The Turn to Regulation in Digital Communication: The ACCC’s Digital Platforms Inquiry and Australian Media Policy

Flew, Terry; Wilding, Derek

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3659671

Cited by 4 publications

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“…These findings provide some important context for our discussion of news performance on Facebook. While Facebook is clearly a dominant social platform and is worth studying considering an increasingly tense policy debate (Flew & Wilding, 2021), most Australian news media outlets were not wholly reliant on the platform for audience traffic in 2018. Some of the public statements made by Australian media companies, our own qualitative research (Meese & Hurcombe, 2020), and outcomes from the Facebook ban suggest that this is still the case for many outlets.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The ACCC released a final report featuring analyses based on confidential data from media companies and social media platforms. However, the inquiry has not provided a detailed public-facing analysis of their online data (Flew & Wilding, 2021). The News Media Bargaining Code, which tried to get Facebook and Google pay for Australian news content, came out of this policy process.…”

Section: Platform Data Crowdtangle and Approaching Journalism Institutionallymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…News organizations are now turning away from social media in favor of reader-focused business strategies (Meese & Hurcombe, 2020; Rashidian et al, 2018). Facebook has changed its algorithm to show more content from family and friends, and governments are introducing new regulatory frameworks to manage the relationship between these two parties (Flew & Wilding, 2021; Meese, 2020). One reason why Facebook has attempted to distance itself from news content is because of growing concerns about the ability of misinformation and disinformation to spread widely across the platform (Benkler et al, 2018).…”

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confidence: 99%

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The Institutional Impacts of Algorithmic Distribution: Facebook and the Australian News Media

Bailo

Meese

Hurcombe

2021

Social Media + Society

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Since changing its algorithm in January 2018 to boost the content of family and friends over other content (including news), Facebook has signaled that it is less interested in news. However, the field is still trying to understand the long-term impacts of this change for news publishers. This is a problem because policymakers and legislators across the world are becoming concerned about the relationship between platforms and publishers. In particular, there are worries that platforms’ ability to make unilateral decisions about how their algorithms operate may harm the economic sustainability of journalism. This article provides some clarity around the relationship between these two parties through a longitudinal study of the Australian news media sector’s relationship with Facebook from 2014 to 2020, with a particular focus on the January 2018 algorithm change. We do this by analyzing Facebook data (2,082,804 posts from CrowdTangle) and external traffic data from 32 major Australian news outlets. These data are contextualized by additional desk research. We identify a range of trends including the decline of news sharing, the collapse in the performance of “social news,” the variable position of social media as a source of referral traffic, and, most critically, the diffused nature of the 2018 algorithm change. Our approach cannot make direct causal inferences. We can only identify trends in on-platform performance and referral traffic, which we then contextualize with industry reportage. However, the data provide vital longitudinal insights into the performance and responses of individual media outlets, news categories, and the Australian media sector as a whole during a critical moment of algorithmic change.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Platform Data Crowdtangle and Approaching Journalism Institutionallymentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Institutional Impacts of Algorithmic Distribution: Facebook and the Australian News Media

Bailo

Meese

Hurcombe

2021

Social Media + Society

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Introduction: Governing the Algorithmic Distribution of the News

Meese

Bannerman

2022

Palgrave Global Media Policy and Business

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The algorithmic distribution of news on digital platforms has become an increasingly prominent policy issue. There are concerns about the ability of technology companies like Google and Facebook to independently modify their algorithms, arbitrarily changing how news is distributed across their services. This dramatically affects people who want to access news and news outlets who want audiences to reach their websites. Governments are also worried about misinformation and hate speech and whether algorithmic distribution amplifies these activities. In this chapter, we canvass these regulatory trends and outline some of the more popular conceptual responses. We go on to introduce historical institutionalism, the theoretical and methodological approach that informs the collection as a whole. After this, we summarize the major themes from this collection, before introducing each chapter and ending with a reflection on future research directions for journalism and media policy scholars.

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Advertising, Algorithms and Audiences: The Unchanging Economics of Online Journalism

Meese

2022

Palgrave Global Media Policy and Business

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The Turn to Regulation in Digital Communication: The ACCC’s Digital Platforms Inquiry and Australian Media Policy

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

The Institutional Impacts of Algorithmic Distribution: Facebook and the Australian News Media

The Institutional Impacts of Algorithmic Distribution: Facebook and the Australian News Media

Introduction: Governing the Algorithmic Distribution of the News

Advertising, Algorithms and Audiences: The Unchanging Economics of Online Journalism

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