Facebook doesn’t need news stories for its business & won’t pay to share them in Australia

The social media giant Facebook has recently dismissed a proposal from Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCA) which was about sharing its advertising revenue with news organizations on Facebook. The organization said that there would “not be significant” impacts on its business if Facebook quits sharing news on its platform. 

On Monday, Facebook gave its reaction to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which has been entrusted with making obligatory implicit rules planned for making everything fair. 

During the Covid-19 pandemic, a continuous and surprising downturn was observed in the advertising income on Facebook. Lots of famous Australian media companies and regional newspaper agencies cut jobs, shut down their businesses or failed to provide employment to the masses as before. The treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, advised the ACCC to build up a code to handle the issue.

Facebook and Google have recently stated that they won’t accept to pay for using the news content. In its submission to the watchdog, Facebook said it dismissed a considerable lot of the ACCC’s ideas in the latest proposal, and said there was a “healthy rivalry” between itself and news companies.

Facebook also said it could remove news altogether with no noteworthy effect on its business. This would, however, affect the number of users who share, repost and consume for either purpose including delete contacts on the Facebook platform. 

“If there were no news content available on Facebook in Australia, we are confident the impact on Facebook’s community metrics and revenues in Australia would not be significant.” 

The web based life goliath said it upheld the possibility of a set of accepted rules between news publishers and digital platforms, however that itself and Google were being “singled out” unjustifiably in the ACCA’s proposal.