"If there were no news content available on Facebook in Australia, we are confident the impact on Facebook's community metrics and revenues in Australia would not be significant because news content is highly substitutable and most users do not come to Facebook with the intention of viewing news," the company said, as cited by the Sydney Morning Herald.
The US social media giant said in a response to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which has been working on a code of conduct in a bid to force Facebook and Google to share revenues generated by news published on their platforms, that it would consider scrapping the news feed if the new rules were adopted.
Facebook argued that the absence of news from its services would primarily hurt news publishers that would lose the opportunity to reach out to a wider audience. It also accused the Australian regulator of targeting US businesses.