of Epistemic Chaos

    Creepy and ruthless Facebook has again impressed with its steely indifference to civic responsibility, as if a company established by a sociopath could ever be a model of human improvement. On February 18, Mark Zuckerberg’s antisocial company took aim at Australia by blocking those in that country from sharing local and international content.  As the company notice to those trying to share material went: “In response to Australian government legislation, Facebook generally restricts the posting of news links and all post from news Pages in Australia. Globally, the posting and sharing of news links from Australian publications is restricted.”

    As with previous thugs of mercenary trade (the Dutch East India Company and its British equivalent come to mind), Facebook is keen to make the rules it likes, and ignore those of the commonweal.  It is a plundering pioneer in the world of surveillance capitalism, which has led to what Shoshana Zuboff calls an “epistemic coup” with “unprecedented computational concentrations of knowledge and power” gathered by extracting data elitists.  These elitists, in turn, trash such concepts as the rule of law and democracy in the name of profits.

    As she explained in her keynote speech at last year’s EU Parliament’s Science and Technology Options Assessment panel, “These corporations are not publishers, they are not distributors, they are not merely adtech providers; they are indiscriminate, radically indifferent all-you-can-eat extractors of everything forever, all for the sake of prediction that become more lucrative as they approach certainty.”

    Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code is one such proposed imposition on these extractive qualities, though it does little to actually redress the central principles Facebook and Google operate under.  The Code, as it stands, is a compendium of defects sold as politics rather than sound structural change. In it, the Australian government hopes not to restrict surveillance capitalism so much as redirect it.

    According to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission the Code would “address the fundamental bargaining power imbalance between Australian news media businesses and major digital platforms.”  It’s all a problem of revenue: the fourth estate is dying, having lost its classified advertising base; the Australian government, unenthused by ideas of creating funding schemes or taxing Big Tech, has come to the conclusion that these giants will subsidize and ultimately regenerate old media outlets.  To do so, it proposes making companies reach, through good will negotiations, bargains by which revenue can be distributed.

    While making wild presumptions of what platforms such as Facebook do with the news (referrals, shares and so forth), the government will also require these Silicon Valley hulks to notify media organisations of any change in their search algorithms and abide by an arbitration mechanism.  Disputes on the amount of revenue will then go to an arbitration body.  Such scenes promise to be messy: media moguls hunkering down to discussions with such amoral practitioners as Facebook.

    The blocking of news content on the Facebook platform precipitated a range of consequences, some of them possibly surprising to Zuckerberg and his crew.  The Facebook pages of news organisations were immediately emptied of content.  Australia’s ABC put it like this: “If you search for the Facebook pages of (for example) ABC News, the Sydney Morning Herald, the New York Times, and the BBC, you’ll see a blank feed saying ‘No posts yet.’”

    This was not all.  The draft Code has a definition of news content of some breadth, which purports to be any material that “reports, investigates, or explains issues that are relevant in engaging Australians in public debate”.  When approached for comment on the issue, Facebook confirmed it has pushed its own reading to the limits, citing a lack of clarity.  “As the law does not provide clear guidance on the definition of news content, we have taken a broad definition in order to respect the law as drafted.”  Not that the law has been implemented, but Facebook has been quick on the draw.  Snottily, the company promises to “reverse any Pages that are inadvertently impacted.”

    Government pages were also caught up in the dramatic scrub, including the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Queensland Health and an assortment of commercial and retail outlets.  The blocking of content on the bureau’s site was considered particularly galling, given cases of flooding in Queensland and fire danger in Western Australia.  “Warnings need to get to as wide an audience as possible as a matter of safety,” tweeted ABC weather presenter Nate Byrne.  “Shocking.”

    Smaller community news outlets, trade unions, homeless charities, and various local controlled health services were also enveloped in the information clean. Indigenous communities have been particularly bruised. According to the National Indigenous Times, “Indigenous health and media groups fear Facebook’s pushback will have a dangerous impact on regional and remote communities during [the] wet season and the COVID-19 epidemic, with concerns communities will not have access to vital updates on flood warnings or the rollout of COVID-19 vaccinations.”

    The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services saw the issue of blocking content on its site as a matter of rights, restricting an invaluable means of connecting with the community.  “This is a human rights issue, silencing the voices of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander people, our representative peak bodies.”

    In going for the Australian throat, Facebook has resorted to a different approach from that other giant of amoral propensities, Google.  Google has repeatedly threatened to withdraw its search engine from Australia for similar grievances against the draft Code. But the company has been aggressively negotiating and buttering up Australian media outlets for its News Showcase.  The Australian government sees this as a triumph, a strange interpretation given the positively pyrrhic nature of any such outcomes.  Google can well argue to have come out better in the deal, its business model left intact.

    The time has come to reconsider the very operating rationale of such companies in an effort to address their singular monopoly position.  Solutions are not merely to be found in government regulation and antitrust approaches.  The very allegiance shown to such platforms by their captive users will have to change.  The time has come to save the human project from surveillance capitalism.

    This article was posted on Saturday, February 20th, 2021 at 5:54pm and is filed under Australia, Censorship, Facebook, Google, Media.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.