A 3D printed Facebook's new rebrand logo Meta is seen in front of displayed Google logo in this illustration taken on November 2, 2021. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo Acquire Licensing RightsJOHANNESBURG, Oct 17 (Reuters) - South Africa's Competition Commission will investigate whether digital platforms like Meta (META.O) and Google (GOOGL.O) were unfairly competing with news publishers by using their content to generate ad revenue, it said on Tuesday. The Commission will be investigating among other things market features that may distort competition for advertising revenue between news media organisations and digital platforms, and whether these are affected by imbalances in bargaining power. The inquiry will include general search engines such as Alphabet's Google and Bing, social media platforms such as Meta and X, news aggregation platforms, video sharing platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, and ad networks such as Google Ads. It will also examine generative artificial intelligence such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and how it uses original news content in its output, the Commission added.

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Persons: Dado Ruvic, Doris Tshepe, James Hodge, Nqobile Dludla, Josie Kao Organizations: REUTERS, Rights, Africa's, Google, YouTube, Thomson Locations: Rights JOHANNESBURG