• by Sean Hargrave , Staff Writer, April 4, 2019

It comes just a couple of days after he took to the pages of the Washington Post to say that he agreed more must be done for tougher, but aligned, regulation of the internet. 

That was clearly an acceptance of the direction of travel. It is not just the EU -- governments around the world are calling for more to be done to make the internet -- particularly social media -- much safer with less harmful content and disinformation, with the privacy of users a little better respected.

Putting out the idea that Facebook may pay for content fits in with this trend as well as another unavoidable obstacle -- the new EU Copyright Directive.

As The Times points out, this new controversial law compels internet companies to pay for the content they host. If you've got content up on your site that other people created, they need to be compensated.

Google has the obvious get-out clause that most publishers will likely sign off their right to charge to be included in Google's search results, but social media could be an exception.

So on the one hand, Facebook -- like other internet companies -- is being asked to pay for content that appears on its site, and it's also coming under great pressure to ensure the content it does host meets guidelines on fake news and is neither hate speech nor harmful. 

The BBC recently covered how stressed Facebook moderators and fake news checkers can be, and even suggested that they are only paid to check so much content before they effectively put their tools down. 

It looks increasingly likely, then, that Facebook has to accept greater regulation as well as needing to compensate publishers for having large extracts, or even full articles, uploaded onto its site. 

By embracing these inevitabilities, and actively going out there to pay for quality content, could it just be that Zuckerberg could avoid being labelled a publisher himself?

By taking on content from trusted third parties, hosting news stories comes with less risk of fake news, but it also allows Facebook to keep saying that is not a publisher. If it pays for content, it could point to multiple publishers being the publishers, all it's doing is paying to host their output.

You obviously need to factor in the upcoming launch of Apple News+ here too. If Apple is going to potentially be the place to go for a wide range of quality content for, say, ten pounds a month, that will put a stake in the ground for quality publishers being paid to allow third parties to host their content. It also runs the risk of some of Facebook's traffic heading away to find quality content elsewhere. 

So paying for content could well be the way for Zuckerberg to hit several objectives. It would ensure that Apple News+ is not the only quality content aggregator in town, and it could ensure that its news-supplying partners are the publishers -- not Facebook, as it also answers the need to pay for news content on its pages.

Paying for content could be a very smart way of keeping users on its site while placing the regulatory onus on third-party publishers. 

It will be positioned as a kind move, a magnanimous gesture -- but paying for news content could be a very smart move for Facebook.