Facebook would have intentionally blocked certain pages of the Australian government, but also those of hospitals and emergency services. By preventing access to these pages, the social network wanted to ensure that a law could not be passed.
An Australian bill did not please Facebook
In February 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic raging around the world, the Australian government proposed a new law. This aims to impose on the digital giants (the GAFAMs), the remuneration of the journalistic content appearing on their pages. If Google complies with the potential promulgation of this law, this is not the case of Meta, which shows its dissatisfaction a week before the vote on this new regulation.
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In parallel with this announcement, Facebook is blocking access to articles and videos from many Australian and international newspapers, but also to Australian government pages informing the population about Covid-19, and about natural disasters. These blockages come at the height of the fire and flood season and a few days before the start of the Australian vaccination campaign.
A well-honed strategy by Facebook to prevent the passage of this law
If at that time, the social network claimed that these blockages were involuntary, the reality is quite different according to the whistleblowers who informed the wall street journal. Several internal documents submitted to the United States Department of Justice and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission seem to prove the implementation of a strategy in this direction by Facebook. The social network has exploited its sorting algorithm to achieve this.
It would also be appropriate that several employees of Meta have tried to trace the problem, not being aware of the strategy put in place by Facebook, in order to solve it. However, officials, presumably aware, did nothing to stop this campaign of depublications and blockages. They waited several days before restoring all of this content, which required modifying only a few lines of computer code.
Further evidence supporting the whistleblowers’ claims is an email from Campbell Brown, Facebook’s Director of Partnerships, congratulating the teams who worked on this “project”: We got to exactly where we wanted “, she specified in this e-mail.
Note that a Facebook spokesperson denied all of these accusations: These documents clearly show that we intended to exempt government pages from restrictions in order to minimize the impact of this harmful and misguided legislation. […] We were unable to achieve this due to a technical error, we apologize for this, and we have been working to resolve this issue. Any claim to the contrary would be categorically and clearly false. “.