Facebook s news ban experiment is almost over. Here s what we ve learnt
Posted
TueTuesday 23
updated
WedWednesday 24
FebFebruary 2021 at 3:12am
Australian news sites have seen a drop in traffic due to the news ban, with links shared on Facebook pages down 80 per cent.
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It s now six days since the most popular social media platform in the country, Facebook, decided Australians could no longer view or share links to news websites.
Key points:
New publishers have seen a drop in traffic and lost a big chunk of audience
Comedy and satire pages are now among the most popular
What happens when news is taken out of Facebook? How do users respond?
Despite growing evidence that exposure to and engagement with disinformation narrowly defined on the basis of identified problematic domains is a very small part of most people’s media use, concentrated among partisans actively seeking it out, and often primarily consumed by people who consume far more news from established outlets, survey research suggests very widespread concern over disinformation, especially online.
One survey conducted in 2020 asked respondents across 40 media markets whether, thinking about online news, they were concerned about what is real and what is fake on the internet. 56% of respondents across these markets were ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ concerned about this, ranging from a low 32% in the Netherlands to a high 84% in Brazil.
New Statesman digital subscriptions have grown by 75 per cent in a single year The The
New Statesman grew its paid-for digital subscriptions by 75 per cent in 2020, part of a longer-term increase in the brand’s readership that has led to 77 per cent revenue growth from subscriptions over three years. Print subscriptions also rose by 12 per cent last year, but the coronavirus pandemic adversely affected news-stand sales. In a survey conducted for the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2020, 64 per cent of readers in the UK cited “distinctive journalism” as their primary reason for subscribing to any publication, and 35 per cent of those readers said that they subscribe for particular writers they like. This agrees with what our readers tell us about why they subscribe: for Stephen Bush, Anoosh Chakelian, Jeremy Cliffe, Emily Tamkin, Sarah Manavis and Ailbhe Rea, among many others.
Comments
NSA whistleblower and internet freedom advocate Edward Snowden has cautioned the public against celebrating President Trump’s recent social media ban. “I know a lot of folks in the comments [who] read this are like ‘YAAAAS,’ which, like I get it. But imagine for a moment a world that exists for more than the next 13 days, and this becomes a milestone that will endure,” he wrote on Twitter.
Facebook officially silences the President of the United States. For better or worse, this will be remembered as a turning point in the battle for control over digital speech. https://t.co/RBfoIn4ENE
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