New Meta research is bad news for News Bargaining Code
As Australian publishers fight to force social media platforms to pay them for news content, a new study has found that, aside from with X, most people aren’t visiting social media for news.
These are the findings from a new Pew Research Center survey of about 10,000 U.S. adults conducted in March, 2024. Although the study is from the US, it highlights the differing ways in which people interact with, and use, the various social media sites.
In terms of proliferation of news content, half of X users say they “regularly get news on the platform”, compared with 40% of TikTok users, 37% of Facebook users, and 30% of those on Instagram. But this is merely how often this content floats into their feeds.
It’d be valuable to contrast this against the local insights from the 2024 Digital News Australia report, looking at similar trends concerning online, broadcast, and social news consumption: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2024/australia
Meta is spinning a narrative that people don’t want to see news on their feed but in the absence of their support of legitimate news brands, I know I’m seeing my feed infiltrated by loads of faux news brands and posts (mainly Taylor and Travis news) rather than legitimate news I might be interested in. I block one, and ten similar click-bait ones are on my feed that same week. I’d love to be able to opt-in to legit news sources on my feed (and see Meta being willing to contribute financially to those outlets being able to continue delivering local and national news powered by social).
Meta saying that Australians aren’t going to their FB feed for news is a self-fulfilling prophecy when they’re filtering out legitimate news from being visible. Can we interrogate this more when considering Meta’s nobody-cares-about-news claims?