18.02.2021 – 14:39
BDZV – Federal Association of Digital Publishers and Newspaper Publishers eV
Berlin (ots)
In Australia, Facebook has switched off all content from news sites on its platform in protest against a new media law.
“After the market power, the mega-platforms are now also playing to their political power,” commented Dietmar Wolff, General Manager of the Federal Association of Digital Publishers and Newspaper Publishers (BDZV), the events in Australia today. The fact that a platform can simply switch off pages at will in order to build up political pressure shows impressively where the problem with the American network monopoly lies on the Internet. In principle, this behavior is part of the global strategy of mega-platforms.
Facebook is acting here out of pure self-interest and not because they supposedly want to make the world a better place: “In Australia, Facebook shows its true colors: The platform itself claims to network the world, to supply the world with information. But if politics sets up the necessary rules, then it is suddenly over and the interests of the users as well as the freedom of opinion and freedom of the press are suddenly irrelevant for Facebook “, said Wolff in Berlin.
It is high time that governments around the world restricted the market power of gatekeeper platforms. And the mega-platform Facebook has to decide whether it wants to be a medium itself or not. If you now announce and implement your own media offers, it is a global media company with almost three billion customers and must be regulated accordingly.
In Germany, even without Facebook, users could of course rely on the fact that they would be well-informed in a variety of ways directly from the more than 600 news portals of the newspapers, according to the BDZV managing director.
Press contact:
Alexander von Schmettow
Head of Communication
Phone: 030 / 726298-210
Email: [email protected]
Anja Pasquay
Press officer
Phone: 030 / 726298-214
E-Mai [email protected]
Original content by: BDZV – Bundesverband Digitalpublisher und Zeitungsverleger eV, transmitted by news aktuell
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