When Facebook stripped news content from its Australian feed in 2021, the social media giant may not have expected to spark a full-scale ripple through its own digital ecosystem. But that’s exactly what happened. In a move meant to push back against new legislation, the platform temporarily blacked out journalism, only to find that the silence carried weight. A new study has turned that blackout into a magnifying lens, capturing the hidden dependencies that link Facebook’s business model with the journalism it once tried to exclude.
Researchers Yu Song and Puneet Manchanda treated the incident as a natural experiment. By comparing user behavior in Australia, where the platform temporarily blocked news sharing, with user patterns in neighboring New Zealand, which saw no such interruption, the study isolated the effects of news content removal on Facebook’s performance metrics.
What the numbers reveal is striking. Without access to news, users didn’t just scroll less, they posted less, too. The platform saw around 11 percent decline in engagement with non-news content, alongside nearly 9 percent drop in daily post creation. Those figures mark a clear slowdown, not from user fatigue or outside events, but from the sudden disappearance of news as a driver. And across the Tasman Sea in New Zealand? No change at all, reinforcing the cause-and-effect dynamic.
The study also estimates the financial impact of the blackout. Based on platform usage and engagement metrics tied to advertising outcomes, the authors calculated a 4.3 percent decline in Facebook Australia’s annual advertising revenue. Although temporary, the revenue shortfall underscores the structural role that news content plays in driving monetizable user behavior.
That dip in dollars wasn't abstract — it came from fewer eyes, shorter sessions, and less traction on the feed. Facebook didn’t just lose news; it lost the behavioral momentum that news quietly generates. From headlines to hashtags, the presence of journalism appears to energize the entire platform. Even users uninterested in politics or current affairs engaged less when news disappeared. As a result, the platform's economic machinery lost pressure.
Facebook has maintained that news organizations gain visibility and traffic from being featured on its platform, but the study presents a reversed picture. The researchers argue that the presence of news produces spillover effects that enhance user involvement across content types. News, they contend, functions not as isolated content but as an activator for broader engagement, indirectly boosting attention to non-news posts and increasing the volume of user activity.
The timing of the study aligns with global efforts to regulate platform-publisher relationships. Several governments have advanced legislation aimed at compelling digital intermediaries to pay for journalistic material. Australia’s law, which triggered the blackout, was among the first to gain passage, prompting similar proposals in Canada, the European Union, and the United States.
Of course, the researchers acknowledge the limits. The blackout didn’t stretch long enough to capture long-term adaptation. Given time, users might have migrated toward other news sources or platforms, or Facebook’s algorithm might have pivoted toward different engagement strategies. But as a sharp, time-boxed disruption, the event provided a clean look at what happens when journalism is pulled out of the feed — and it wasn’t nothing.
It turns out that journalism doesn’t just inform the public — it sustains the scroll. What looked like a tactical standoff between a government and a platform became a stress test for an entire engagement model. When news vanished, the numbers dipped. And behind those numbers sat a simple truth: Facebook may not be in the news business, but it clearly does business with news.
Image: DIW-Aigen
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Researchers Yu Song and Puneet Manchanda treated the incident as a natural experiment. By comparing user behavior in Australia, where the platform temporarily blocked news sharing, with user patterns in neighboring New Zealand, which saw no such interruption, the study isolated the effects of news content removal on Facebook’s performance metrics.
What the numbers reveal is striking. Without access to news, users didn’t just scroll less, they posted less, too. The platform saw around 11 percent decline in engagement with non-news content, alongside nearly 9 percent drop in daily post creation. Those figures mark a clear slowdown, not from user fatigue or outside events, but from the sudden disappearance of news as a driver. And across the Tasman Sea in New Zealand? No change at all, reinforcing the cause-and-effect dynamic.
The study also estimates the financial impact of the blackout. Based on platform usage and engagement metrics tied to advertising outcomes, the authors calculated a 4.3 percent decline in Facebook Australia’s annual advertising revenue. Although temporary, the revenue shortfall underscores the structural role that news content plays in driving monetizable user behavior.
That dip in dollars wasn't abstract — it came from fewer eyes, shorter sessions, and less traction on the feed. Facebook didn’t just lose news; it lost the behavioral momentum that news quietly generates. From headlines to hashtags, the presence of journalism appears to energize the entire platform. Even users uninterested in politics or current affairs engaged less when news disappeared. As a result, the platform's economic machinery lost pressure.
Facebook has maintained that news organizations gain visibility and traffic from being featured on its platform, but the study presents a reversed picture. The researchers argue that the presence of news produces spillover effects that enhance user involvement across content types. News, they contend, functions not as isolated content but as an activator for broader engagement, indirectly boosting attention to non-news posts and increasing the volume of user activity.
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The timing of the study aligns with global efforts to regulate platform-publisher relationships. Several governments have advanced legislation aimed at compelling digital intermediaries to pay for journalistic material. Australia’s law, which triggered the blackout, was among the first to gain passage, prompting similar proposals in Canada, the European Union, and the United States.
Of course, the researchers acknowledge the limits. The blackout didn’t stretch long enough to capture long-term adaptation. Given time, users might have migrated toward other news sources or platforms, or Facebook’s algorithm might have pivoted toward different engagement strategies. But as a sharp, time-boxed disruption, the event provided a clean look at what happens when journalism is pulled out of the feed — and it wasn’t nothing.
It turns out that journalism doesn’t just inform the public — it sustains the scroll. What looked like a tactical standoff between a government and a platform became a stress test for an entire engagement model. When news vanished, the numbers dipped. And behind those numbers sat a simple truth: Facebook may not be in the news business, but it clearly does business with news.
Image: DIW-Aigen
Read next:
• Google's AI Summaries Keep Users Within Its Platform, Study Shows
• Advanced Reasoning AI May Face Limits by 2026 Warns Epoch Report
• Google Tests New "Discussions" Feature for Sports Searches in Mobile Beta
