Facebook v Australia: Who blinked first?

[rlvaughn]

Facebook v Australia: Who blinked first?

The war between Facebook and the Australian government is over...I think there's no question that global backlash against this was pretty stern....Australia had support not only from other governments, which wanted to see Mark Zuckerberg's company taken down a peg, but even from another tech firm that has previously been in regulators' sights itself.

Earlier this month, Microsoft came out in strong support of the new media law.

 

[rlvaughn]

I use Facebook to promote articles such as the ones I write for this august publication!

So you can imagine my surprise when I went to my Facebook page last Thursday only to discover that 90 per cent of my posts had been removed. I thought I had been banned but it turned out that Facebook had simply ‘unfriended’ the whole of Australia. No one was allowed to post any news items from Australia – and Facebook took the widest possible definition of news. As a result, mental health providers and other charities were prevented from posting, and in the end Facebook enabled fake news while banning real news. Why?

Facebook’s monopoly power is good news for cancel culture and bad news for intellectual freedom