{"id":182123,"date":"2021-02-18T22:41:11","date_gmt":"2021-02-18T19:41:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/australian-pm-slams-arrogant-facebook-for-banning-news-content\/"},"modified":"2021-02-18T22:41:11","modified_gmt":"2021-02-18T19:41:11","slug":"australian-pm-slams-arrogant-facebook-for-banning-news-content","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/australian-pm-slams-arrogant-facebook-for-banning-news-content\/","title":{"rendered":"#Australian PM slams ‘arrogant’ Facebook for banning news content"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Australian PM slams ‘arrogant’ Facebook<\/a> for banning news<\/a> content<\/strong>”
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Australia\u2019s prime minister on Thursday slammed Facebook\u2019s \u201carrogant,\u201d retaliatory move to yank news content from its site \u2014 as he and other leaders refused to bow to pressure from Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n

\u201cFacebook\u2019s actions to unfriend Australia today, cutting off essential information services on health and emergency services, were as arrogant as they were disapp<\/a>ointing,\u201d PM Scott Morrison wrote on his own Facebook page.<\/a><\/p>\n

The prime minister tore into Facebook the same day the social media giant issued an immediate ban on media content across its platform down under \u2014 resulting in emergency services and government pages, including the Queensland and South Australia state health departments, also going dark.<\/p>\n

The sweeping move \u2014 which came without warning \u2014 was in response to legislation passed by the House of Representatives that would make Facebook and Google negotiate with media companies and pay for news content that gets distributed on their sites.<\/p>\n

The bill is headed for a vote in the Senate and is expected to pass next week.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe will not be intimidated by BigTech seeking to pressure our Parliament as it votes on our important News Media Bargaining Code,\u201d Morrison promised.<\/p>\n

He added, \u201cThese actions will only confirm the concerns that an increasing number of countries are expressing about the behavior of BigTech companies who think they are bigger than governments and that the rules should not apply to them.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey may be changing the world, but that doesn\u2019t mean they run it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Morrison also hinted that he\u2019s rallying global support to take action against Facebook.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI am in regular contact with the leaders of other nations on these issues,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

The prime minister has already been in contact with his counterpart Narendra Modi in India, which has the most Facebook users in the world, according to the Sydney Morning Herald<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The two leaders shared a phone call on Thursday afternoon.<\/p>\n

Facebook, which has 17 million users in Australia, and Google take a combined 81 percent of online advertising in Australia.<\/p>\n

The country\u2019s Communications Minister Paul Fletcher on Thursday also vowed to move forward with the legislation despite the media blackout.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll be proceeding with the code,\u201d he\u00a0told Australia\u2019s ABC News<\/a>. \u201cWe want Google and Facebook to stay in Australia, but we\u2019ve been very clear that if you do business in Australia you need to comply with the laws passed by the elected parliament of this nation.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a blog post<\/a> early Thursday morning, William Easton, the managing director of Facebook\u2019s Australia and New Zealand, defended the platform\u2019s decision for an all-out news blackout after the bill cleared the House.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe proposed law fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIt has left us facing a stark choice: attempt to comply with a law that ignores the realities of this relationship, or stop allowing news content on our services in Australia. With a heavy heart, we are choosing the latter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Facebook\u2019s sudden action has sparked fierce criticism, including from its own former chief executive, Stephen Scheeler, who headed Facebook Australia and New Zealand.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt shouldn\u2019t have happened. But unfortunately it did,\u201d Scheeler told The Australian. \u201cBut there\u2019s no good answers \u2026 But at Facebook nobody ever loses their jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a proud ex-Facebooker, but over the years I get more and more exasperated. For Facebook and Mark it\u2019s too much about the money, and the power, and not about the good,\u201d Scheeler added. \u201cImagine if a Chinese company for example had done this, we would be up in arms. All Australians should be quite alarmed by this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scheeler, who resigned in 2017, also urged Australians to boycott the site and called for \u201cmore regulation\u201d of the social media giant.<\/p>\n

Google and Facebook have waged war against the proposed \u201cNews Media Bargaining Code,\u201d with the search engine titan saying it could give bigger companies an \u201cunfair advantage\u201d over its free services.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe law is set up to give big media companies special treatment and to encourage them to make enormous and unreasonable demands that would put our free services at risk,\u201d Mel Silva, a Google Australia managing director, wrote in an August letter.<\/p>\n

Google has also threatened to shut down its search engine in Australia if the bill gets passed \u2014 though Fletcher noted that the tech giant took a more conciliatory approach to making deals with publishers.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, Google agreed to pay \u201csignificant payments\u201d to News Corp. \u2014 which owns The Post and the Wall Street Journal \u2014 in order to provide its news content as part of a three-year deal.<\/p>\n

The financial terms weren\u2019t disclosed but a source close to the situation pegged it at tens of millions of dollars.<\/p>\n

Fletcher told ABC that said the proposed law is \u201cabout having a diverse, well-resourced media sector in Australia. <\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s an important part of our democratic process,\u201d he said. \u201cMay not seem so important perhaps in Silicon Valley but it\u2019s very important to the Australian government and the Australian people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Facebook said it erroneously restricted so many pages because the draft law didn\u2019t clearly define news content.<\/p>\n

For instance, Save the Children Australia, the Hobart Women\u2019s Shelter, and the Kids Cancer Project had their pages pulled from the platform, as did the Brisbane City Council, South Australia Health and the Bureau of Meteorology. <\/p>\n

By the evening local time on Thursday, some of these pages had already been restored.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson said it would work to restore access to certain pages.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe actions we\u2019re taking are focused on restricting publishers and people in Australia from sharing or viewing Australian and international news content,\u201d\u00a0a Facebook spokesperson said<\/a>. \u201cAs the law does not provide clear guidance on the definition of news content, we have taken a broad definition in order to respect the law as drafted.\u201d<\/p>\n

With Post wires<\/em>\n <\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#Australian PM slams ‘arrogant’ Facebook for banning news content” Australia\u2019s prime minister on Thursday slammed Facebook\u2019s \u201carrogant,\u201d retaliatory move to yank news content from its site \u2014 as he and other leaders refused to bow to pressure from Silicon Valley. \u201cFacebook\u2019s actions to unfriend Australia today, cutting off essential information services on health and emergency…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":182124,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/02\/morrison-australia-fb.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[93894,20358,4974,26293,115,4946],"class_list":["post-182123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-2-18-21","tag-australia","tag-facebook","tag-google","tag-news","tag-newspapers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182123\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/182124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}