Facebook’s Australian action no accident
Limiting the country’s internet service was done deliberately, say whistle-blowers
During last year’s showdown with the Australian government over media organisations being paid for their content, Facebook appeared to cut off a bunch of state websites by accident. At the time it was portrayed as the social media giant getting it wrong. Except it didn’t.
Facebook (no, I won’t call it Meta) deliberately undermined a sovereign government’s web presence as part of its attempts to water down the controversial legislation, it has now emerged from whistle-blowers.
“We landed exactly where we wanted to,” Campbell Brown, Facebook’s head of partnerships, wrote to staff in February 2021, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Brown led Facebook’s efforts to counter the Australian government’s groundbreaking law to compel it and Google to pay the media forums whose content they use. She added: “And that was only possible because this team was genius enough to pull it off in zero time.”
The pressure seemingly worked, because the law’s strictest requirements still have not been implemented, over a year later. At the time, Facebook claimed the Australian health services and government pages were “inadvertently” blocked. It caused five days of mayhem just as the country was rolling out its vaccination programmes.
Internal Facebook documents and e-mails were given to US and Australian authorities by whistle-blowers who had help from NGO Whistleblower Aid. It also assisted Frances Haugen, who lifted the lid last year on how Facebook knew that Instagram adversely affected the mental health of teen girls but continued to “prioritise growth over safety”.
US President Joe Biden mentioned Haugen and her revelations in his first state of the union address earlier this year. “We must hold social media platforms accountable for the national experiment they’re conducting on our children for profit,” he said.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent an e-mail, included in the whistle-blower documents, praising Brown and her team: “We were able to execute quickly and take a principled approach for our community around the world, while achieving what might be the best possible outcome in Australia.”
His contentious COO, Sheryl Sandberg, also congratulated the team, writing: “The thoughtfulness of the strategy, precision of execution, and ability to stay nimble as things evolved set a new high standard.”
The whistle-blower revelations reveal that staff argued they could exclude the Australian government pages, and those of numerous charities, but the social giant instead went with a broader, destructive approach.
Whistleblower Aid CEO Libby Liu said: “Facebook lied not just to the public but to its own employees, many of whom worked tirelessly to propose solutions to the overblocking problems we now realise were created by Facebook itself solutions that were ignored or brushed aside.”
Sandberg has previously condoned socalled oppo research on Facebook’s critics and was aware of attempts to slander free-speech advocate George Soros for being Jewish. Both Zuckerberg and Sandberg are Jewish, making them second only to Russian President Vladimir Putin for such shameful anti-Semitism.
These are the people running the world’s largest communication networks. Are you terrified yet?