This was published 4 months ago
Opinion
Want to hit Facebook where it really hurts? Outlaw its harvesting of our data
Waleed Aly
Columnist, co-host of Ten's The Project and academic“Deprecate” seemed an odd word to use, didn’t it? “We’ll be deprecating Facebook news” declared Meta this week, as a way of announcing it would close its dedicated news tab in April.
The practical meaning of this is that Facebook will not renew its contracts with news organisations whereby it pays for the news content that appears on the site. That’s obviously significant news for anyone who cares about journalism, but even so, I found myself stuck on the verb. So I looked it up.
Illustration: Andrew Dyson
Turns out “deprecate” has become standard IT jargon for when a developer ceases supporting or maintaining a particular application. The application may still exist, but it’s no longer recommended because its failings are now so manifest, it is outmoded.
Here, there’s an overlap with the word’s traditional meaning of belittling or disapproving of something. Turns out it’s the perfect word for Facebook to use because at the centre of its decision is one blunt calculation: that as far as Facebook content goes, news just isn’t that valuable. And so, in one country after another – the US, the UK, Germany, France, Australia – where it has been forced to pay for this content, it has now concluded the price isn’t worth paying. Facebook is quite literally belittling the worth of news.
It’s easy to be outraged by this. But in a sense this is precisely the kind of evaluation the news organisations – and the federal government, which pushed the tech giants into striking these agreements – have been asking for. Ask tech companies to pay for the news that appears on their sites, and you immediately ask them to assign a dollar value to it on entirely commercial criteria. Once judged that way, news is really no different from any other Facebook content. It either drives engagement or it doesn’t, and must be assessed on those terms.
If Facebook says news doesn’t pull its weight, all we can really do is call its bluff. Our federal government has that option under current legislation, which can mandate a deal if Facebook doesn’t strike one with the relevant news companies. But if that bluff fails, Facebook will simply remove all news from its Australian site, which it has done in Canada for nine months now. Predictably, far more misleading and sensational viral content filled the breach, and guess what? It turns out that Facebook’s Canadian user metrics have stayed basically the same, and it hasn’t noticeably lost advertisers.
We’re here because this whole pay-for-news-content scheme was founded on two dubious assumptions. First, that these tech companies were somehow stealing the content of news organisations. And second, that they were doing so because that content is indispensable for the likes of Facebook, either because it is popular or because it gives the site a veneer of credibility. We’ve now seen Facebook doesn’t share that last assumption. And the problem with the first one is it’s simply untrue.
Facebook knows this. Here’s what the company said when the same fight broke out in Canada: “The Online News Act is based on the incorrect premise that Meta benefits unfairly from news content shared on our platforms, when the reverse is true. News outlets voluntarily share content on Facebook and Instagram to expand their audiences and help their bottom line.”
That’s almost right. News organisations looked at Facebook and saw the possibility of free, instant distribution on a global scale. And they found this simply too much to resist. Facebook didn’t steal this content any more than it stole those endless holiday photos you insist on foisting on everyone.
But Facebook’s statement is less reliable when it says this helped news companies’ “bottom line”. Actually, large and quality news organisation gained little revenue and merely contributed to Facebook’s growth. Now Facebook is destroying news organisations, not by taking their content, but by taking their advertisers. Let’s be clear about this: Facebook kills news because if you don’t care too much about ethics, it offers a superior, better targeted advertising product, built on fantastic amounts of its users’ personal data.
That’s why moral government arguments about Facebook paying news companies justly for their work will, in the long run, fall flat. And legislative responses predicated on this will fall over the moment the commercial case doesn’t stack up.
If governments want to go to the heart of the matter, they have two broad approaches they could take: go after Facebook’s advertising product, or treat journalism as a public good rather than merely as commercially valuable content. There might be a million versions of this, but to illustrate, it could be something like finding a way to tax the tech giants properly – whether they’re hosting news content or not – and putting the revenue into a fund specifically dedicated to public-interest journalism.
In any event, there are good reasons to go after the former. Facebook’s data collection is surely unconscionable in itself. Remember when Cambridge Analytica used the data of at least 30 million Facebook users – without their consent – so it could psychologically profile them and allow the Trump campaign to target these users most effectively? Or remember in 2014 when Facebook manipulated the news feed of 700,000 users – again without their informed consent – so it could study how this would affect their emotional state?
The real-world application of this would be to manipulate our emotions – say, making us feel sad on cue – to make us more likely to buy stuff. These are not accidents or aberrations. They are the inevitable consequences of mega companies mass-harvesting such ominously detailed data. It is hard to think of a single sound reason governments should allow this. And if they attacked it aggressively, it would probably have the side effect of giving news organisations a chance.
All else commits us to an inexorable process of deprecation, in both senses of the word. With journalism no longer supported, democracy will no longer be maintained, and everything which depends on it will be irreversibly belittled. And that’s not a deal any government should be prepared to make.
Waleed Aly is a regular columnist.
The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.