Facebook news ban, its fallout, is a breathtaking act of corporate arrogance
That Facebook would consciously choose to purge fact-based journalism from their networks in the middle of a global pandemic is a breathtaking act of corporate arrogance against the Australian people.
Overnight Facebook has removed access to not only traditional mastheads like The Australian, but sites supporting academic discourse like The Conversation, official government health information and even the humble Bureau of Meteorology.
If you were setting out to run an experiment on what a world without facts could like look – we may be about to find out.
While giving lip service to its responsibility to address conspiracy theories on vaccines, Facebook has actively removed the professionally curated journalism that calls this dangerous nonsense out.
It betrays a fundamental blind spot in Facebook’s attitudes to the current reform process in Australia, driven by the ACCC’s finding that, along with Google, they exercise monopoly power in the advertising industry, a dominance that has to be addressed in the public interest.
Facebook believes all content is equal, they are just a platform and responsibility is only required when the pressure is too great to hold back.
What Australia’s parliament – on the advice of the competition regulator – has determined, is that not all content is the same. When content is created by public interest journalists it has a greater value that should be recognised. Not just through the clicks and shares it generates, but in the value it brings to the network.
In a world drowning in information we need more than algorithms preferencing our existing desires at us and filter out the truth from the dangerous noise.
That is the purpose of the News Bargaining Code – supported by all major political parties. It sets out to establish value in the truth.
It’s not just the 30 per cent of Australians who say Facebook is their primary source of news that are exposed by this reckless and dangerous move.
Without a fact-base to anchor the roll-out of the coronavirus vaccine, there is a real risk that efforts to build local immunity will stall, with immense flow-on effects in terms of not just health but the economy.
Of course none of this seems to concern Facebook who see the effort to hold back regulation as justifying this collateral damage.
It’s as if they have disappeared down their own worm-hole of self-delusions.
The Australian Government must stand firm in the face of these threats and continue with the important process of Digital Platform Reform, including consumer privacy and disinformation that the ACCC has proposed.
As for Facebook? It needs to reverse this decision before it costs lives.
Peter Lewis is the Director of the Centre for Responsible Technology
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