“Deprecate” seemed an odd word to use, didn’t it? “We’ll be deprecating Facebook news” declared Meta this week, as a way of announcing it would close its dedicated news tab in April.
The practical meaning of this is that Facebook will not renew its contracts with news organisations whereby it pays for the news content that appears on the site. That’s obviously significant news for anyone who cares about journalism, but even so, I found myself stuck on the verb. So I looked it up.
Illustration: Andrew Dyson
Turns out “deprecate” has become standard IT jargon for when a developer ceases supporting or maintaining a particular application. The application may still exist, but it’s no longer recommended because its failings are now so manifest, it is outmoded.
Here, there’s an overlap with the word’s traditional meaning of belittling or disapproving of something. Turns out it’s the perfect word for Facebook to use because at the centre of its decision is one blunt calculation: that as far as Facebook content goes, news just isn’t that valuable. And so, in one country after another – the US, the UK, Germany, France, Australia – where it has been forced to pay for this content, it has now concluded the price isn’t worth paying. Facebook is quite literally belittling the worth of news.
It’s easy to be outraged by this. But in a sense this is precisely the kind of evaluation the news organisations – and the federal government, which pushed the tech giants into striking these agreements – have been asking for. Ask tech companies to pay for the news that appears on their sites, and you immediately ask them to assign a dollar value to it on entirely commercial criteria. Once judged that way, news is really no different from any other Facebook content. It either drives engagement or it doesn’t, and must be assessed on those terms.
If Facebook says news doesn’t pull its weight, all we can really do is call its bluff. Our federal government has that option under current legislation, which can mandate a deal if Facebook doesn’t strike one with the relevant news companies. But if that bluff fails, Facebook will simply remove all news from its Australian site, which it has done in Canada for nine months now. Predictably, far more misleading and sensational viral content filled the breach, and guess what? It turns out that Facebook’s Canadian user metrics have stayed basically the same, and it hasn’t noticeably lost advertisers.
We’re here because this whole pay-for-news-content scheme was founded on two dubious assumptions. First, that these tech companies were somehow stealing the content of news organisations. And second, that they were doing so because that content is indispensable for the likes of Facebook, either because it is popular or because it gives the site a veneer of credibility. We’ve now seen Facebook doesn’t share that last assumption. And the problem with the first one is it’s simply untrue.
Facebook knows this. Here’s what the company said when the same fight broke out in Canada: “The Online News Act is based on the incorrect premise that Meta benefits unfairly from news content shared on our platforms, when the reverse is true. News outlets voluntarily share content on Facebook and Instagram to expand their audiences and help their bottom line.”
Want to hit Facebook where it really hurts? Outlaw its harvesting of our data
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07.03.2024
“Deprecate” seemed an odd word to use, didn’t it? “We’ll be deprecating Facebook news” declared Meta this week, as a way of announcing it would close its dedicated news tab in April.
The practical meaning of this is that Facebook will not renew its contracts with news organisations whereby it pays for the news content that appears on the site. That’s obviously significant news for anyone who cares about journalism, but even so, I found myself stuck on the verb. So I looked it up.
Illustration: Andrew Dyson
Turns out “deprecate” has become standard IT jargon for when a developer ceases supporting or maintaining a particular application. The application may still exist, but it’s no longer recommended because its failings are now so manifest, it is outmoded.
Here, there’s an overlap with the word’s........
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