Facebook friending after bad ‘mistakes’
AFTER stopping Australian users accessing news on Facebook, a senior executive at the social media company has apologised for the execution of the ban which also wiped the pages of government organisations, charities and other community pages.
The apology came as Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the tech giant was “back at the table” and willing to negotiate.
“Those actions were completely indefensible,” he said.
“We appreciate the apology. Now let’s get on with discussion and come to a successful conclusion.
“We are no strangers in taking the lead on this and we are pleased Facebook is tentatively friending us again.”
Facebook’s vice-president of public policy for the AsiaPacific region, Simon Milner, said the future of the news ban would be dictated by the federal government’s next steps.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg confirmed he was in crisis talks with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“This is a really hard thing to do,” Mr Milner said. “We’ve never done it before.
“We are sorry for the mistakes we made in some of the implementation.”
Key criticism originated from the fact that hundreds of non-publisher pages were also removed in the ban.
Facebook is using human reviewers to manually return the feeds of non news sites, with the pages of key organisations such as the Bureau of Meteorology and SA Health restored.
“There’s still some pages that we’re looking at but some of it’s really difficult in that the law isn’t clear, and therefore there may be some pages that were clearly not news but actually under the law they might be,” Mr Milner said.
“That’s one of the challenges for us. We’re sorry for the mistakes that we made on that front.”
Facebook’s move is in retaliation to the government’s proposed Mandatory News Media Bargaining Code, which would force Google and Facebook to pay news outlets for using their content. Currently the laws would only apply to Facebook’s News Feed and Google’s Search services, however other platforms could be added to the list.
However in the hours after Facebook launched the strategy, Google announced it had secured advertising deals with Nine Entertainment, Seven West Media and Newscorp.
The arrangements mean publishers will receive “significant payments” for their content to be featured on Google’s News Showcase.
Similar agreements are expected to be struck with other Australian publishers such as the ABC, Daily Mail Australia and Guardian Australia.