Charles Moore Charles Moore

What happens when Facebook pays for news?

[Getty Images]

The recently departed head of MI6, Sir Alex Younger, wants to balance China’s ideological antagonism to the West with the need for coexistence. Commenting on the government’s new ‘integrated review’, he says we must fight back with technological innovation and stronger alliances but avoid a second Cold War. He advocates ‘One Planet: Two Systems’ — a globalised echo of the Anglo-Chinese Hong Kong Agreement by which Hong Kong was handed back to China in 1997 under the principle of ‘One Country: Two Systems’. Sir Alex’s is an interesting analogy, but the important thing to note about ‘One Country: Two Systems’ is that China adhered to it only for 20 years and is now trashing it. Could the same problem take over the world?

Meanwhile, a small example of Chinese soft power. A scientific professor at Oxford writes to tell me about Chinese pay to British academics. Sometimes dons harmlessly earn small sums (£150, say) to lecture to Chinese students for summer cultural enrichment programmes. But academics who manage undergraduate admissions should not do paid work of the ‘how-to-make-your-Oxbridge-application-stand-out’ style. Suddenly, he and others have been approached by an obscure Chinese body called the GEC Academy. It is offering him $10,000 for 12-15 hours of Zoom. ‘I may wish that professors were regarded as equivalent to corporate law QCs, but I know they are not,’ he says, so he is suspicious. The intended audience are secondary school students: ‘It is no secret that the number of overseas (many from China) undergraduate applicants to Oxford is going up.’

Yes, it is disgraceful that Facebook profits from other people’s news without paying, but might it not be even worse when it does pay? Facebook has now done a payment deal with the Murdoch empire in Australia, where the tireless nonagenarian controls 70 per cent of newspaper circulation.

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