Facebook and Instagram could soon be wiped of news content.
It’s after their parent company, Meta, announced it will stop paying for news content in Australia when the current deal expires.
Hannah Ferguson, whose company Cheek Media was grown through Instagram, is already working on how to combat this.
Listen to Hannah Ferguson tell The Briefing how she plans to move forward:
“For now it’s really about trying to send people to other avenues of content that keeps them connected to what I’m doing,” Ferguson says. “It really changes the way you approach the different income streams.”
In 2021, Meta signed deals with Australian news outlets after the government introduced laws requiring tech companies to pay for the news on their platforms.
Meta says news is “a small part of the Facebook experience for the vast majority of people” and “makes up less than 3% of what people around the world see in their Facebook feed.”
But Ferguson says that it’s a “joke that Meta thinks that it’s not the place that people get their political and news content.”
“If Meta is to remove news and political content from Instagram and Facebook, the media literacy for young people will decline so quickly.”
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