Facebook has blocked news posts in Australia in retaliation for a legislative move

Facebook on Thursday barred users from viewing and sharing Australian and international news content “in response to Australia’s new media trading law.”

As the company explained in a statement, the move prevents Australians from sharing news and does not allow other users around the world to share articles from Australian publishers.

Facebook Australia and New Zealand CEO William Easton said in a statement that “the bill fundamentally interprets the relationship between our platform and the publishers who use it to share topical content.”.

Thus, the government left them with a “difficult” choice, he continued, “to comply with a law that ignores the realities of this relationship, or to stop authorizing news content on our websites. services in Australia. With a heavy heart, we chose the latter ”.

Facebook has once again insisted that Australian publishers benefit from sharing their stories on the platform.

With the move, the platform also shut down some government pages, like those from State Health, where updates on the coronavirus situation are shared, or like that from the Bureau of Meteorology, which offers updates on disasters.

Some pages of the police, fire department and other public administrations were also blocked.

This is due to the fact, “As the law does not provide clear guidance on the definition of news content, we adopted a broad definition to comply with the law as drafted. However, we will restore any inadvertently affected pages “, according to Facebook.

For its part, Australian Communications Minister Paul Fletcher said Facebook’s credibility as a news source “must be called into question”, according to the local TV channel ABC News.

Fletcher warned that as a result of the company’s decision, the site’s content will now come from groups without auditing capabilities or strict editorial policies.

Josh Frydenberg, Minister of the Treasury and considered number two in government, called the technology’s move “bad”, “unnecessary” and “excessive”, in addition to ensuring that it “damages its reputation ” in Australia.

The Australian government and Facebook have been in touch following the growing scale of disputes over the legislative initiative. In fact, platform founder Marck Zuckerberg and Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg had a conversation on Thursday.

In this regard, Frydenberg stressed that it was a “very cordial and constructive” conversation, but insisted that “We want them to stay in Australia, but we also want them to pay for original content.”

Australia’s controversial legislative proposal proposes that tech companies pay publishers when users publish their articles as compensation for the value those articles generate on digital platforms. Other big tech companies, like Google has also threatened to leave Australia if the bill goes ahead.

The so-called media bargaining code was introduced in Australia’s parliament in December and plans to impose fines on those who don’t pay to share content from publishers.

Elaine Pearson, Australia director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), expressed “alarm” at this “dangerous turn” taken by Facebook to “censor the flow of information to Australians”.

“It is inconceivable to cut off access to vital information to an entire country in the middle of the night”, denounces the representative of HRW during his request for “immediate lifting of restrictions” while recalling that Zuckerberg has said in the past that he “doesn’t think it’s fair for a private company to censor information.”

FACEBOOK AND GOOGLE, DIFFERENT STRATEGIES

Although Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has threatened to cease operations in the country over its opposition to the bill, it has opted for a more conciliatory strategy.

This Wednesday, Google and News Corp, a publisher of titles such as The Times, The Sun, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, announced a deal under which the internet giant would pay to display its content in the search engine’s news section.

This is a three-year agreement whereby Google will pay “large sums” to News Corp, owned by magnate Rupert Murdoch, in exchange for being able to display news produced by the various newspapers it owns in the featured section of Google News., but the amounts were not detailed

The News Corp headers that will get money from Google are The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch and The New York Post in EE.UU .; The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun United Kingdom; and various publications in Australia such as The Australian, Sky News, news.com.au and a host of local Australian media.

The search engine also recently made another similar deal with 121 publishing houses in France and recently entered into private contracts with publishers in Argentina, Brazil, Germany and the UK.

(With information from Europa Press)

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