Last Thursday morning, news services on Facebook rapidly went dark.
In a matter of hours, the social media network switched off news — a response to the Government’s laws forcing tech giants to pay publishers for news content.
On Tuesday, Facebook agreed to restore Australian news on Facebook “in the coming days”.
“After further discussions, we are satisfied that the Australian government has agreed to a number of changes and guarantees that address our core concerns,” a Facebook statement said.
But while it took only a matter of hours for news to be torn off our feeds, it’s taking far longer to build it back up again.
As of Thursday, almost no Australian news Facebook pages have come back online.
A handful of news pages can post photos that are viewable by the audience, but links to external content are not.
The Facebook pages of ABC News, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Herald Sun, and Guardian Australia remain entirely down.
If Facebook users attempt to share news articles with friends, their own pages, or in groups, an error message still appears.
A spokesperson from Facebook said it would begin to restore news content “before the weekend” but did not respond to questions about why the process would take days to complete.
Why is it taking so long?
University of Sydney political economist of communication Benedetta Brevini said Facebook’s behaviour over the last week had been purely strategic, and its delay restoring news was likely another negotiation tactic.
“It was always strategic, and now we’re sure,” Dr Brevini said.
“The fact they haven’t reinstated news — I think they’re madly involved with negotiations, and they’re trying to develop deals and maybe announce them before the bargaining code becomes law.
“It’s more convenient for them to show they’ve achieved some deals and to have something more to communicate — because until they [reinstate news], they still have the bargaining power to keep negotiating.”
Dr Brevini says news giants like Amazon and Facebook behaved as “digital lords” by luring users to their platform, locking them in with appealing content and then harvesting user data.
She said Facebook’s “drastic” actions achieved their desired intent by accelerating negotiations with government.
“The decision to remove the news was a tactic to obtain a huge watering down of the bargaining code, because you see what they’ve done, it’s a huge gain,” she said.
“The digital lords can choose who are the publishers to negotiate with, they can now have all these months to negotiate.
“So in a way, they won all battles. And the public didn’t really win, because media diversity could have been addressed.”
Dr Brevini said Facebook was likely never going to walk away from Australian news content entirely because news was another platform that could be monetised.
“We all knew that in the end, Facebook was not going to give up on news,” she said.
Anxious wait for news publishers
For many commercial publishers that derive income from audience views, every day matters in the anxious wait for news on Facebook to be restored.
Digital news brands experienced a drop in audience numbers and time spent on their sites as Facebook referrals nosedived, according to Nielsen data reported by Mumbrella.
The data found audience sessions on news websites and apps fell by 16.1 per cent on February 18, compared with the previous six Thursdays.
Meanwhile, total audience time spent on digital sites was down by 13 per cent versus the past six Thursday averages.
By the Monday following the ban, the number of news links posted on Facebook was down 80 per cent compared with the pre-ban figure, according to Queensland University of Technology data.
Following the outage, downloads of the ABC news app increased and it rocketed to the top rank of Apple’s app store.