Government faces Meta showdown amid misinformation fears
Meta has been blocking news in Canada for 2.5 years and Mark Zuckerberg is not in the mood.
That’s the reality Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his parliamentary colleagues will need to consider when publishing their News Bargaining Incentive bills this week, not the optimistic precedent of 2021, when Google and Facebook scrambled to sign checks rather than make appointments under the original law.
The world has changed in the last five years: The Meta has been bluffed once before and won.
I must admit that I underestimated it when the Albanian government first implemented this stimulus plan in December 2024. The government then said it would impose a tax of 2.25 percent of tech firms’ revenues unless they entered into voluntary agreements with media companies to provide compensation for news used on their platforms. For the commodity, this means a tax of between $27 million and $34 million.
My assumption (and it was a common assumption at the time among newsroom colleagues and executives at other tech companies) was that Meta’s news ban in Canada was a temporary protest, the kind of corporate toddler tantrum that would eventually give way to business pragmatism.
Wanting something to work is not the same as believing it will work, and the evidence from Canada is not encouraging.
Of course, the thinking persisted that a company that built its empire on likes, clicks, and user engagement wouldn’t voluntarily eliminate news altogether and just walk away.
That’s what happened. And the inconvenient truth is that everything was fine.
According to researcher Axel Bruns and his team, less than 1 percent of posts on Facebook in Australia contain a URL from a local news site. This explains why Meta pulled out of commercial deals with Australian broadcasters in March 2024 and completely removed news from that country when legislation similar to Australia’s was passed in Canada.
It seems that for Meta, news is a content category that creates regulatory headaches without creating meaningful engagement. From the company’s perspective, why pay for a problem?
Meta has almost certainly done the math and decided that any penalty is cheaper than the alternative.
The Australian government’s response was to write “must-carry” provisions into the redesigned framework designed to prevent Meta from doing in Australia what it had done in Canada. In this context, the move necessarily means legislation that forces Meta to host Australian news on its platforms whether it wants to or not.
This is where politics gets interesting and risky. Forcing a private company to host content it does not want to host raises constitutional questions that have not been seriously tested in Australian courts. It also invites a fight that the Trump administration clearly craves. The US-based Computer and Communications Industry Association currently branded the plan as a taxJust like Meta did on Tuesday when he responded to Albanese’s announcement.
There is a fair counterargument here and it deserves an honest hearing. Australia is not Canada. Our media market is more concentrated, our political consensus to support public interest journalism is broader, and the original 2021 code had generated meaningful sums (more than $200 million) before Meta came out.
Google will care, always has. In 2021, before the original code had even been adopted, the company acquired Seven West, Nine and News Corp. was signing lump sum payment agreements with. The company has shown that it prefers to write checks rather than block connections because search is essentially about being the front door to the Internet, and an Internet without news connections is a worse front door.
TikTok is the wild card. It has never been a meaningful news distributor, and its Chinese parent company ByteDance has spent years convincing Western governments that it is a benign entertainment app. Expect quiet lobbying rather than a meta-style pushback: ByteDance can’t afford another front in its war with the Western government.
When Meta blocks news, which I think it will, three things will happen: Publishers lose referral traffic, which hurts their business model. Misinformation is filling the gap because the verified content that previously accompanied conspiracy theories is no longer available. And reversing the policy that triggered the ban becomes even more difficult politically because backing down looks like surrender.
None of these have been disastrous for Canada. Neither of them were good.
The Albanian government is making a calculated bet that Meta will wink in Australia where he didn’t wink in Canada.
The bet is based on the assumption that the Australian market is more important to Meta’s global strategy, that any provisions that need to be carried will hold up in court, or that Donald Trump will not follow through on his tariff rhetoric. Probably all three.
That’s a lot of assumptions piled on top of each other.
I want this policy to work. Local journalism is truly under threat — newsrooms continue to shrink — and the case for platforms compensating newsrooms whose work fuels their products is morally simple.
And I have always viewed such policies as a flawed solution to a very real problem: not enough people pay for quality journalism. Small and independent publishers in particular need better financing.
But wanting something to work isn’t the same as believing it will, and the evidence from Canada isn’t encouraging.
Meta showed us clearly what he wanted to do. I wouldn’t be surprised if he did it again.
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David Swan is the technology editor of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor of The Australian newspaper.Connect with: X or email.
