Welcome to our new 'Meet an Admin' series, celebrating local volunteers on Facebook

Many readers will have heard that Meta, the global tech giant that owns Facebook and Instagram, is giving up on news and pulling millions of dollars in funding from Australian media. How will this affect your local community paper, The Illawarra Flame? Short answer: not much.

Like other members of our industry body, the Local and Independent News Association (LINA), this publication has received no money from the News Media Bargaining Code; that went to the big operators. Taking it away may even level the playing field.

Besides, as our new Meet an Admin series will show, at a local level, Facebook isn't giving up on news, it's just giving up on paying for it.

Facebook relies on user-generated and -moderated content, i.e. free labour. In this business model, users (citizen journalists) post to Facebook community groups (local newspapers), moderated by admins (newspaper editors). Many admins do a top job, volunteering their time and leadership skills to keep spammers out and discussions civil.

The difference and the danger in this form of volunteerism is that it’s unsupported, unregulated and owned by an American tech giant. Every lost dog, business recommendation or suspicious character is more golden data for Meta, which makes most of its money from advertising. It’s a feat of marketing that community forums owned by a US firm, run by the world’s fourth richest person, are perceived as “private” spaces and operated by unpaid admins.

The quality of community groups is largely determined by the skill and dedication of their admins, the new gatekeepers deciding what you see and what you don’t; which comments to allow, which threads to shut down. While our area is lucky to have many useful and popular village forums, there are others where porn, spite and slander go unchecked.

Facebook and its kind have been fantastic enablers of communication, bringing residents together in easily accessible groups. However, like any big company aiming to rule the metaverse, we need to ask where a healthy symbiotic relationship ends and exploitation begins.

As the age of artificial intelligence accelerates, undermining everyone’s ability to tell true from false, the World Economic Forum has named mis- and dis-information as the most severe short-term risk the world faces. Even so, the Australian Communications and Media Authority has found more Australians are choosing social media as their primary source of news.

So perhaps it's time to consider corporate social responsibility and treat Meta like a mining company. Make those who pollute the information environment foot the clean-up bill. And fund independent local journalism, not just the mainstream media.

That's the big picture.

In the meantime, the aim of our Meet an Admin series is simply to shed light on the delivery of news today, starting at the grassroots with such daily dilemmas as "Where’s the smoke?", "Why the sirens?" and "Help, I’ve lost my internet!".

In this new series, we’ll find out how forums are run, and celebrate the local volunteers who help to educate and inform their communities, foster freedom of expression, promote democratic discussion and generally work for the common good.

Welcome to our job!

Read the first Meet an Admin article, by University of Wollongong journalism student Zachary Houtenville