MELBOURNE, Australia – Facebook agreed to pay Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp for its journalistic content in Australia, a month after the social media platform temporarily blocked news links within the country due to legislation that presses digital giants to compensate the publishers.
The multi-year agreement, announced on Tuesday, includes news content from Murdoch’s main conservative media outlets such as The Australian, a national newspaper, and the news.com.au news website, as well as other metropolitan, regional publications and community.
This comes a month after Google unveiled its own three-year global deal with News Corp to pay for the publisher’s news content, and after Facebook backed down, under strong criticism, for its drastic measure to block sharing or viewing. of news links in Australia.
Few details, including how much Facebook will pay News Corp for the content, have been released.
In a statement on Tuesday, Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp, said the deal, which he called a “milestone”, “would have a material and significant impact on our Australian news business”.
News Corp’s leaders, Thomson added, “led a global debate” while the rise of digital giants impoverished the news industry. With the deal, he said, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and his team helped “shape a future for journalism, which is under extreme pressure”.
Critics said, however, that the deal did little to guarantee the kind of public interest journalism that the Australian government was trumpeting when it proposed the legislation, which was passed last month.
“There is no guarantee that the public will benefit,” said Tanya Notley, a senior communications professor at Western Sydney University, who noted that the first major news companies to close deals with Facebook were conservative and aligned with the current government.
Others said he further emphasized the exaggerated power of social media companies to control news and public information. “They are the custodians of news for public consumption,” said Marc Cheong, who researches digital ethics at the University of Melbourne.
In a statement, Facebook said the deals would help people access news articles and breaking news videos from a network of national, metropolitan, rural and suburban newsrooms.
“We are committed to bringing Facebook News to Australia,” said Andrew Hunter, head of Facebook partnerships in Australia and New Zealand.
This was a markedly different tone from that adopted by the tech giant in February, when Facebook blocked news in Australia.
At the time, William Easton, managing director of Facebook Australia and New Zealand, said of the draft Australian legislation: “The proposed law misinterprets the relationship between our platform and the publishers who use it to share news content.”
Although the Australian government has aimed to consolidate spending on digital advertising at companies like Google and Facebook, tech giants say they benefit news companies by driving traffic to their websites.
Facebook also announced preliminary payment agreements with independent news organizations, including Private Media, Schwartz Media and Solstice Media. But so far, it has cemented deals only with News Corp and Seven West Media, another major conservative news company.
Sky News Australia, also owned by Mr. Murdoch, has extended an existing agreement with Facebook.