Coalition MP Andrew Wallace, a long-time advocate for social media controls, said he had been dealing with Meta executives for nearly a decade and their behaviour was similar to “dealing with Big Tobacco in the 1970s”.
“You can’t be taken seriously, Ms Davis, when you say Meta products aren’t harming young Australians. We welcome Meta’s support for age verification, but I’m putting to you that you are not a credible witness,” Wallace said, a claim denied by Davis.
This masthead revealed in May that Mark Zuckerberg’s firm had told Australia it would stop media companies and individual users from posting news links if the government enforced a world-first Morrison-government scheme compelling tech giants to pay for articles.
Meta blocked news content and some emergency services pages for a few days in 2021 at the height of nationwide border closures and COVID-19 lockdowns as it negotiated with the government.
News Corp Australasia executive chair Michael Miller said the hearing made clear Meta was prepared to pull news from its products, as it did in Canada last year when the government tried to force it to pay media companies.
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“I warned this would be Meta’s position and that it was prepared to blackmail Australia over this issue,” Miller said in a written statement, urging the federal government to use its powers to go after the tech giants.
“All genuine evidence shows millions of Australian Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users consume and value news on social media, and to turn off that access would directly attack their right to be reliably informed.”
During the hearing, Meta defended its oft-repeated claim that news made up only 3 per cent of content seen by users.