Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, has set itself on a collision course with the Albanese government after announcing it will stop paying Australian publishers for news, and plans to shut down its news tab in Australia and the United States.

Meta informed publishers on Friday that it would not enter new deals when the current contracts expire this year.

The news tab – a dedicated tab for news in the bookmarks section of Facebook – will also shut down in April, after a similar shut down in the UK, Germany and France last year.

The answer from Australian politics is that they will do such things etc.

As we’ve pointed out before there’s a certain tension in the arguments used here.

One claim is that Facebook (and Google and so on) steal the news content from the producers of it, thereby taking the crusts out of the mouths of journalists. Well, OK, possibly.

Another claim is that Facebook and Google (and so on) must carry news because that’s a significant source of traffic to the news sites themselves, from which they make ad revenue with which to provide crusts for journalists. Well, OK, possibly.

But there’s clearly that tension with trying to insist upon both at the same time. That Facebook steals the news content and therefore must pay for it but also that it’s entirely vital that Facebook must run the news as it’s essential to the incomes of the news sites.

We might even call that cakeism.

But that is what this insistence is. That Facebook must run the news, that Facebook must pay for running the news, because the follow on income to the news sites of Facebook running the news is vital.

We do tend to think that there would be more logical clarity here in politics if the news sites were not such a significant influence upon who gets elected to those political positions where such decisions are taken. But perhaps that’s just us being cynics.