STEPHEN GLOVER: Obnoxious practices, unbridled power... how this digital behemoth threatens Press freedom
Newspaper readers are rightly not over concerned with the commercial trials and tribulations of publishers. But most of them do care about the freedom of the Press.
And when that freedom is threatened by an American technology conglomerate with enormous power, many will become uneasy.
The company is Meta. It may not be a household name but its constituent parts are. Meta owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and is run by the billionaire Mark Zuckerberg.
People talk about the power of the Press but the most successful newspapers in the world are minnows in comparison with Meta. Facebook boasts over
3 billion 'active monthly users'. There are around 6.4 billion people in the world aged over 12, so Facebook has close to half of them. Instagram and WhatsApp are not far behind.
Of course, no one could sensibly deny that Meta is an innovative company offering services many people want. But its occasionally obnoxious practices, as well as its unbridled power, are concerning.
How does Meta threaten the freedom of the Press? If you're reading this article in a printed newspaper, you are not directly affected by what the American behemoth does. But if you are reading it online, it's possible you came to it via Meta.
Many people access newspaper articles through Facebook. This is particularly true for local news publications, which have taken the worst hit as print circulation tumbled over recent years. In the UK, as many as a third of the audience of local news outlets originate on the social media platform.
People talk about the power of the Press but the most successful newspapers in the world are minnows in comparison with Meta
Facebook has recently, and unilaterally, sought to change its terms so that Meta will be able to 'crawl' or 'scrape' any website associated with a business account on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Messenger, the fourth of these particular Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
In plain English this means that Meta would gain access to large amounts of newspapers' journalism – everything ever published online – without having to pay for it. That, at any rate, is what many publishers fear. The charge is one of potential theft.
Publishers are worried that Meta will steal their journalism for its own purposes driven by a desire to train its AI, reducing the impact of what they produce themselves, and so inevitably diminishing their revenues.
Theo Bamber, chief executive of The News Media Association, which represents over 900 news media titles across the United Kingdom including the Daily Mail, doesn't mince his words.
He says: 'Meta's bid to force publishers to allow unrestricted scraping of their websites to power its AI products is an outrageous assault on journalism.'
Meanwhile the reaction of the Competition and Markets Authority – a regulatory quango – has been relatively robust. It says that it 'shares at face value the concerns' of publishers, and is examining Facebook's change of terms.
What is Meta's response? It's along the lines of 'Nothing to do with us, guv'. In a statement to Reuters, it said the issue is largely one of misunderstanding, and asked for 'more time for us to explain' the reason for altering its terms. It has postponed the date at which this will occur until November 20.
Specifically, Meta claims that the new rights it is seeking won't change how it uses 'web crawlers', while it maintains that publishers will still be able to block Meta's bots if they want to.
The image that comes into my mind is that of a large dog that has been caught in the act of removing a joint of beef from a trolley. It stands there looking rather shamefaced, trying to give the impression the beef got into its mouth wholly by accident.
Meta is claiming that thousands of publishers around the world have got the wrong end of the stick and there is nothing whatsoever to worry about. I suppose it is just possible, but it doesn't seem very likely.
My main reason for saying this is that, for all its innovative brilliance, Meta is an amoral company with monopolistic instincts, and already stands convicted of very bad behaviour.
Only last week, a judge in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $25billion after a jury found the company liable for misleading users about privacy on Facebook. Meta is appealing against this record fine.
More seriously to my mind, Meta agreed in August to pay up to $18 billion over 10 years in respect of allegations that it had deliberately designed addictive features that are harmful to children, such as the 'infinite scroll' on its apps.
There have been other cases against Meta that show the company in a poor light, and there are more in the pipeline in the United States and elsewhere that seem likely to have the same outcome.
Meta owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and is run by the billionaire Mark Zuckerberg
Famously, it has expertly minimised its tax liabilities. In the UK, which represents only a small segment of its global business, Meta made a pre-tax profit of £362.4million on revenues of £3.1billion in 2024. It paid tax at 12 per cent (about £41 million), around half the 25 per cent Corporation Tax rate.
Former Deputy Prime Minister and ex-leader of the Lib Dems Nick Clegg made a lucrative career out of defending Meta against many egregious charges, and is said to have pocketed £100million as President of Global Affairs. Let's hope he can live with his conscience.
Most of the rest of the world takes a more jaundiced view of this voracious company. Do we really believe that publishers have simply misread Meta's intentions, and that it has no designs on their journalism?
It should be said that readers are probably free to read online newspapers without there being any danger of Meta's involvement. We are only talking about those who choose to use Facebook and other Meta services.
And it is also true, at least theoretically, that publishers can protect themselves from the danger of having their journalism ripped off simply by leaving Facebook and Instagram, though they will lose revenue if they do so. At least one local title, the McKinley Park News in the US, has done this.
Can anything be done? There is a fashionable view that Meta and other enormous tech companies are too big to be regulated by single countries, and will always get their way. But it isn't so.
After all, several countries including Britain have adopted, or will soon do so, a statutory ban on children under 16 using social media. That is bound to affect Meta's revenues, and there's nothing it can do about it.
So although I'm normally sceptical about bodies such as the Competition and Markets Authority, there's some hope that it will act. It could use its new powers under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 to combat anti-competitive behaviour by tech giants.
The European Commission, which has considerable muscle, representing as it does 450 million people, is also taking an interest in the issue. For all its defects, the EU has a record of standing up to Meta, applying fines of about £850million over the years.
Maybe Meta senses that it has overreached itself yet again – hence its talk of misunderstandings, and the postponement of the date when the changes will take effect.
Whatever happens, this rapacious company must be stopped before it is allowed to add undermining a free Press to its long list of other sins.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.