Facebook has committed to making a major contribution to the news industry with a promise to license material from news publishers.
Facebook announced that the company would spend at least $1 billion to license news media over the next three years.
“Facebook is more than willing to partner with news publishers. We absolutely recognize quality journalism is at the heart of how open societies function — informing and empowering citizens and holding the powerful to account. That’s why we’ve invested $600 million since 2018 to support the news industry and plan at least $1 billion more over the next three years,” said Global Policy Chief Nick Clegg.
The move is part of an effort to show the company’s commitment to journalism following an unprecedented showdown between the tech giant and the Australian government.
Last week Facebook removed news from its platform in Australia after the country’s legislature began debating a proposal that would require Google and Facebook to pay traditional news and media companies for their content. The disabling entailed prohibiting the sharing and reading of news links from both users and publishers.
“At the heart of it, in Facebook’s view, is a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between Facebook and news publishers. It’s the publishers themselves who choose to share their stories on social media, or make them available to be shared by others, because they get value from doing so,” said Clegg.
Australia intends to make tech companies pay a portion of the costs news publishers incur to produce news content that goes on to be shared on social media sites.
Google had a similar reaction to Australia’s pending legislation and threatened to cut off its services to the country. The company eventually backed down and came to the negotiation table to cut deals with traditional media companies.
Facebook eventually reached an agreement with the Australian government to restore the news function on its platform. The deal includes additional negotiation with media companies before binding arbitration kicks in, and the company is now free to negotiate deals with the media companies themselves.
“Facebook would have been forced to pay potentially unlimited amounts of money to multi-national media conglomerates under an arbitration system that deliberately misdescribes the relationship between publishers and Facebook — without even so much as a guarantee that it is used to pay for journalism, let alone support smaller publishers,” explained Clegg.
To illustrate Facebook’s frustration with the proposed legislation, Clegg used the analogy that the law would be like asking carmakers to fund radio stations because people might listen to them in the car and then allowing the radio stations to set the price.
Under the new agreement that Facebook has reached, the company will also retain the right to restrict news content on its platform for Australian publishers and users as it did last week. However, the company has signaled that it has no intent to do so as long as negotiations going forward remain in good faith.
