Australia vs the Internet: RIP your newsfeed

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G'day, I'm Thomas O'Reitty, and I'm thrilled to announce I'll now also be hosting Background Briefing.

Over the past few weeks, our reporters have been investigating stories of untold power and hidden influence.

Who's really shifting the dial in Australia?

They're secretive by nature.

From the unlikely influences.

I've rejected probably 15 to 20 politicians in the last month.

To the international businessman shunning the spotlight.

All of his buddies are sanctioned.

The game changers, wielding serious power under the radar.

We are cultivating influence.

Agents of influence, an all-new series by Background Briefing.

This podcast is recorded on the lands of the Awabakal, Dharug, and Eora people.

There's a bit of a debate at the moment about who gets to cover politics.

Friends, if you are a content creator, check this out.

We have reserved a spark for you.

Just a girl on her way to Australian Parliament House to be part of change.

In the lead-up to elections in Australia and Canada, social media influencers are getting involved in political coverage.

For the first time, influencers were invited to yesterday's media lock-up.

Campaign officials call it a new way of doing politics.

And it's got a few of the traditional media journals a bit riled up.

You're supposedly there to cover the budget, not to be a sycophant.

They weren't allowed to ask questions at the press conference, so they they were kind of separate to the mainstream media in that sense.

Great to see the Prime Minister taking advice from the sex and lifestyle podcasts in the middle of a cost of living crisis of all things.

In the United States, big, well-established news outlets are being told to vacate their bureaus inside government buildings to make way for pro-Trump networks.

It is a privilege to cover this White House, and nobody has the right to go into the Oval Office and ask the President of the United States questions.

That's an invitation that is given.

There's a lot of reasons for this tension, but a big part of it is that traditional media outlets are losing a lot of their power.

We don't have a great deal of trust in what we read in the newspaper or for that matter, see on the telly.

The reality is that young people don't watch insiders and they don't read the papers.

They get their news off social media.

37% of Aussies say they trust the media to do what's right, and that's down from 40% last year.

More and more people are turning to influencers and new media outlets for their news, and that is, to be clear, absolutely fine with me.

But the problem is, investigating, exposing, and questioning the powerful requires a lot of access, resources, and time.

And new media outlets rarely have a big enough workforce.

The old media, broadcasters, and newspapers used to have that, but increasingly they don't.

With a dramatic decline in advertising, regional newspapers will struggle to survive.

Advertisers are abandoning free-to-wear television, and that's largely because they're seeking digital alternatives.

Back in the old days, advertising revenue kept journalism afloat.

But now, most of the advertising revenue is going into the pockets of a handful of billionaire middlemen, most of whom were at Donald Trump's inauguration, right there in the front row.

Now, oddly enough, the situation isn't hopeless.

One unexpected country is fighting back and trying to make Facebook, Google, X, TikTok, and others support the local media, and that country is Australia.

The charge is expected to be around $200 million a year, which they'll have to pay whether they run Australian news or not.

Australia has spent the last few years trying to find a way to fix social media.

And if it works, it could potentially help democracy everywhere.

But the big boy billionaires are fighting back.

And it's affecting what you can see in your newsfeed.

It's affecting how you engage with politics.

And it's affecting democracy.

This is the first of three episodes where we're going to be looking at Australia's attempt to rein in social media companies and shore up democratic principles, not just here, but everywhere.

Will it work or will the broligarchs win?

I'm Matt Bevan and from if you're listening, this is Australia versus the internet.

So in this first episode, we're going to be talking about Australia's attempts to get social media giants to help pay for local journalism.

The ACCC says journalism is a public good.

So it's drafted a law that would require Google and Facebook to negotiate a payment for content.

And the story of this law begins in the most cringe era in the history of technology, the mid-1990s.

Ladies and gentlemen, Steve Balmer!

It was the era of extremely unfit billionaire tech executives dancing on stage and screaming at their workers to launch their new products.

I have four words for you.

I

love

this

company.

Yes!

I've gone deep into the ABC content minds and I've uncovered an Australian version of one of these product launch events.

Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you enjoy the next hour as we glimpse the highlights and the fun aspects of Windows 95.

In 1995, Microsoft launched their new operating system in Sydney.

For now, sit back, relax, prepare to have a fun look at some amazing software.

A mulleted gentleman has now thrown to a laser light show introducing none other than

the world will never be the same again.

Dame Edna.

Funnily enough, Microsoft

describes my late husband very well.

And all the hype was really to compensate for the fact that while everyone was very excited about computers and the internet, Nobody was quite sure what the internet was for.

You can see how many cokes are left in the Coke machine at Carnegie Mellon in New York.

You can get a picture of the beach from somewhere in California.

Imagine waking up from a 30-year coma today and hearing, well, we were counting Cokes and looking at beach pictures and then, you know, yada yada yada, half a dozen tech companies control the entire world.

But even back then, there were some people who had an inkling of the internet's true potential.

It is that whole new audiences and markets are being created.

News Corporation boss Rupert Murdoch thought that the internet created an opportunity to find new viewers and readers for his newspapers.

Right now,

anyone anywhere in the world is able to go to a computer screen, get information, news and entertainment, work and play at minimal cost.

He could just set up news websites for people to access and not have to spend all that money delivering physical newspapers all over the country.

But Rupert Murdoch was missing something crucial.

The reason people advertised in his papers was because of the distribution system.

Advertisers were paying him to put their slogans and logos onto millions of front porches every morning.

The internet provided a new, cheaper way to deliver news, but it also provided a new, cheaper way to advertise and sell your products.

All of a sudden, I can sit here on the internet and buy goods.

Where does that leave the large media moguls?

Where does that leave the large corporate empires?

Slowly and surely dying.

But the shift wasn't just about a physical one from papers to screens.

It also opened up an important legal question about who should be held responsible for publishing.

And this legal question was answered with a single online ad.

On the 1st of May 1995, this Oklahoma City breakfast radio show was outraged.

Shannon and Spinozi, Mornings, Classic Rock All Day, on 107.7 KRXO.

It was a week after the horrific Oklahoma City terrorist bombing that killed 167 people.

Radio host Mark Shannon had been told that somebody was putting ads on the website AOL for t-shirts covered in slogans making jokes about the bombing.

The ad was posted under the name Ken and had a phone number attached.

Mark Shannon encouraged his listeners to call that number and express their anger at the person who had posted the ad.

Hours later, AOL got a phone call from a man named Ken Zoran.

He was the owner of a small real estate magazine in Seattle, and he was wondering why he was suddenly getting an enormous number of angry phone calls.

And basically I told him, you know, my phone's ringing off the hook and I can't get anything done.

And it's all these people upset about something that they saw on AOL.

Ken Zoran later did an interview on NBR and he said the callers were furious.

How could you do this?

What a loser you are.

I didn't want the thing to go any further and have some, you know, nitwitch show up with a shotgun on my property.

Eventually, AOL took down the ads, but the company didn't do anything to correct the record or prevent new copycat ads from popping up.

Zoran took them to court.

And see, if the ads had been posted in a newspaper, this was an open-and-shut case of defamation.

Zoran would win easily.

But little did Ken Zoran know websites had very recently been given legal immunity.

Bill Clinton signed America's huge telecommunications bill into law today.

Huge was right.

107 pages filled with new and exciting laws that set out to govern the internet.

One of the goals was to make websites act more like media outlets.

Hardcore pornography and the use of indecent language, which children may access on the internet, is now illegal.

Big website owners like Yahoo didn't like these new censorship laws at all.

They said the law was violating the right to free speech and so they shut down their sites.

Screens across the country are all black in protest.

That part of the law ended up being repealed.

But elsewhere on a different page of the same bill was a provision that the website owners learned to like a lot because it clearly put them in a separate category from media outlets.

But at the time, basically nobody had noticed that such a consequential law had been passed.

Having gone through all the newspaper clips, there was really no coverage of this.

So lawyers didn't even know what to do with it.

Jeff Kosiff is the author of a book called The 26 Words That Created the Internet.

These 26 words that had been passed through the U.S.

Congress were an attempt to cut red tape and help online businesses grow.

Here's what those 26 words say.

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held to be the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

So that's the 26 words.

If you don't know what that means, that's okay, because nobody then you would have met.

It was these 26 words, which came to be known as section 230, that would decide Ken Zoran's case.

The implication of the law was that while AOL did have the right to delete stuff that was posted on their sites, they were not responsible for it.

They aren't publishers, like newspapers are.

So when when these laws were applied to Ken Zoran's case, the troll who posted the ads for those shirts on AOL could be sued if Ken Zorand could ever find them.

But AOL, the company running the website, was free and clear.

This is the basis of the modern internet.

It's this law, and others like it in other countries, that enables Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and others to have open comment sections without any fear of being sued into oblivion by someone like Ken Zoran.

Day Medna's prophecy had come true.

I want to make it clear that up until quite recently, most journalists didn't have a massive beef with Google or Facebook.

Tonight, for the first time, we'll be showing on screen a small selection of the thousands of live comments that viewers make using Twitter.

I think this is one of the most exciting times ever to be alive because what's really happening is a worldwide conversation.

And you can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

You can use the Quanda hashtag to join or follow the Twitter conversation online.

And media outlets were in constant contact with the social media companies to figure out how we could best work together with them to make news accessible.

You want video?

We'll make video.

You want catchier headlines?

We'll make catchier headlines.

President Obama Mark's Father's Day at the White House becomes nine times Barack Obama was the coolest dad ever.

Mark Zuckerberg appears before U.S.

Congress becomes the 21 most iconic clapbacks from today's Facebook hearing.

It was a symbiotic relationship.

We created the news content, they shared it with our audiences.

By 2017, Facebook and Google were responsible for more than half of the traffic to news websites in Australia.

And that is when it all fell apart.

It started with the comments.

Dylan Voller was big news.

Images of his treatment shown on the ABC's Four Corners program prompted a Royal Commission into youth detention in the Northern Territory.

In 2017, a video of an Indigenous teenager named Dylan Voller being mistreated while in a youth detention centre sent shockwaves around Australia.

But today some of the biggest media companies who posted the story on Facebook have had a rude awakening.

When the news was posted on Facebook, users started posting defamatory slurs against Dylan Voller.

Now, Section 230 and laws like it prevent Dylan Voller from suing Facebook.

But what about the news outlets that had posted the story online and invited people to comment?

The companies told the court they weren't the publishers of the Facebook posts, so couldn't be held responsible.

But the courts decided that actually they could.

The High Court has found they are liable for comments posted by the public on their Facebook pages.

This ruling meant media companies would have to have staff monitoring comments around the clock to avoid defamation, which was too expensive.

So, bye-bye comments.

The second sign that the relationship between the Australian media outlets and social media companies was getting rocky was the rise of something called zero-click searches.

Hey, Google, what is a zero-click search?

On the website Verbolia.com, they say the term zero-click results refers to any result that Google shows you without sending you to a specific website.

For example, if you search for the age of your favorite celebrity, Google will present you with the answer without you having to click on a website.

See, somebody wrote an article about the idea of zero-click searches and I just got the key fact from the article without clicking on it.

Google took the information from the news article and served it up to me with zero clicks.

Which is great for Google because they get the ad revenue.

Not so great for the journalist who actually wrote the original article though.

By 2021, 65% of Google searches were zero-click searches.

Google was using news content to answer people's questions and keeping all the ad revenue to themselves.

As a result of these incremental changes, newspaper revenue had fallen by 45% in a decade.

All of the money has gone online, which is up from zero to eight billion dollars in 15 years.

And more than half of that goes to Google and Facebook.

The tech giants were making so much profit from the Australian media industry that the government decided to do something about it.

The government introduced a law to force Google and Facebook to pay the media for news content.

The law basically said big tech had to negotiate deals with Australian news outlets or they'd be sorry.

And because Google and Facebook are serious companies run by level-headed, reasonable adults, they came to the table and then they flipped it.

If this version of the code were to become law, it would give us no real choice but to stop making Google search available in Australia.

Australian media companies are united and the Prime Minister is on their side.

We don't respond to threats.

Was this an overreaction from them?

Maybe.

But the concern was that this would set a precedent.

For Google and Facebook, it's a challenge to their global dominance, given other countries could adopt Australia's rules.

It turns out that threat wasn't idle.

This morning, Facebook closed down links to Australian news pages, including the ABC, Nine Media and News Corporation.

News was banned from Australian Facebook feeds for a whole week, in which time the world had a very lively debate about whether or not this was actually a good idea.

We need a vibrant public interest, investigative, free journalism ecosystem in this country.

This legislation is pure protectionism out of the brain of Rupert Murdoch to try to create attacks on his competitors.

Google and Facebook are being asked to do something they really don't want to do, which is pay for something they now get for free.

Eventually, a compromise was reached.

Google and Facebook struck three-year deals with Australian media outlets, injecting more than $200 million into the sector.

It was great because it meant that new journalists could be employed and existing journalists had some job security.

That is what happened to me.

That money kept me in a job through 2022, as my position was funded by what everyone at the ABC called the Google money.

Everyone seemed to have accepted the news system.

But then

another government tried to follow the Australian precedent.

We recently passed legislation that says Facebook, if you're going to be sharing news

or work done by Canadian journalists or local news, you have to make sure they're compensated for it fairly.

This is the former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau copying Australia's homework.

But this time around, Facebook in particular was not having it at all.

Facebook is blocking news from its sites.

Two years ago news was turned off on Facebook and Instagram in Canada and it has not returned.

By 2024, the deals struck in Australia were due for renewal.

Google signed on but Facebook or Meta as it's now known has chosen to walk away.

No deal.

Not Not here or anywhere.

In Australia, hundreds of jobs have been lost in news organisations thanks to Facebook's decision.

Facebook has also decided that it's actually not interested in putting news into your so-called news feed.

The number of people using Facebook news in Australia and the US has dropped by over 80% last year.

Facebook has clearly decided it no longer wants to be in the news business.

It's just too expensive.

Facebook started deprioritising news links in your news feed.

Meanwhile, X, the dearly departed Twitter, has basically done the same thing.

And this is really quite bad.

Largely because Australia and Canada both have upcoming federal elections in this brave new newsless world.

And we've never seen elections like it.

The only political content in Facebook feeds is political advertising and politicians talking to influencers.

There is very little traditional news.

Welcome to It's Lot Podcast, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

Great to be here, Abby.

Peter Dutton.

Peter Craig Dutton.

Welcome to No Filter.

It's great to be here.

Thank you.

Adam Band, leader of the Australian Greens, welcome to the podcast Big Small Talk.

Thank you for coming.

Thanks so much for having me.

Meanwhile, the Australian government is trying to find another way to make Facebook pay for journalism anyway, with some kind of a tax.

But guess what?

U.S.

tech companies are urging the Trump administration to target Australia over proposed laws for social media.

As Donald Trump announced tariffs on Australia, the brolegarchs, who were sitting in the front row of his inauguration, brought these annoying little laws to his attention.

What they are asking is for them to pressure the Australian government to change these regulations.

I think the chances of broad multinational regulation of big tech companies is pretty unlikely in the short term.

Donald Trump is unlikely to back it, and to be honest, even the Democrats might have taken the tech giant's side.

But this effort by Australia and Canada is important.

A strong argument can be made that in the coming four years at least, having a well-funded media is going to be pretty important.

If you're you're listening, is written by me, Matt Bevan.

Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon.

Audio production is by Cinnamon Nippahart.

Social media giants used to at least pretend to care about stopping harmful content and misinformation from spreading online.

We want to find ways to work more openly with researchers and universities and also law enforcement.

But in the last year or so, they've kind of just given up.

The fact-checkers have just been too politically biased.

One little country has has been trying to fight back, and yes, it's Australia again.

So, why is misinformation worse than ever before?

And can it be fixed?

That's next.

On Australia versus the internet.