The following report is from the Associated Press:
For years, Facebook has been in a defensive crouch amid a slew of privacy scandals, antitrust lawsuits and charges that it was letting hate speech and extremism destroy democracy. Early Thursday, though, it abruptly pivoted to take the offensive in Australia, where it lowered the boom on publishers and the government with a sudden decision to block news on its platform across the entire country.
That power play — a response to an Australian law that would compel Facebook to pay publishers for using their news stories — might easily backfire, given how concerned many governments have grown about the company’s unchecked influence over society, democracy and political discourse. But it’s still a startling reminder of just how much power CEO Mark Zuckerberg can wield at the touch of a figurative button.
Zuckerberg’s flex here shows how he can disrupt global access to the news in a heartbeat. No company should have this much influence over access to journalism.
Jennifer Grygiel. A social media expert and professor at Syracuse University.
Facebook’s move means people in Australia can no longer post links to news stories on Facebook. Outside Australia, meanwhile, no one can post links to Aussie news sources such as the Sydney Morning Herald.
Facebook said the proposed law “ignores the realities” of its relationship with publishers that use its service to propel their stories across the world. Technology and media experts have also raised serious concerns. Timothy Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, told an Australian Senate committee in January that the law’s precedent could ultimately wreck the internet by requiring payment for links that have always been free.
The law hasn’t gone into effect. Negotiations between the tech companies, the Australian government and the country’s media giants — most notably, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. — may result in changes to the final version.
What can’t be changed, though, is Facebook’s dramatic, if ham-handed, attempt to force the issue. The company provided no warning of its decision to block Australian news and applied the ban so clumsily that it blocked many innocent bystanders.
As the law does not provide a clear guidance on the definition of news content, we have taken a broad definition in order to respect the law as drafted.
Mari Melguizo. Facebook spokeswoman
She added that the company would unblock any pages that were blocked by accident.
Facebook’s reaction was not justified even if there are issues with the law, including the fact that it stands to benefit media giants like News Corp., said Elizabeth Renieris, director of the Notre Dame-IBM Technology Ethics Lab. Facebook’s show of strength, she said, is “really going to wake up regulators around the world.”
If it is not already clear, Facebook is not compatible with democracy. Threatening to bring an entire country to its knees to agree to Facebook’s terms is the ultimate admission of monopoly power.
Rep. David Cicilline. Rhode Island Democrat
AUTHOR COMMENTARY
The WinePress reported a month ago that Berners-Lee is calling for a total reset of the internet. He and his companies are already in the works of creating an entirely new internet system. He says it’s largely due to fascist groups like Facebook doing what they have been doing; and now, entire continents can get turned off and on with a click of the mouse.
Social media is just an extension of the media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Amazon, Google, etc, want to control our speech and force feed us with information they want us to know. I had noted in one of our reports following Trump’s censorship on social media, the following day his accounts were reactivated and made more political speeches, and then was eventually terminated. That just shows that the governments work hand-in-hand with big tech to control the narrative.
It seems to me that Australia is a “casualty of war” or a testing ground perhaps. Do a mega-censorship and see what the fallout is. It will be interesting to see where this goes.
The censorship is only getting to get worse. And doing a complete do over of the system, like Berners-Lee is designing, will not fix the problem. The greed of man will quickly take control of that as well. Only in the inevitable do over, only the ones ‘they’ allow to use their software will be “censorship free.”
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