Facebook news ban: why its ban on information proves it is not an essential service, business partner

Facebook’s ban on essential information in Australia to save lives should tell you what’s really important to the social network.

Fire and rescue services, domestic violence support agencies, weather authorities, energy companies, health departments with coronavirus-tracing information, and charities dedicated to helping children have been banned from Facebook in Australia today.

If you ever needed a reminder that Facebook is not an essential public service, is not really free and is not your friend or business partner, this is it.

Facebook is a $762 billion American company that can largely do as it sees fit to make a profit.

Over the past six months, Facebook has made very clear that it does not consider “news” to be valuable or profitable for the company.

Today, Facebook made very clear that it doesn't consider its Australian users to be valuable either.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has held several meetings with Australian government officials. Picture: AFP

The company first revealed its threat to ban news content being shared in Australia in September last year in a protest against Australian laws that would see Facebook and Google compensate Australian news outlets for the use of their content.

Facebook Australia managing director Will Easton said “assuming this draft code becomes law, we will reluctantly stop allowing publishers and people in Australia from sharing local and international news on Facebook and Instagram”.

He said the company objected to the “perplexing” argument that Facebook should pay for news when it “is not a significant source of revenue for us”.

Facebook executives reiterated the company’s threat to ban news content before the Senate Committee looking into Australia’s news media bargaining code.

Tellingly, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Rod Sims told the committee that Facebook did not just oppose the style of negotiation proposed in the laws but any form of deal-making with news outlets at all.

“If I heard Facebook correctly, they just don’t like arbitration … and that’s been a consistent Facebook position,” Mr Sims said.

Today, Facebook doubled down on its message that news means very little to it.

Mr Easton argues that the laws “fundamentally misunderstand” the relationship between Facebook and news organisations.

While Australia’s competition watchdog argued that Google and Facebook had become so dominant that news outlets had no choice but to share content with them, Facebook argues they’re essentially doing news companies a favour by sharing their work and selling ads based on users’ engagement with it.

Australian Facebook users can no longer share any news content on the social network. Picture: AFP

“For Facebook, the business gain from news is minimal,” he said. “News makes up less than four per cent of the content people see in their Newsfeed.”

But Facebook appears to have blocked much more than four per cent of its content in Australia today.

The pages of charities and small business have been wiped clean. Local government pages are blank, as are the Facebook profiles of some health departments, such as those in Queensland and the ACT, where thousands of people get coronavirus health updates and watch streaming news conferences.

In Facebook’s rush to avoid paying news companies a cent, they have blocked essential public services from their network, including emergency services pages and the Bureau of Meteorology.

And the removal of post from the Betoota Advocate, The Onion, and The Weekly shows the company cannot take a joke either.

The company now says organisations blocked in the ban will be able to appeal their status from February 25.

But this ban is ill-considered, rushed, and will do untold damage to Facebook’s Australian users.

While the company battles with Apple over whether it should be allowed to track users for the good of small businesses, Facebook is wiping the pages of small businesses in Australia to protest a law.

And for all of Facebook’s arguments about how little news content means to its Australian operations, the University of Canberra’s 2020 Digital News Report found that 39 per cent of Australians use Facebook to keep up with “general” news and 49 per cent use it for updates about the COVID-19 pandemic.

One hopes those people go looking for verified information from the source in future and don’t look to misinformed memes left circulating on the social network that didn’t find news “valuable”.