A new report details how atrociously Facebook behaved last year when it faced having to pay for news content it had been getting for free.
Facebook tried to bully Australia, as the country considered a media bargaining policy, by cutting access to news on its platforms. The tactic was obvious and widely criticized.
Now, The Wall Street Journal’s blockbuster report details how Facebook overshot and misled the public about the effects of its temporary news ban.
“Despite saying it was targeting only news outlets, the company deployed an algorithm for deciding what pages to take down that it knew was certain to affect more than publishers,” the Journal reported.
Some Facebook employees were concerned about harmful effects of the ban, which also blocked public health and safety information. Their alarms were met with “a minimal or delayed response” by leaders.
Meanwhile executives, including Facebook’s top liaison with the news industry, cheered and celebrated the information blockade, according to emails the WSJ reviewed.
Its headline: “Facebook Deliberately Caused Havoc in Australia to Influence New Law, Whistleblowers Say.”
Whistleblowers also shared details with regulators in the U.S. and Australia.
“It was clear this was not complying with the law, but a hit on civic institutions and emergency services in Australia,” an employee involved in the project told the WSJ.
A Facebook spokesperson said the ban didn’t work as intended because of a technical error and the company apologized and worked to correct it.
Either way, these are billionaires and centimillionaires going to extreme ends, and punishing millions of innocent civilians, to avoid paying for the commercial equivalent of a Netflix or Spotify subscription.
Australia’s policy succeeded in forcing Google and Facebook to start paying the country’s news outlets for content the platforms profit from. The policy was written as a hammer that would be dropped if the companies failed to negotiate in good faith with publishers. That has yet to fall because the threat mostly worked.
The hammer would be a formal designation of Google and Facebook as dominant platforms, which would trigger oversight and a stricter process for negotiating compensation deals, with baseball-style arbitration if deals weren’t reached.
Canada’s government is pursuing a similar policy, and sponsors of the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act in the U.S. Congress are reworking the bill to give it the strength of Australia’s policy.
The new report should convince regulators and policymakers that they’re on the right path emulating Australia’s model and pursuing broader antitrust cases against companies that are misbehaving.
The revelations also drive home why news outlets, especially small ones withering away in America’s heartland, need policy giving them leverage to negotiate fair compensation from dominant and thuggish platforms.
Brier Dudley is editor of The Seattle Times Save the Free Press Initiative.
