Mark Zuckerberg turned against the news

The article can be summarized as follows: Zuck was personally interested in how to save the news industry from their own failed business model. He gave them over $2 billion a year and even thought about buying the Associated Press outright. But journalists didn't realize how little they actually mattered to Facebook's business [1], nor the extent to which Meta giving them money was purely a matter of Zuck being helpful and interested.

So in 2019 they started trying to extort more out of Meta (i.e. Zuck personally, given his personal interest and controlling stake), by using their influence over weak politicians to get laws passed forcing tech firms to pay for links to news [2]. This forced Meta to treat news for the first time as a business decision rather than Mark's personal interest, at which point they concluded they'd have to pay billions more in fees but eliminating news would cost them ~nothing due to its tiny engagement.

Simultaneously journalists decide that Mark Zuckerberg and his employees are single handedly responsible for a nearly random collection of events they didn't like. Trump? Facebook's fault. Genocide in Myanmar? Also Facebook's fault. Americans rejecting the election on Jan 6th? Facebook. They didn't asserted this in their public articles, putting them in the position of demanding Facebook pay them for links to articles trashing Facebook, but also shat on employees personally in meetings as well [3].

Journalists felt they were so special that Meta had to reward them merely for existing [4], regardless of how badly they treated Meta in return. They were wrong. Eventually they'd overplayed their hand so badly Mark seems to have decided to leave the industry to its fate.

I think the extent to which the news industry has become dependent on extracting money from rich billionaires isn't widely appreciated. At this point many major news organizations have whole teams of journalists who aren't paid for by readers or viewers at all, their funding comes entirely from grants given out by foundations or corporations with explicitly political agendas [5]. This fact often isn't called out anywhere on the stories themselves, and they continue to present themselves as independent and unbiased, a claim that is false. The way they justify this to themselves is to claim that the agenda these billionaires have is so transparently and obviously correct that it doesn't matter if they take the money, or indeed, that they have a moral obligation to do so. Zuck is right to get Meta distanced from that mess.

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[1] "We did all the calculations on what would happen if we removed and blocked all the news there, and it was a tiny, almost negligible impact on engagement," one of the people familiar with the situation said.

[2] Zuckerberg decided Facebook's relationship with the news industry had become untenable toward the end of 2019. That was when Australian government officials first informed Facebook and Google that the country was pursuing a new law, the News Media Bargaining Code.

"Australia alone was now going to cost us about $100 million a year," a person who worked for Meta at the time with knowledge of the situation said. "Assuming other countries would follow suit, which they did, the cost quickly went up to several billion a year. And it was then that the top executives were like 'Time out, what the fuck are you all doing in news that this is suddenly a multibillion-dollar risk?'"

[3] "You'd go into a meeting with a TV network or a news company and they would just tell us what assholes we are for an hour," a person who worked for years in such a role at Meta said.

Even when Facebook started writing more checks to more news organizations as part of its News Accelerator Program — which started in 2018 with a budget of $300 million to hand out to publishers, and later with direct multimillion-dollar deals with publishers for their content — relations did not improve.

[4] "People in news feel like Facebook owes them something," one of the former high-level employees said. "But eventually, if you push Mark to the brink, his response is 'Nope, I'm done.'"

[5] https://apnews.com/article/science-business-arts-and-enterta...