Queensland Premier Steven Miles has won praise from regional news publishers after calling for an investigation into the power of social media companies.
The move comes after Facebook’s parent company, Meta, announced it will ignore Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code and stop paying Australian media for content used on the site.
The peak body representing regional newspapers in Australia has praised Premier Miles for his leadership and is calling on all Premiers to back his call for an investigation.
Andrew Schreyer, the president of Country Press Australia, which represents 230 regional and local newspapers across Australia said, “Premier Miles is standing up for independent news, and he’s calling out Meta for their extraordinary abuse of market power by blatantly ignoring the Australian government“.
“This is a national issue and we welcome the strong words from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the Communications Minister Michelle Rowland, but Meta is one of the most powerful corporations in history and we need every politician in this fight, so we thank Premier Miles for standing up on behalf of his state,” he said.
Mr Miles has called for an investigation into the power social media companies hold over Australians.
“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,” he said.
“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,” he said.
Meta’s decision to stop paying publishers for the news that Meta profits from will have a catastrophic effect on regional news services.
“Facebook produce no news but they probably make more money from sharing news than the publishers do for creating it. It’s wrong and a classic market failure,“ Andrew Schreyer said.
“The Australian government had corrected this market failure with the introduction of Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code in March 2021, but Meta are now arrogantly ignoring the Australian government,” Mr Schreyer said.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has called Meta’s decision to pull funding from Australian news organisations “untenable” and has flagged action against the tech giant.
“The idea that one company can profit from others’ investment, not just investment in capital but investment in people, investment in journalism is unfair. That’s not the Australian way,” Prime Minister Albanese said.
Meta has pulled news content from its sites in other democracies to avoid paying for the content, as it did in Australia in 2021 for a short period and it is likely this will be the next tactic Meta will deploy with Facebook.
“If social media platforms such as Facebook continue to promote misinformation ahead of professionally balanced news then democracy at its core is at risk,” Mr Schreyer said.
