Kangaroo court
Zuckerberg gets whacked Down Under
Australians are good at a lot of things. There’s their annoying cricket prowess, known to reduce fans of rival teams to gibbering wrecks. Their unique contribution to the culinary wonders of the world include witchetty grubs and Vegemite.
Then there’s that seminal style item, the cork hat. In case the name isn’t obvious enough, this accessory consists of a hat with corks on strings around the brim, traditionally worn in the outback to ward off blowflies. Used bottle corks were repurposed to make hats, so it is also a prime example of fashion and recycling long before today’s couture disciples started paying lip service to the trend.
So we have a lot for which to thank the guys Down Under. Now add to the list the snotklap the country gave Facebook this week.
For those who have been on an information detox, Australia this week passed legislation that forces Big Tech to pay traditional news organisations for using their original content and thereby reward proper journalism.
It’s not as if they can’t afford the bill. Facebook generated a record $86bn (about R1.3-trillion) in revenue last year.
Facebook retaliated with a blackout of all Australian news. It boomeranged horribly. Sites with up-to-date information on Covid, domestic violence charities and even Australia’s weather agency fell victims to the ban.
The country’s 13-million monthly users were furious. Hashtag terms such as #deletefacebook and #BoycottZuckerberg trended on Twitter. A local newspaper described it as “an act of war”.
Mark McGowan, premier of Western Australia, told the Financial Times: “They are behaving more like North Korea than an American company.”
When Facebook relented on Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg walked away with cheeks just about as red as the day he was threatened with expulsion at Harvard for his first venture into social networking. He had created a site that allowed users to compare student’s faces and pick “who’s hotter”. Unsurprisingly the college that had educated eight US presidents told him to shut down or ship out.
US Democratic congressman David Cicilline tweeted after the blackout this week: “If it is not already clear, Facebook is not compatible with democracy. Threatening to bring an entire country to its knees to agree to Facebook’s terms is the ultimate admission of monopoly power.”
Facebook’s latest bullyboy tactics have drawn more attention to its global dominance. Australian officials had already spoken to their counterparts from Canada, Germany, France and Finland about similar legislation. It remains to be seen if Donald Trump’s “s***hole countries” — us and just about the rest of the world — will be able to exert the same pressure on Zuckerberg.
This fiasco is the latest in a string of scandals. A damning 2018 New York Times investigation headlined “Delay, Deny and Deflect” claimed Facebook knew about Russian interference in the 2016 US election although publicly denying it, sought dirt on George Soros to punish him for his negative comments about social media and habitually accused critics of being anti-Semitic.
The 2018 Cambridge Analytica debacle, which landed Zuckerberg before Congress, erupted with the disclosure that Facebook had sold tens of millions of users’ personal information to political data firm Cambridge Analytica, without their consent. The information was later used to influence voter behaviour during the 2016 US election.
Facebook was slapped with a $5bn fine. It was to be the largest data scandal in its history.
The Australia blackout has prompted critics to again question how Facebook was able to ban genuine news from its platforms so easily, yet had dragged its heels when it came to acting against fake news, hate speech and groups plotting sedition.
The trial in which six men have been accused of plotting to kidnap
Michigan governor Gretchen
Whitmer was planned in part on
Facebook. The right-wing extremists wanted to put her on
“trial” as a tyrant and instigate a civil war over her coronavirus policies.
They posted footage of their paramilitary exercises and bomb-making training online.
One of the co-conspirators wrote that if they encountered law enforcers during a recce, “they should give the officers one opportunity to leave, and kill them if they did not comply”.
Evan Greer, the deputy director of digital human rights group Fight for the Future, wrote on Twitter that Facebook was “uniquely dangerous” because it was designed for “algorithmic recruitment”.
“It’s one thing to provide a forum where people can say what they want, even if it’s controversial,” Greer told the Guardian. “It’s a totally different thing to actively help violent bigots recruit other violent bigots into their group using data harvesting and algorithmic recommendations.”
Facebook is also under regulatory scrutiny with the US Federal Trade Commission and 48 states accusing it of violating antitrust laws. They aim to break up the social network.
The lawsuit accuses Facebook of using “vast amounts of money” to acquire competitors and quash rivals. They also asked for Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp to be judged illegal.
“For nearly a decade, Facebook has used its dominance and monopoly power to crush smaller rivals, snuff out competition, all at the expense of everyday users,” New York attorney-general Letitia James said.
Prosecutors intend using Zuckerberg’s own words against him in the lawsuit, a precedent set when Bill Gates and Microsoft faced anti-trust charges in 1998.
“It is better to buy than compete,” Zuckerberg allegedly wrote in an e-mail in 2008. After Facebook bought what he had called a “very disruptive” photosharing app, he wrote in an e-mail: “Instagram was our threat ... One thing about startups though is you can often acquire them.”
In October, the European Parliament signalled its intention to develop the “Digital Services Act”, which seeks to significantly curtail the company’s power in the EU.
But all these lawsuits are bound to drag on for ages. In the meantime, let’s toast the kangaroo court.