Facebook’s look stuns Australians
Josh Frydenberg, Australia’s federal treasurer, declared that Facebook’s actions were the very kind that demanded government intervention.
A digitally savvy nation woke up Thursday to a shock on Facebook: The news was gone.
The social media giant had decided to block journalism in Australia rather than pay the companies that produce it under legislation now before Parliament, angering a country of arguers who had grown used to Facebook as a regular forum for politics or culture.
And then Australians discovered it wasn’t just those staples that were missing. Pages for state health departments and emergency services were also wiped clean. The Bureau of Meteorology, providing weather data in the middle of fire season — blank. An opposition candidate running for office in Western Australia, just a few weeks from an election — every message, gone.
Even pages for nonprofits providing information to domestic violence victims fell into the Facebook dragnet, along with those for organizations that work with the poor and vulnerable.
“It’s quite scary when you see it happen,” said Elaine Pearson, the Australia
director at Human Rights Watch, which lost its own Facebook posts with indepth reports on deaths in Australian police custody, on the coup in Myanmar and on many other topics.
More frightening was what remained: pages dedicated to aliens and UFOs; one for a community group called “Say No to Vaccines”; and plenty of conspiracy theories, some falsely linking 5G to infertility, others spreading lies about Bill Gates and the end of the world.
Australians could hardly believe what they were seeing. For most of the day, millions of them seemed to be wandering around Facebook, dazed as if after a flood, looking to see what had been washed away and what was still around.
Facebook initially blamed the proposed law (which is expected to pass within days) for the disappearances, including what it called the legislation’s toobroad definition of news. Later in the day, Facebook promised to revive vital public service pages, which seemed to roll back online gradually.
But by that point, many Australians were already dividing into opinionated groups — all outraged, but with very different views of what went wrong and what should happen next.
Those in the first group believe it was Facebook’s fault, and it was intentional. Josh Frydenberg, Australia’s federal treasurer, who would oversee implementation of the law, was among the first Thursday to declare that Facebook’s actions revealed the kind of abusive tactics that demanded government intervention.
Many people said they believed that Facebook had wiped away as much as it did to show that tussling with the world’s largest social network would hurt more than just the big players in Australian publishing.
The second group says the problem is not Facebook, but rather the law. Australia’s legislation aims to compel Big Tech platforms to negotiate with news publishers with the threat of rapid, final arbitration if they cannot reach a deal. Critics, speaking more loudly than usual Thursday, contended that the law mistakenly accepted as fact that Google and Facebook had stolen ad dollars from newspapers and other media companies.
The third group argues maybe it’s for the best. Facebook’s broad approach to blocking news has effectively slapped Australia in the face. Johan Lindberg, a professor of media, film and journalism at Monash University in Melbourne, said its “incredibly heavyhanded strategy” would backfire because the public and politicians were now even more united in disgust.
One possible result is that Facebook users look elsewhere. Crikey, an independent news outlet, has been encouraging that with a simple message: “Don’t get Zucked. Get news straight from the source.”
Some small publishers will find that difficult. Naomi Moran, vice chair of First Nations Media, an association of news organizations in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, said that many of its outlets specifically focused on Facebook distribution — “and now it’s gone.”