Facebook has urged Australian senators to investigate concerns about the concentration of the country’s media ownership, rather than wasting time “re-examining well-trodden ground” regarding the impact of tech giants.
The former prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, also argued on Monday that News Corp Australia posed a greater threat to the nation’s media landscape than Google’s threat to pull its search functionality from Australia if a new media code was made law.
Facebook and Google are in a battle with the Morrison government concerning draft legislation that would force the tech giants to pay Australian news publishers for content.
Facebook has told a new Senate inquiry into media diversity that it was not to blame for the challenges facing the news industry.
The chair of the inquiry, the Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, signalled she planned to question News Corp executives about the company’s political relationships during forthcoming public hearings.
The inquiry into media diversity, independence and reliability – set up by the Senate after the former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd campaigned for a royal commission into the Murdoch media – is due to begin hearings in mid-February.
Guardian Australia understands the inquiry has received more than 4,000 submissions, including many from members of the general public, but so far only a handful have been published on the committee’s website.
On Friday, the tech giants escalated the dispute with the government over the proposed media code. Facebook threatened to remove local and international news from the feeds of all Australian users while Google said it could remove Google Search altogether.
Turnbull said he was more concerned that News Corp’s Australian outlets, including Sky News, were promoting misinformation in the same way he believed sister outlet Fox News in the US ushered in a rise of “proto-facism” that motivated rioters to storm the US Capitol.
“As far as I’m aware Google hasn’t sought to overthrow a government,” Turnbull told Guardian Australia.
“Powerful forces in the media are literally spreading lies. To say the election was stolen, and you’ve had big voices in the media, Fox News in particular, that their new president [Joe Biden] has no democratic legitimacy. All of this led [to the Capitol attacks].”
Turnbull said the Fox News formula was “essentially repeated in Australia in terms of Sky News”.
“We cannot let lying propaganda go through to the keeper,” the former Liberal prime minister said.
“When you have people with big megaphones repeatedly saying black is white, black is white, some people will believe black is white.”
In addition, Turnbull reaffirmed his criticism of News Corp over the events of 2018, when he was toppled in a Liberal leadership challenge initiated by Peter Dutton. Scott Morrison won the subsequent party ballot and led the Coalition to victory in the 2019 federal election.
“News Corp’s fingerprints all over the 2018 coup were obvious,” Turnbull said.
The terms of reference for the Senate inquiry include “the impact of online global platforms such as Facebook, Google and Twitter on the media industry and sharing of news in Australia”.
But Facebook said Australian policymakers and regulators had “continuously and comprehensively scrutinised” relationships between digital platforms and Australian media businesses over the past four years.
“We therefore respectfully suggest that re-examining well-trodden ground would distract the Senate Standing Committee on Environment and Communications from focussing on an as-yet unexamined issue: concentration within the Australian media sector,” it said in its submission.
“Whilst much of the public debate and policy scrutiny has focused on the role that digital platforms such as Facebook play in Australia’s news ecosystem, this narrow focus has obscured the true challenges associated with the sustainability of journalism.”
The social media giant said the industry’s challenges “have existed since the commercial phase of the internet began and Australian newspaper circulation began to decline in the 1990s”.
“While the internet may have exacerbated challenges faced by the news industry, those challenges began years before people began widely adopting the internet and decades before the launch of Facebook,” the company wrote.
Facebook said the barriers faced by small and medium-sized publishers, especially regional and local publishers, as a result of increased concentration in the Australian media market had not been properly considered.
Hanson-Young, the inquiry chair, said if the government accepted it needed to “rein in big tech” it also had to better support media diversity in Australia.
“It can’t just be that the media code passes and the government thinks their role supporting journalism is done – it is far from over,” Hanson-Young told Guardian Australia.
Hanson-Young said News Corp had indicated it was willing to participate in the hearings, and “we will be calling them as witnesses”. She said the public hearings would include questions about how media businesses engaged with the government.
“We know the government talks to the Murdoch press all the time,” she said.
“How does that work? What is the level of that relationship? They’re the types of questions that we need to get to through the hearing process … We need to help the public understand what the current relationship looks like and how it operates, and then we need to consider whether that’s appropriate.”
In a brief submission to the inquiry, News Corp Australia said a number of laws and regulations framed Australia’s media landscape.
It included a copy of Nielsen digital unique audience figures for November, showing ABC News websites in top position in the current events category, followed by News Corp’s news.com.au and a range of other publications.
News Corp pointed to its submissions to other recent inquiries as addressing “contemporary issues facing Australian news media”. It also reaffirmed its concerns about “the rising tide of secrecy” undermining Australians’ right to know under the guise of national security legislation.
Note: Guardian Australia has been in discussion with Google over inclusion in its new “Showcase” offering that would see the company pay news providers for inclusion in this product.