Facebook news goes dark in Australia as content spat escalates
SYDNEY, Feb 18 — Australians woke to empty news feeds on their
Facebook Inc pages today after the social media giant blocked all media content
in a surprise and dramatic escalation of a dispute with the government over
paying for content.
The move was swiftly criticised by news producers and lawmakers,
many of whom pointed out that official health and meteorology pages had also
been scrubbed during the coronavirus pandemic and at the height of Australia’s
summer bushfire season.
“So Facebook can instantly block @abcperth, @6PR, @BOM_au, @BOM_WA, AND
@dfes_wa in the middle of the #bushfire season, but they can’t take down
murderous gun crime videos? Incredible.
Unbelievable. Unacceptable. The arrogance,” Madeleine King, a
federal opposition lawmaker, wrote in a tweet referring to impacted emergency
services
Facebook and search giant Google Inc had both warned they could
cancel services in Australia because of looming laws that will force them to
pay local publishers for content.
However, Alphabet Inc-owned Google has instead sealed preemptive deals with
several outlets in recent days. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp was the latest to
announce a deal in which it will receive “significant payments” from Google in
return for providing content for the search engine’s News Showcase account.
The Australian law would require Facebook and Google to reach
commercial deals with news outlets whose links drive traffic to their
platforms, or be subjected to forced arbitration to agree a price.
Facebook said in its statement that the law, which is expected
to be passed by parliament within days, “fundamentally misunderstands” the
relationship between itself and publishers and it faced a stark choice of
attempting to comply or banning news content.
Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said in a tweet he had a
“constructive discussion” with Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg today
and that talks with the company on the new law would continue. The tweet did
not make clear whether he spoke with Zuckerberg before or after Facebook imposed
the change.
“(Zuckerberg) raised a few remaining issues with the
government’s news media bargaining code and we agreed to continue our
conversation to try to find a pathway forward,” Frydenberg added.
Lisa Davies, editor of daily The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper,
owned by Nine Entertainment Co Ltd, tweeted: “Well, that’s a tantrum. Facebook
has exponentially increased the opportunity for misinformation, dangerous
radicalism and conspiracy theories to abound on its platform.”
The Facebook pages of Nine, News Corp, which together dominate
the country’s metro newspaper market, and the government-funded Australian
Broadcasting Corp, which acts as a central information source during natural
disasters, were blank.
The pages of the Queensland and South Australia state health
departments, where a quarter of the country’s 25 million population are
directed for reliable information about Covid-19, were similarly stripped of
content.
The Bureau of Meteorology, a government source for advice about
bushfire danger, flooding and other natural disasters, was also erased. —
Reuters
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