Facebook would have intentionally blocked some Australian government pages, but also those of hospitals and emergency services. By preventing access to these pages, the social network wanted to prevent a law from being passed.
An Australian bill did not please Facebook
In February 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic raging all over the world, the Australian government proposes a new law. This one aims at imposing to the digital giants, the remuneration of the journalistic contents appearing on their pages. If Google complies with the potential promulgation of this law, it is not the case of Meta which shows its discontent one week before the vote of this new regulation.
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In parallel to this announcement, Facebook blocks access to articles and videos of many Australian and international newspapers, but also to pages of the Australian government informing the population about Covid-19, and about natural disasters. These blockings occur in the middle of the fire and flood season and a few days before the beginning of the Australian vaccination campaign.
A well-tried strategy by Facebook to prevent the vote 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 U.S. Department of Justice and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission seem to prove that Facebook has implemented a strategy in this sense. The social network has exploited its sorting algorithm to achieve this.
It would also be appropriate that several employees of Meta have tried to raise the problem, not being aware of the strategy implemented by Facebook, in order to solve it. However, the managers, presumably being aware of this, did nothing to stop this campaign of de-publications and blocking. They waited several days before to restore all this content which required only a few lines of computer code to be changed.
Another piece of evidence affirming the whistleblowers’ statements is an email from Campbell Brown, Facebook’s director of partnerships, congratulating the teams that worked on this “project”:” We got exactly where we wanted to go “, she said in the 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 do this due to a technical error, we apologize, and we have been working to resolve this issue. Any claim to the contrary would be categorically and clearly false. “.
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