CENSORSHIP OBSCENE
YESTERDAY Australians learned just how far a corporate social media giant was willing to go to get its own way. Facebook banned news on its platform in Australia. It did so in response to the federal government’s news media code which is aimed at ensuring the US-based tech giant pays for the news that it benefits from.
It meant that both Australian and international organisations could not share articles on the site and that users would not see any news on their feeds.
It also meant that other official pages — such as Queensland Health, the Bureau of Meteorology, women’s shelters, domestic violence helplines and emergency service information — were shut down.
With an election due in Western Australia, the Opposition Leader’s profile was also wiped, while Premier Mark McGowan was able to continue to share anything he deemed important.
Facebook didn’t punish media organisations, it went to war with a nation with an obscene act of censorship one wouldn’t have thought possible in the Western world.
The organisation that previously failed to stop the livestream of the Christchurch massacre from being published on its platform has shown the world what it is really capable of.
More than 10 million Australians use the social media platform and far too many of us have become accustomed to scrolling down the feed as a primary news source — particularly for breaking news.
At the height of the pandemic, state and federal governments were hosting daily press conferences that media organisations streamed, for free, live on Facebook as well as on their websites, so as to help get critical information out quickly.
Similarly, countless emergency updates or critical, accurate public health advice was shared through that platform.
Unfortunately, Facebook is also hopeless at handling misinformation.
So here we are.
In the middle of the coronavirus crisis, it’s cyclone season in the north and bushfire season in the rest of the country and a tech giant has flexed its corporate muscle to remove any type of useful and potentially lifesaving information from its platform.
It’s a disgrace.
So what can you do?
You can buy the paper, you can bookmark our homepage, sign up for newsletters, download the app and sign up for alerts, you can turn on the radio or the TV news and you can still be well-informed.
A diverse and credible media landscape needs consumers to look beyond a manipulative tech platform that’s willing to bargain with a whole nation’s safety and wellbeing.
If you do decide to keep using Facebook, just be aware of what kind of corporate citizen you’re dealing with.