‘Fakebook’ shows all it cares about is profit, not people

’Mark Zuckerberg has declared that when it comes to Australia, fake news is the lingua franca of Facebook.’ Picture: Getty Images

As Mark Zuckerberg’s content-killing robots began swarming the planet to exterminate dinky-di Australian news, one of their first casualties was a provincial radio program that screens its three-hour show to a small but discerning audience via Facebook Live.

Just minutes into Thursday’s broadcast of Adelaide’s FIVEaa breakfast show — which I co-host with my friend Will Goodings — Facebook pulled the plug on us, prompting a flurry of old-fashioned text messages and ye olde telephone calls from our army of fans who have come to enjoy the visual version of the program.

FIVEaa, along with every other Australian news site — and other non-news offenders such as the weather bureau, the ACTU and even the SA health department that live streams vital COVID information — were all waking to find that Zuckerberg had cracked a content fatwa that was both wide and indiscriminate.

In a stroke of millennial genius, our youngster producer Andy Ruzyon, who knows about the internet and that kind of stuff, rebranded the program on Facebook as “Not FIVEaa” and listed our business not as part of the Nova Entertainment media company, but a gift shop. To maintain further cover, we affixed stick-on Zapata moustaches to our headshots on our rebadged Facebook page.

Miraculously, the live stream roared back into life, and the show continued on as normal.

The manner in which Facebook closed us down then let us restart is itself a testament to its algorithm-driven uninterest in what constitutes news. These people wouldn’t know the difference between a news story and a block of flats. This is because they are not people as such — people who exercise news judgment, demand that facts be checked, sources be reliable — but just an unwieldy and unthinking computer program that hoovers up and spits out content that others have created.

Damningly, they acted more swiftly and broadly against the Australian news media yesterday than they did against the Christchurch terrorist, who live-streamed the mosque atrocity to several thousand viewers, with the hapless Zuckerberg later admitting that his company (worth $525bn) was really struggling to clear its cache.

No such issues yesterday when its commercial interests were under threat.

The other perverse irony is that this is the same company that after the 2016 US election is on the record as saying it is serious about the scourge of fake news. As of Thursday, Zuckerberg has declared that when it comes to Australia, fake news is the lingua franca of Facebook. By targeting evidence-based mainstream news sites, Facebook has effectively decided that the only “news” content it will publish is of the unchecked, unverified, unsourced kind.

In both an actual sense and a public relations sense, the most damning part of its actions was that it even ensnared an important government department in SA Health, which uses Facebook as a chief means of distributing health information that relates to the pandemic. The state’s health officials routinely use Facebook to distribute links to press releases and media statements outlining information relating to COVID infections, social distancing rules for businesses and individuals, requirements around QR codes. And when Chief Medical Officer Nicola Spurrier holds press conferences to discuss developments with all the above, the press conferences are streamed via Facebook Live, as per our radio show.

Facebook has proved itself incapable of stopping the Pete Evanses of this world from promoting their COVID-curing lava lamps. It is also more than happy to let your mad Aunty Ethel write a 3000-word post about how the COVID jab is part of a sinister plot to usher in a one-world government by drugging the populace. It will let you read at length about the hidden truth surrounding 9/11, the controlled detonation of the Twin Towers, and the fact that Buzz Aldrin and his conniving chums were all in on the lie when they “landed” — yeah right! — on the moon.

But SA Health? It can take its damned “content” and peddle it elsewhere.

It is an extraordinarily level of irresponsibility, made worse when you consider Facebook has also banned the Bureau of Meteorology at a time of high fire danger in some parts of Australia. It is worth contrasting that with the sense of social commitment shown by mainstream news sites that are now rightly charging subscriptions to ensure their financial survival, but routinely leave news stories about bushfires and the pandemic unlocked and free, out of a conviction that the public needs reliable, accurate information about matters of life and death.

I saw Mark Zuckerberg once at a work conference in California where he was standing around awkwardly in his hoody a distance away from the rest of us and toying with the idea of letting himself be bought by News Corporation.

He didn’t, of course, and it feels like a terrifically good turn of events to me, as his actions in the past 24 hours show that one of us is in the news business, whereas Mark is in the any-old-piece-of-crap business, with Facebook now confirmed as the Steptoe and Son of information distribution.

When you look at the mature and collegiate deliberations of Google, in recognising that it is fair to contribute financially when your brand proposition is framed around using other people’s information, it takes a special brand of juvenile self-interest and conceit to act the way Facebook did.

Anyway, if it’s news you want, our gift shop will hopefully still be open tomorrow. And if it’s a COVID-curing lava lamp, a cat that looks like Hitler, or the revelation that Prince Philip has actually been hospitalised because he’s a shape-shifting lizard, you know where you can get that too.