What happens if Facebook slows down the news flow?

“Websites are our second stop,” said Kantesha Takai, a 29-year-old small business owner on the island. “We are very dependent on giants like Facebook.”

Mark Zuckerberg cut a critical piece in the chain of communication from such regions when Facebook blocked news from the social media platform across the country, a drastic contradiction with the Australian government to force the company to pay news services for the content shared. the website. Although the company reached an agreement earlier this week, the experience of Ms Takai and her neighbors in a small town on a small island revealed a side of the world’s largest social media platform that can be blunt and cruel as it is challenged in a negotiation.

The past week has highlighted a new chapter in the 17-year-old business’s moody teens, one that has turned the users of the platform into collateral damage in the battle between titans who run tech companies and those who want to regulate it.

The effect of the sudden absence of Facebook has been seen especially among Australia’s indigenous people, often remote communities who use the social media platform more as a utility, especially in a time of climate change and weather patterns. These are the places where Facebook’s goal of connecting the world seems to be almost too effective – when the company had a conversation with Australian government officials, residents like me. Takai left behind without the most effective warnings for bad weather and Covid-19 information. After years of defending Facebook’s platform of accusations of conspiracy theories and misinformation, it snatched legitimate news sources from the continent’s most vulnerable populations days before a coronavirus vaccine was released.

Facebook on Tuesday announced an agreement with lawmakers that will make it possible to return news to the site. It has agreed to pay some news sales through transactions it undertakes on its own, although details have not been released. After all, the initial and dramatic response from the company also feels like a possible warning to lawmakers in other countries considering legislation that the service may not hold. Alphabet Inc.’s

Google, the other company covered by Australian law, initially threatened to leave the country before agreeing to new deals with content publishers earlier this month. These publishers include News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co., which is campaigning for the position of government.

Facebook did not respond to requests for comment on the impact of the eclipse on indigenous communities. Spokesman Nick Clegg posted in a company blog about the Australian events published on Wednesday: ‘The events in Australia show the danger of a cash subsidy bid being camouflaged behind distortions about how the internet works.

“It is understandable that some media conglomerates see Facebook as a potential source of money to compensate for their losses, but does that mean they should be able to claim a blank check?” he added.

Those who run indigenous news sites admit that they do not like to give away so many eyeballs to Facebook, but the platform has become indispensable for those in the community for whom the priority is to hand out information to the public. Nearly half of Australia’s 25 million people have a Facebook account, but the platform has reached particular heights within its First Nation communities. The communities are made up of about 3% of Australians and are descended from those who lived on the mainland before the British colonized it in the late 18th century.

Indigenous people who have moved to the city use Facebook to stay in touch with people at home; stories transmitted in the oral tradition are uploaded and shared; and public health information is placed in hundreds of local dialects.

The excessive impact that Facebook’s disappearance has had on Australia’s indigenous communities seems to run counter to the ethos that the company has put forward. You can imagine in another moment that Facebook is placing the fishermen and elders of Thursday Island in an ad about the beauty of interconnectedness.

Indigenous newspapers whose pages have been blacked out since Tuesday have found it difficult to get directly to Facebook, and have instead relied on lawmakers to address the issue and be reinstated as soon as possible, said Naomi Moran, vice president of First Nations Media, the leading community newsletter organization.

‘It’s back to our people to pick up the pieces for a problem we did not cause. “This is the age-old story when it comes to nations of the first nation around the world,” she said.

The information vacuum caused by Facebook was particularly pleasing to those in the indigenous media industry, as it came just as the country was preparing to introduce the Covid-19 vaccine, and indigenous communities have a higher rate of comorbidities that the virus can kill. .

Hannah Cross, editor of the National Indigenous Times, was shocked to see all of her newspaper’s Facebook posts – usually everything from indigenous artist exhibitions to information on where to access social distance guidelines in your local dialect – erased from the page word. In their place: a note that reads: “No messages yet.”

“I did not know I was waking up in Orwell’s ‘1984,’” she said.

Facebook’s reaction quickly backfired when its machines followed non-news pages, leading to temporary interruptions by the country’s Bureau of Meteorology – another source for cyclone warnings – as well as services such as domestic violence hotlines. Independent bloggers with small followers were also cut off.

Even with a deal, the experience of waking up with no news on the world’s most popular social media platform will have lasting consequences for those in Australia, and for those looking for a Menlo Park-based company that seems to go further work any boundary or jurisdiction. Its obscuration was in response to a bill that the Australian government was preparing to adopt democratically. But the ‘proxy struggle’, as Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg put it, cannot help but send a cool message to other lawmakers who want to regulate the service in a number of ways.

For those whose sites were captured by the eclipse, the week taught them to turn – in the language of Silicon Valley. Me. Cross drove readers to the newsletter and website of her article.

“We learned that we can not just rely on Facebook,” she said.

And for those who have a livelihood on Thursday Island, Ms. Takai said her family can rely on fishermen on natural instincts when they are on the water and the cell phone is not working.

“We know the seasons and when the wind changes, we know what it means,” Ms Takai said.

Write to Erich Schwartzel by [email protected]