The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reports allegations from whistleblowers accusing Facebook, now Meta, of deliberately causing havoc in Australia to influence a new law forcing platforms to pay publishers for news.
"When Facebook blocked news pages last year to pre-empt Australian legislation that would force it to pay for content, it also took down hospitals, emergency services and charities," the newspaper reports.
"The company says that was inadvertent; whistleblowers allege it was a negotiating tactic."
The WSJ says Facebook documents and testimony filed to US and Australian authorities by whistleblowers allege that the socia media platform deliberately created a broad and sloppy process to take down pages.
This resulted is in government and health services being caught just as Australia was launching COVID vaccinations.
"The goal, according to the whistleblowers and documents, was to exert maximum negotiating leverage over the Australian Parliament, which was voting on the first law in the world that would require platforms such as Google and Facebook to pay news outlets for content," says WSJ.
"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, according to the documents and people familiar with the matter.
"It didn’t notify affected pages in advance they would be blocked or provide a system for them to appeal once they were.
"The documents also show multiple Facebook employees tried to raise alarms about the impact and offer possible solutions, only to receive a minimal or delayed response from the leaders of the team in charge."
After the legislation passed the Senate, an internal email at Facebook, quoted by the WSJ, said: “We landed exactly where we wanted to -- and that was only possible because this team was genius enough to pull it off in zero time.”
And founder Mark Zuckerberg's email: “We were able to execute quickly and take a principled approach for our community around the world, while achieving what might be the best possible outcome in Australia.”
Facebook says the move wasn't a netotiating tactic: “The documents in question clearly show that we intended to exempt Australian government pages from restrictions in an effort to minimise the impact of this misguided and harmful legislation. When we were unable to do so as intended due to a technical error, we apologised and worked to correct it. Any suggestion to the contrary is categorically and obviously false.”
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