In a special sit down with Ivan Leung from WAMN News, Ivan told DRN1 how Facebook had made his news channel a stable in Western Australia with over 20,000 followers tuning into his news headlines, press conferences and live streams.

“We give our viewers live and raw information.” Mr Leung said, he went on to say “Television is monolog… The web and Facebook is a very interesting thing.” When talking about Facebook Mr Leung said “The success formula last year, when we were starting through the pandemic… When other journos I know were working from home, they do rely on our service.”

Facebook played a huge roll for media companies just like WAMN News. Being able to bring breaking news to thousands of people at once, which allowed Facebook users to get the latest news without leaving the platform. “During the bushfires… We had to extend our news  service to half hour.” Mr Leung said. 

While Facebook covered the cost to deliver it to the end user allowing media companies to keep cost low and only need to pay for the original broadcast to Facebook media servers a cost that Facebook did not charge them but rather their internet provider.

While it’s now been two days without Australian or international news content on Facebook, users have become creative with screenshots of news articles, posting links on twitter which then they share to Facebook. It’s unclear if this is what the new way of getting news content on Facebook will be, or if Facebook will come to an agreement with the Australian government.

In Facebooks deference if the law passes they only have two options, pay for the news content that they don’t control, own or scrap from the web and that owners of these media companies voluntarily upload to Facebook, or remove news media from their platform.

You can watch WAMN News on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/user/wamnau