On Thursday morning, Melbourne time, Australians woke up with the strange perception that a major technology company had fulfilled its greatest threat. Only we didn’t hear about any official news sources in our Facebook news feed.
We Australians were suddenly prevented from posting and viewing news content on Facebook. If we tried to post a link to a news story, a pop-up informed us that “This post cannot be shared”. He continued: “In response to Australian government legislation, Facebook restricts the posting of news links and all postings to news pages in Australia. Globally, posting and sharing news links from Australian publications is restricted. “
What’s more, all of the Australian news channel’s Facebook pages have been deleted from their posts. Even the pages of international publications have been cleaned for us; although you can still see the posts on the Slate Facebook page, when I looked at it, I didn’t see any. “No posts yet,” he said. What was worst: It soon became clear that many other important pages had also been cleared – including state health departments, just days before Australia started launching vaccines.
The shocking but totally predictable move came, as the pop-up said, in response to government legislation, which was passed by the Chamber of Deputies with bipartisan support on Wednesday night. The News Media Trading Code – which would force “designated digital platforms” to pay new publishers for the links they display, redistributing part of the advertising revenue they consumed – was a reason for contention for many months: Facebook threatened to attract news In September and January, Google threatened to withdraw its entire search engine if the code remained as it was. Australian treasurer Josh Frydenberg was in regular talks with CEOs Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai and expressed confidence that an agreement would be reached. He seemed to be right: Google started making multimillion dollar deals with publishers in the weeks leading up to the law’s approval. But someone took their eyes off Facebook.
After Facebook turned off the news outlet, Australian politicians attacked the company for doing exactly what it said it would do, with the prime minister arguing that the company had “unmanned” the country and demanded that the health, climate and health pages emergency services were restored – something Facebook did quickly. Others (including me) criticized the government for disrupting negotiations, making extreme demands and then failing to reach an agreement, in turn disrupting the publishers it was supposedly trying to “help” (not to mention a number of charities, unions, community groups and sports organizations).
Just under a week later, the ban was reversed, with an 11ºan hour’s commitment to seeing the government agree to fundamentally weaken the code. The change means that the government cannot apply the code to a company if it can demonstrate that it has made a “significant contribution” to the Australian news industry through trade agreements, and must notify the platform one month in advance before submitting it. it to the code. In other words, Facebook just needs to close some deals and the government will let it go. The news hasn’t returned yet, but Australian managing director of Facebook, Will Easton, says it will be restored “in the next few days”, while global vice president of partnerships Campbell Brown indicated that the company could get news from Australia again if the government to apply the code for this. Frydenberg wants to pretend that this is a government victory in a “proxy battle” for the world, but it was the Australian government that backed off. Facebook was right: the news needs it more than the news.
But does Facebook need news? A few weeks ago, when writing about the Australia vs. Big Tech showdown, I joked that a news feed without news can be a “blessing” – after all, the news feed can be a cesspool of useless clickbait, inflammatory headlines and futile comments. I wasn’t being serious: I, like Frydenberg, didn’t think it would really happen. But what was it like to try Facebook without news?
Browsing Facebook on Thursday morning, the news feed was still dominated by news, only it wasn’t through links. They were the status of friends and group posts, discussing, digesting and debating the strange reality in which we find ourselves – the real Facebook react. “This will be considered one of the most prolific policies in history,” wrote one about the government. “Facebook absolutely prefers to ruin its own product than to pay a small amount of taxes. What a pile of shit, ”wrote another. Others, behind the backstory, went crowdsourcing where they should direct their anger, divided between the tech giant and the conservative government. Many noticed that other pages were missing, in a state of panic, mainly about charities and social services, which were soon restored. But I was genuinely impressed with the amount of posts I saw from my social network– the people I’m supposed to be on Facebook to see.
In the days that followed, posts about the news ban decreased, but the presence of my Facebook friends did not. A girl I met in Mexico shouted her partner’s 30th birthdayº; a couple celebrated the purchase of their first home; my cousins in England posed with their children. I saw profile pictures and memes, thanks and babies. It was extremely strange and extremely healthy, a reminder that good things were happening in the world as well.
I also saw much more satire, with beloved satirical news pages that were initially dropped and then restored. The Chaser, one of the first to be returned, was like a child in a candy store, mocking the Murdoch masts, along with the public broadcaster on which it used to be broadcast, due to the fact that it could post while they couldn’t. But he also used his spotlight to highlight some genuine news (“As we are the only news site left, we think we could begin to reveal corruption on a large scale,” he wrote), sharing a comprehensive list of government corruption (which soon crashed your site). It probably helps that I already liked and followed a lot of satire, but without a doubt I was shown interesting and informative content. But I wonder what’s left in the feeds temporarily without news from other people.
As a journalist, I was devastated by the news ban, afraid of what it meant for my already decimated industry and angry with the government for having gone so hard, supposedly at the behest of big fish like Rupert Murdoch, and hurting the fish that rely on the Facebook in the process. As a citizen, I am shocked by Facebook’s display of raw power and I am concerned about the possibility of misinformation on the platform again.
But, to be honest, as a user, things looked good. Better than good; the news feed was lighter, calmer, happier. It looked like what Facebook used to be, a social network instead of a news aggregator, and it was as good as you’d expect. I didn’t learn anything interesting while it was rolling; I learned things that were News-valuable. I didn’t live in ignorance, because I get my news elsewhere, with more control over what I see, I don’t need news on Facebook, and I really hope that other Australians will notice that too.
I’ve complained before about the Australian being a “testing ground” for social media resources, because we are not really an important market. We are not yet; Facebook managed to be an example of us here, a warning to other countries that think of their own codes, because we represent such a small segment of their market. But if that ban had remained and proved popular, could it have also been the model for a new direction for Facebook?
Don’t celebrate anytime soon, Zuckerberg. I’m not sure if I or other users would spend so much time on Facebook without news – an amount that had already dropped considerably. But it would be quality over quantity. You know what they say: “No news is good news.” In fact, one of my friends said that last Thursday. I know, because I saw it on my news feed.
Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy and society.