A senior Facebook executive told Australian media companies that if they didn’t cooperate with the social network, their businesses would die.
According to a report by The Australian, Campbell Brown, Facebook’s head of news partnerships, told a group of more than 20 broadcasters and publishers that she wanted to help media companies develop sustainable business models through the platform.
“We will help you revitalise journalism … in a few years the reverse looks like I’ll be holding your hands with your dying business like in a hospice,” she said, in comments corroborated by five people who attended the meeting in Sydney on Tuesday.
The Australian also reported that Brown said that Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, “doesn’t care about publishers but is giving me a lot of leeway and concessions to make these changes”, although both Facebook and Brown vehemently deny this comment was made, referring to a transcript they have from the meeting.
Facebook would not release the transcript from the meeting.
During the four-hour meeting, Brown also talked about the company’s decision to prioritise personal posts from family and friends over journalistic content within the news feed. The move has hit some publishers who rely heavily on referrals from Facebook hard.
“We are not interested in talking to you about your traffic and referrals anymore. That is the old world and there is no going back – Mark wouldn’t agree to this,” said Brown.
In a statement issued on Monday, Brown said: “These quotes are simply not accurate and don’t reflect the discussion we had in the meeting. We know there’s much more to do, but our goal at Facebook – what the team works on every day with publishers and reporters around the world – is to help journalism succeed and thrive, both on our platform and off.”
This wouldn’t be the first time that Brown, a former CNN news anchor, has used blunt language in stark contrast with the mealy-mouthed corporate messaging Facebook typically delivers.
In March, she told the audience at a conference in London that threatening to sue the Guardian ahead of its Cambridge Analytica exposé on data harvesting was “not our wisest move”.
Facebook hired Brown in January 2017 to help build better relations with news organisations after the social network was criticised for its role in disseminating misinformation in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election.
“Right now we are watching massive transformation take place in the news business – both in the way people consume news and in the way reporters disseminate news. Facebook is a major part of this transformation,” she said on her Facebook page at the time.
Contact the author: olivia.solon@theguardian.com