Comment by tomhoward | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomhoward | Hacker News Reader

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The main reason for the outrage is that a whole lot of content that is not (or at least is not intended to be) covered by the legislation was also removed by Facebook, apparently to make a point, but done in a way that was unfair at best and dangerous at worst.

Such content included public health and safety information (government/emergency services advice re. the pandemic and bushfires), though Facebook later claimed this was a mistake and restored it (I don't know details of exactly what was removed and what has been restored).

It also included other content platforms - i.e., several major news/comment sites, satirical news sites, weather/climate info sites, retail sites, a major independent restaurant/cafe review site, and info services for minority communities like indigenous groups. I think most of these platforms would have attained little-to-no benefit from the new laws, so they are just "collateral damage", losing traffic and revenue over a law they likely didn't support and had little to gain from.

It seems highly capricious on Facebook's part, and a terrible PR move, given that most Australians probably didn't support the laws, at least not very strongly, but in a climate where people are already uncomfortable with how much power the major internet platforms have, this "show of strength" against a country's elected government and populace is alarming.

There's no way for facebook to know in advance if a link is to a new agency or not, and in fact the law doesn't even specify news agencies. Links to any news-like content anywhere are covered by the law, whether they are on news publisher's web sites or not. Yes, it really is that appallingly badly thought out:

https://twitter.com/NewtonMark/status/1362173580776148996

Facebook has banned specific Australian sites by domain name, so they know in advance the kind of content that is normally published on all the platforms they've banned.

As one of biggest/"smartest" technology companies in the world, they could easily have implemented this response in a way that didn't make them look such bullies.

The laws are very clearly formulated for the benefit of the major media publishers, particularly News Corp and Nine Fairfax, and it would have been trivial for Facebook to limit their ban to those platforms, and perhaps a handful of other large ones that lobbied for the law.

To be clear, I'm not normally in the faction of people hating on Facebook, and generally regard the loudest attacks on them as overblown scapegoating. But, regardless of how technically right they might be, from a PR point of view it's a losing move.

What happens when one of the domains they did not ban publishes some news content than demands payment from Facebook when they do not have a process in place for that? How do they take the risk?

They did accidentally block their own page already[1].

[1] - https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-accidentally-blocks-own-p...

It has been interesting to see how incompetently Facebook wields its own platform. Having to back-pedal after banning government Covid updates and managing to ban themselves makes them look like they have no idea what they're doing.

All Facebook has managed to achieve is to give the Australian government a good reason to dig in, to increase support for the new media code within Australia, and to gain the Australian government the support of various other governments internationally.

The fact is government Covid updates quite clearly are covered by the law as content that is chargeable if they chose to do so. It's hardly reasonable to accuse facebook of not knowing what they are doing when blocking content, when the Australian government clearly has no idea what it's doing defining the scope of the law.

> The fact is government Covid updates quite clearly are covered by the law

They aren't.

> It's hardly reasonable to accuse facebook of not knowing what they are doing

No, it's reasonable. This has backfired badly for Facebook. They've weakened their bargaining position.

No the laws are not formulated that way, they are formulated to be ridiculously broad.

If any site of any kind publishing newsworthy content chooses to sue facebook for payment, there's nothing the Australian government can do to stop them. Also there is no way for facebook to know how he Australian government will actually choose to interpret and apply the law as regulators. They could even change the way they regulate it retroactively, that's the problem with at-will enforcement of vaguely worded laws.

I'm not defending the new laws - I agree they're stupid. But all the public discussion about the laws in Australia, where I live, has focused on the giant publishers - News Corp and Nine Fairfax in particular. They were the primary lobbyists for the laws, and were the ones who would attain almost all the revenues from them.

My point is that Facebook's reaction is a tactical error in the PR battle. They've effectively conceded this themselves, having back-pedalled on at least some of the sites banned initially.

They could have responded in a way that won them support from the Australian populace, but instead they've made themselves seem worse than the AU government, which is quite a feat.

Much of the "outrage" is confected by the journalists that are presenting it.

In actuality, none of the parties concerned held the public's trust to begin with, so pardon me if I suggest that most Australians would interpret the whole charade as a pissing contest between idiots.

Yeah I think that's a reasonable take, and it'll be interesting to see how it plays out up till the next election, which should be early/mid next year, and whether anyone's still talking about it by then.

I'm mostly just surprised to see Facebook play the PR game so badly, but perhaps I shouldn't be.

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