Facebook will ban Australian users from sharing or viewing news

I feel like there are a few portions of this that should be highlighted:

I’d feel better about this if publishers said a single word about how much of their new Google revenue that they planned to spend on journalists’ salaries, or news gathering.

They didn’t, though, and why would they? Australia’s bargaining code doesn’t say one word about requiring that any of this money be spent on journalism, either.

Certainly the execution of the ban left something to be desired.

Rather than building a blacklist of news sites to restrict, Facebook tried using its machine learning systems to identify news publishers, and the systems went predictably haywire. There were reports that government and emergency pages, nonprofit groups, and the Bureau of Meteorology could no longer share. Given how long the possibility of restricting links has loomed, you’d think Facebook would have better prepared for it to arrive.

I wish Australia would take Facebook’s rejection as a sign it should rethink its approach to media regulation entirely. It could just tax companies based on their revenues, for example. It could earmark those revenues to support journalism — nonprofit public media, even, which has consistently been shown to have powerful civic benefits. Or it could pursue a bargaining code that requires big media conglomerates to create and support jobs in journalism, rather than simply accept tens of millions of dollars and spend them however they like — or just return it to shareholders.

In reality, though, none of that seems likely to happen. Google’s capitulation means that Australian crony capitalism is now likely to be exported worldwide. Legacy media outlets will become richer — and also more dependent on the tech giants that they excoriate daily for having too much power over them. All the while, the media industry will continue to consolidate, and it will be harder to get or keep a job in journalism.

it might make it harder for places like whatever the Australian equivalent of Fox News and The Daily Caller are to spread false information

Rupert Murdoch (founder of News Corp/Fox News) is Australian, and that is where his media empire started and is still strongest. So I doubt this law will make a lick of difference in regard to the spread of right-wing misinformation in Australia, for exactly the reasons described in the News Corp Australia Wikipedia page.

News Corp Australia owns approximately 142 daily, Sunday, weekly, bi-weekly and tri-weekly newspapers, of which 102 are suburban publications (including 16 in which News Corp Australia has a 50% interest). News Corp Australia publishes a nationally distributed newspaper in Australia, a metropolitan newspaper in each of the Australian cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart and Darwin and groups of suburban newspapers in the suburbs of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth. The company publishes a further thirty magazine titles across Australia. According to the Finkelstein Review of Media and Media Regulation, in 2011 the group accounted for 23% of the newspaper titles in Australia.

Their reach is already vast, and it's not just newspapers either. News Corp Aus also owns Sky News Australia, as well as a 65% stake in Foxtel.

Although to be fair, in my admittedly limited experience with the Aus press, the stuff News Corp peddles via their platforms there is not nearly as horrible as what they're allowed to spread in the US.