Major publishers receive more than 500K posts on Facebook in a month, finds Meltwater
The recent High Court of Australia ruling that publishers are responsible for third-party comments on respective Facebook pages, is set to have significant repercussions for publishers that rely on the platform for engagement.
Media monitoring platform Meltwater has found that half a million Facebook comments were posted in the past month alone, across a number of major publication pages.
The ruling by the court, means publications could be liable for defamation and other legal challenges as a result of community engagement with the social media posts.
Between The Australian Financial Review, The Australian, The Guardian Australia, ABC and News.com.au there has been upwards of half a million Facebook comments in the past month, according to Meltwater data.
Source: Meltwater [click to enlarge]
As flagged by G Squared director George Photios, brands will also be on close watch as the ruling could soon be applied to all businesses nation-wide, not just media outlets.
Meltwater Australia’s enterprise director Georgina Bitcon sees this ruling resulting in two scenarios for organisations that use social media: “Firstly, publishers disable comments on Facebook, and lose access to much coveted engagement rates, greatly depreciating the value of owned social channels and reducing public access to news media. Secondly, greater resourcing will be attributed to in-house social media teams by relying on co-ordinators and technology partners who can accurately filter comments to scale.”
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Olivia Kruimel is the managing editor at Mumbrella. She has more than 15 years of experience in journalism, communications and marketing. Her journalism career began at Fairfax Media (now part of Nine) and includes various B2B publications such as B&T, Travel Today and ALB. As a marketer Olivia has worked for Standard Chartered and various global law firms.
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