Members of Facebook’s supervisory board, some compared to an internal ‘high court’, were asked to speak out or resign after the platform shut down the media and key public information sites during a fight with the Australian government.
The social media giant has suspended pages – including those of government bodies and state health departments before the launch of the national coronavirus vaccine – as part of a showdown with officials over a new law that will force it and other platforms to pay for links to news content.
It was an ‘attack on democracy’, an open letter from dozens of prominent charities, media and campaign groups around the world, including Save the Children Australia, Hope not Hate and the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, warned.
“Access to reliable and quality information is an integral part of our democracy and our society,” the letter reads. If we take it down, “it leaves room for misinformation and hate speech to fill the void left behind.”
Facebook could wait up to a week before some of the pages of hundreds of non-media organizations caught up in its news ban, the Observer understand, while the vaccination and misinformation against vaccination continues.
Facebook has long argued in response to a call for expanding its rich social media empire that self-regulation is more effective than government regulation, pointing to bodies such as the oversight council.
But this body is moving slowly to judge only controversies in the past, and therefore it can not act on the fast-moving events as it happens, said Maria Ressa, co-founder and CEO of Philippine news website Rappler, who was quoted by President Rodrigo Duterte was targeted for her. work.
It also has ‘no say in the design of the platform itself, that’s where the problem lies’, she adds. As a member of the “Real Facebook Oversight Board”, a campaign that demands more responsibility, she also supports the open letter.
The crisis in Australia has highlighted for her the problems with the current model. Rappler works with Facebook to provide fact-checking on the site for news produced in the Philippines. But because the ban restricts Australian users and publishers from seeing or sharing all news, the large Philippine diaspora in the country has been left vulnerable to misinformation, she said.
‘The thing that made me angry was that not every news organization in the Philippines is visible in Australia. “But government propaganda (is) visible in Australia,” she said. “Now, essentially, for the Philippines and the Philippine diaspora, you will see the lies, but you will not see the fact-checking.”
It shows a huge disconnect between people on Facebook who say they are committed to keeping the site safe and supporting democracy, and those who work on the business side and deal with Australian law, she said.
A senior management has since apologized for taking down health and government websites, and Prime Minister Scott Morrison says Facebook is back at the negotiating table. But the company has not publicly indicated any change in its opposition to the proposed law, which according to senior management members is an ‘unworkable precedent’.
In contrast, rival technology giant Google has entered into more than 50 deals with Australian publishers to showcase their journalism in its News Showcase product.
Guardian Australia is the latest media company to reach an agreement, just days before the Senate discusses the federal government’s news media code.
“Quality journalism is a public good and a very valuable asset to publishers and platforms, as this agreement shows,” said Dan Stinton, managing director of Guardian Australia.
“We also congratulate the Australian Government on the development of the digital platforms and the code of conduct for news media, with this leading-edge legislation providing the necessary regulatory environment to ensure equitable commercial transactions that will support Australian journalism in the future.”
The news media code requires Google and Facebook to pay for the content of news publishers for content, and if no agreement can be reached, an arbitrator will determine the financial terms of the agreement.