Facebook did the right thing here, and the Australian media meltdown about it only seems to prove that. For Facebook (according to their press release) news str

Facebook did the right thing here, and the Australian media meltdown about it only seems to prove that. For Facebook (according to their press release) news stroies account for about 4% of the content on their site. They cut all of this out for Australian users and stopped Australian media from sharing their links to non-Australians, too. In the day since, the traffic to news orgs in Australia has dropped significantly. Early data shows that referrals dropped more than 90% in the 24 hours after the shift in policy came in. [1] The same source reports that overall traffic to the news sites in Australia dropped between 15% (local traffic) and 20% (international traffic) compared to normal. If Facebook was really stealing value from the news orgs, then the fact that they have 'stopped stealing' should have been met with relief. Instead, there are articles all over the media about the hit that Facebook is taking to its reputation, the fall of Mark Zuckerberg [2], and how the Australian government is going to fight back. I’m not convinced there is a lot that the government can do, however. The choice for Facebook was pay for the links to media that you allow on your platform, or don’t allow links on your platform. Ben Thompson said it well in his piece on Australia, Facebook, and Google this week: "The company was quite literally going to have to pay, say, 'The Australian' for 'The Australian' posting 'The Australian' links on Facebook!" That they eventually chose what the government assumed was the impossible choice shouldn’t have surprised anyone - they had warned they might for months. Additionally, the media response in the article linked by OP and the talking points from the government ministers on the recklessness of taking critical resources offline during a pandemic, bushfire season, and crisis periods rings holllow when you refer back to the text of the bill. See this Twitter thread with extracts - if it was information about current affairs of local, regional, or national significance, it counted as ‘core news content' according to the law. [3] 1: https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/02/in-australia-facebooks-ban-on-sharing-news-stories-has-sent-publishers-traffic-tumbling/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/02/in-australia-facebooks-ban... 2: https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/social/the-rise-and-fall-of-mark-zuckerberg-like-roman-emperor-augustus/news-story/79ff2c2016564aac7e47f03e104e6fda https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/social/the-rise-an... 3: https://twitter.com/NewtonMark/status/1362173580776148996 https://twitter.com/NewtonMark/status/1362173580776148996