Every Saturday morning I start the show with a little editorial. I give you an opinion on something. I ask for your feedback. And after I finish the piece, the written version lives on the Newstalk ZB website. You know the one! And from there, our digital teams will share a link on social media.  

But if you just happen to be tuning in from Australia this morning - as I know many listeners do - and you log in to Facebook afterwards, you won’t see a link to this piece. The stoush between Zuckerberg and the Australian government shows no sign of being resolved any time soon.   

Part of me is torn. I look at this issue from a few different sides. Part of me thinks, actually, we know that people get so much information from Facebook that if they aren’t able to access reliable news sources on Facebook, the information they will be accessing instead is going to be the dregs of the dregs. Part of me thinks I’d feel a bit better about the Australian government’s position and their proposals to make big tech pay for news, if it wasn’t Rupert Murdoch set to profit. And part of me thinks actually this could be good for the sort of stuff that gets published by newsrooms. Perhaps they’ll be a little less incentivised to publish click bait trash in the hope of spreading it across Facebook. Perhaps. 

Most of all though, I think good-on the Aussies. We know just how damaging some aspects of big tech and the social media platforms have been when it comes to misinformation. We know they’re pulling of triple backflip pirouette nip tucks with a difficult of 100 in order to pay as little tax as possible. Is it not a relief to see a government stand up to them, for a change?  

One thing you can be sure of in this life is there is no such thing as a free lunch. Reliable news isn’t free. It takes work and resources. And as newsrooms around the World have been hollowed out and undermined, Facebook has grown stronger off their diminished outputs.  

If you value reliable information and you want an honest picture of the World, Facebook isn’t the place you should be going in the first place.  

Facebook has hooped people into opinion ghettoes, stoked their fears, contributed to the rise of conspiracy theories, and it’s manipulated the weakest parts of our collective psychologies. It’s made us feel like it’s serving us, when really it’s selling us.  

I hope the Aussies hold strong. And I hope other countries follow their lead.