Social media giant Facebook has banned Australian users of its platform from viewing or sharing links to national and international news stories. The international backlash over the move continued to grow Thursday (Feb. 18), with Facebook accused of “bullying” for doing so.
Facebook blocked the news content before Australian lawmakers approved a new measure to force the company to pay media outlets, a move that sparked widespread condemnation from politicians in Europe and North America.
They said the social media giant had no respect for democracy and was shamelessly exploiting its monopoly commercial power.
“The proposed legislation in Australia fails to recognize the fundamental nature of the relationship between our platform and publishers,” Campbell Brown, Facebook’s vice president for global news partnerships, wrote in a post Wednesday. “I hope in the future we can once again include in news content for the Australian people.”
Human rights groups have also joined the ranks of critics, slamming Facebook. Amnesty International said, “It is extremely concerning that a private company has the will to control people’s access to the information they rely on.”
Amnesty International added that “Facebook’s willingness to block trusted news sources stands in stark contrast to the company’s poor record in responding to the spread of hateful content and disinformation on the platform.”
Cutting off access
The move by Facebook means that users outside of Australia cannot view news produced by Australian broadcasters and newspapers through the platform, and users within Australia cannot access any news content at all through Facebook.
Facebook’s move didn’t stop the Australian parliament from approving the new law – the first in the world to require social media companies to pay media outlets for the use of their content.
The law could take effect next week. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Facebook had “de-friended Australia”. He described the company as arrogant and bullying, and warned that Facebook is raising international fears about technology companies that are too big for their britches.
Under Australia’s new media law, social media companies will be required to agree on payments for news content linked or shared on their platforms. If agreements are difficult to reach, an independent arbitrator can set the price.
Facebook’s blocking move took effect Wednesday evening, with the digital giant blocking the sharing of news, including content from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and government pages containing weather and emergency service warnings. Pages sharing or linking to community, women’s health and domestic violence pages have also disappeared.
Elaine Pearson, director of Australia for Human Rights Watch, said it was “a dangerous turn of events. Cutting off an entire country’s access to vital information in the dead of night is going too far.”
In a statement, Morrison said, “We will not be intimidated by this kind of bullying by big tech companies.”
He added, “These actions only confirm the concerns expressed by a growing number of countries about the behavior of large tech companies that think they are bigger than the government and that the rules shouldn’t apply to them. They may be changing the world, but that doesn’t mean they should be running it.”
Morrison’s comments have been echoed elsewhere.
In Britain, Conservative MP Julian Knight, chairman of the parliamentary Culture and media committee, described Facebook’s behavior as “one of the most stupid but also deeply disturbing corporate behaviors we have seen in our lifetime.
“Australia’s democratically elected governments are democratically elected. They have the right to make laws and legislation. To act in this way is disrespectful to democracy,” he told British broadcaster Sky News.
In 2019, a U.K. government assessment found that Facebook and Google (Google) have had a devastating impact on the U.K. news media because they attract most of the online advertising revenue, costing private broadcasters and newspapers revenue. The researchers found that 61 percent of British media advertising either went to Facebook or Google.
Google threatened to take similar action, but last week it began signing preemptive payment agreements. Google has also struck voluntary deals with the U.K. and some European countries.
EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said Facebook and Google, which has the world’s most used search engine, are acting like a “de facto duopoly.
In a post, Facebook told 18 million users in Australia that it took the action as a last resort, arguing that the new law misunderstood the relationship between Facebook and the publishers that use it to share news content.
Facebook’s supporters
But Facebook also has defenders in the tech industry.
Mike Masnick, founder of the California-based blog Techdirt.com, said users are not being blocked from accessing news. “Contrary to the Perception that this is an ‘attack’ on Australian journalism or news, it is not. The news still exists in Australia. News companies still have websites. People can still access those sites,” he said in a blog post.
Masnick added that the move taken by Australia to tax the links was shocking. “This is fundamentally against the principles of the open Internet. The government says you can’t link to a news site unless you pay a tax, which should be seen as fundamentally problematic for a number of reasons. At the most basic level, it’s asking for payment for traffic.”
On Thursday, the tech giant began allowing access to sites on public health through its platform.
Facebook’s move to block media content in Australia has come under heavy fire from the News Media Association (UK). The organization’s president, Henry Faure Walker, said the move illustrates why strong regulation needs to be coordinated between countries. He said the action was a “classic example” of a monopoly “trying to protect its dominant position with little regard for the citizens and consumers it is supposed to serve.
Facebook’s British critics also highlighted the just-revealed news that the tech giant had received funding from Chinese state-owned media outlets, including China Daily and China Global Television Network (CGTN), to promote Chinese government propaganda denying Beijing‘s crackdown on Uighur Muslims and other minorities in northwestern Xinjiang. The U.S. government has described Beijing’s crackdown in Xinjiang as “genocide.
An investigation conducted this week by the Press Gazette, a British trade journal, found that China’s state-owned media paid Facebook to promote stories that dismissed international attention to the plight of the Uighurs as Western “disinformation.
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