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Fighting for journalism and profitable news media
Facebook faces criminal complaint from publishers over scam adverts
And both The Observer and the Manchester Evening News have launched paywalls
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Good morning from the team at Press Gazette on Monday, 1 December.
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👮Publishers in Sweden have become so indignant at Meta’s careless refusal to deal with the problem of rampant fraudulent advertising that they have filed a criminal complaint against the company and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Vice chair of publishers’ group Utgivarna Thomas Mattsson told me: “When Meta officials tried to claim that they ‘only build the highway and are not responsible for speeders’, I personally corrected them to say that a better comparison is drug crimes.
“It may be that Meta does not actually hand over drugs to users, but Meta is smuggling the drugs into Sweden so that other illegal gangs can make money out of it. The very model of selling sponsored posts without pre-checking the content is what makes it possible for criminals to deal with Meta.”
Meta literally makes billions of dollars every year in revenue from misleading adverts which steal the identity of actual users (such as these irate Swedish journalists and media brands) in order to con vulnerable people out of their money.
It largely has a free pass in UK, EU and US law – which gives tech platforms exemptions from responsibility for the content they publish and profit from.
Legally it probably will continue to get away with what it does. But morally, it stinks.
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💷The march of the paywalls continues as online publishers respond to falling referral traffic and pressure on advertising.
The Observer launched its first paywall on Thursday, charging £16 per month for full access (and just an additional £2 per month to get home delivery of the print edition).
Readers get one article for free and then must register in order to get a number of additional free reads (the meter is currently set pretty high but will no doubt tighten up in time).
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🐝Meanwhile Reach, a publisher that has always been committed to free online content, launched a paywall at the Manchester Evening News on Friday.
At launch it appears to operating a Daily Mail-style model, charging £1 for the first month and then £4.99 monthly for access to premium content and for an ad-lite experience on the rest of the site.
Paid online content is set to be rolled out on other Reach websites in the months to come.
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