Australia has been urged to hit big tech companies with a new digital platform tax to fund trusted news media in order to confront the “rising tide of misinformation and disinformation”.
Australia’s defence budget “commits billions to buffer against military threats” but the country is “unprepared to fend off malicious actors looking for any chance to wage information warfare”, according to the Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy & Defence Dialogue (AP4D) thinktank.
An options paper published by AP4D on Tuesday says new ideas should be considered because previous efforts to address the news media’s financial woes, regulate social media companies and make them pay for news “have faltered”.
The recommendations include the need to educate citizens in Australia on how to spot misinformation and disinformation, and also to fund independent journalism across the Pacific.
Meta – the parent company of Facebook and Instagram – has announced it will no longer make payments to news companies in Australia, as the three-year contracts struck to avoid being regulated under the news media bargaining code begin to expire.
Anastasia Kapetas, an adviser to AP4D and one of the editors of the options paper, said Meta’s decision could take $70m out of commercial news and public broadcasting in Australia.
Kapetas said this left trusted news outlets “staring down the barrel of yet another crisis”.
She said malicious actors were “taking advantage of information vacuums left by shuttered or curtailed news operations, both in Australia and the region, as well as lax social media regulation to undermine social cohesion”.
The options paper says it is “time to consider other measures such as a special digital platform tax, the revenues of which could be channelled towards news”.
The paper is not prescriptive about the size or scope of this proposed tax, but says “most disinformation” is delivered via multinational social media and tech platforms “and their business models depend on generating maximum engagement through content engineered to cause shock and outrage”.
Australia is facing “a deep decline in information sovereignty” because of the growing power of “a handful of global companies that operate global information infrastructure monopolies in social media, data, AI, satellite technology and cloud computing”.
The paper acknowledges it is difficult for a country of Australia’s size to influence big commercial players like Google, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) and Meta, but suggests trying to “influence standards in cooperation with the US and EU”.
The paper says allocating revenue from a digital platform tax to fund Australian journalism “must be done in a way that does not entrench existing news organisations and information monopolies but encourages new players to emerge”.
Complementary policies could include tax incentives for news producers and philanthropic support.
“Not-for-profit or employee-owned corporate structures for media companies could be modelled and encouraged,” the paper says.
“The most well known of these is the Scott Trust which owns the Guardian. These kinds of trusts could be replicated in Australia to provide stable base funding and freedom from political interference.”
The paper suggests policymakers could also “tackle the demand side in the form of government funding for news subscriptions that are distributed on the basis of means-testing”.
“Given that most credible news is now only accessible through prohibitive paywalls, restoring public access to diverse and accurate news sources has become a critical issue,” the paper says.
Media industry woes are only one part of the AP4D paper, titled What Does it Look Like for Australia to Use All Tools of Statecraft in the Information Environment.
The paper says Australia should commit more resources to protecting citizens from harms in the information environment through “long-term well-funded and ongoing public literacy campaigns”.
It calls for digital media literacy to be taught from early childhood onwards “to help children and young adults build resilience against the many harms targeted at them in the information environment”.
The paper casts the “deterioration of the information environment” as “an urgent foreign policy priority” for Australia at a time when China is seeking to increase its influence across the Pacific.
“Australia’s Pacific broadcasting strategy still spends less than one Australian dollar per capita compared to Japan which spends roughly $4.50 on overseas broadcasting and Germany which spends $7 per person,” it says.
The paper was produced as part of a program funded by the Australian Civil-Military Centre, but does not represent Australian government policy.
