Facebook plans to invest an additional $ 1 billion in the news industry over the next three years as evidence of its commitment to journalism.
According to Arabnet, the company said in a statement that this came after the unprecedented confrontation that the company had with the Australian government, which included a brief disruption of the ability to read and share news of Australian Facebook users and publishers.
The company said: Facebook wants to partner with news publishers, and we understand that high-quality journalism is at the core of how open societies work, which is why we have invested $ 600 million since 2018 to support the news industry, and are planning at least another billion dollars over the next three years. >
The commitment matches the commitment made by Google in October of last year, when the search giant announced that it was starting to pay publishers to create niche versions of stories and other forms of news content for the Google News Showcase platform.
Notable in this scenario, however, is the way Google and Facebook have interacted with Australia's bargaining legislation, which has elicited a profound response.
The law forces the two companies to come to the negotiating table with news organizations to strike deals to pay for news content to be shared on both Facebook and Google.
The company feels that the bargaining law as designed prior to the latest settlement was unfair, mainly because it places more power in the hands of media conglomerates to obtain ever higher payments through the compulsory negotiation process.
The company said: There is a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between Facebook and news publishers from our point of view, and we were forced to pay unlimited amounts of potential money to multinational media conglomerates under an arbitration system that deliberately misrepresented the relationship between publishers and Facebook, without ensuring that it would be used to pay press costs, let alone More support for smaller publishers.
Facebook is now free to negotiate deals with news publishers for its Facebook News platform without fear of enforced arbitration.
and the company says it plans to do this in Australia as it currently does in the UK, US and other markets.
Facebook also reserves the right to restrict news content to Australian publishers and users as it did last week, but the company has indicated that it does not intend to do so if future negotiations remain in good faith. .
