PROGRESS.ID – The parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, META has pointed out that the Presidential (Perpres) regulation on publishers’ rights will hurt small media and only benefit a handful of media.

With the enactment of the Presidential Publishers’ Right Regulations, Facebook will be reluctant to pay for news content, because so far, news on Facebook and Instagram is news uploaded voluntarily by publishers. If there is “coercion” to pay for news content, then Facebook is forced to block news content as it has done in Australia and several European countries.

“They (the information providers) voluntarily put their content on our platform. We don’t take the content, 90% of our news content comes from the news providers themselves,” said Meta Director of Public Policy Rafael Frankel during a virtual conference held on Monday, August 7, 2023.

The existence of social media such as Facebook, according to Rafael, actually offers benefits to the information providers themselves. Apart from increasing the exposure of news content, it can also boost the growth of news agencies. Facebook as a platform can help news content reach more readers interested in a particular topic.

Rafael explained that Meta also helps news agencies increase the number of visitors to their pages. “Benefits obtained after voluntary uploading of content to our platform are obtained by the uploaders themselves,” he explained.

As quoted by Bisnis.com, several countries like Canada and Australia have introduced publisher rights laws to overcome the problem of platforms rebroadcasting news without paying. This situation has impacted both Facebook and Instagram, which have stopped displaying news content on their platforms to avoid payment obligations.

In Indonesia, efforts are also being made to regulate digital platforms such as Google to create a better journalism ecosystem, according to the statement of the head of the Red Cross Forum, Arifin Asydhad. This regulation was initiated by the Press Council which was then taken seriously by the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology.

Digital platforms have a positive impact on mass media, but they also have negative effects. One of the biggest issues is content being taken for granted without verification, which blurs the lines between news content and aggregators.