Australian Facebook News Ban Isn’t About Democracy
jacobinmag.com
jacobinmag.com
Frustratingly, we have this in Australia, and it’s bloody good. The ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission) is ad free, government funded TV and radio, available nationally.
But of course the government attempts to cut or limit their budget. The most recent was ‘not a budget cut’, but rather froze their funding, to let inflation do the work.
My only hope in this current debacle is that it makes a loser of Facebook, NewsCorp and Scott Morrison. Any other result is a loss for the people, Australian or otherwise.
The US should reinstate media ownership rules (as Australia recently attempted until News Corp blocked it).
Anyone can make your argument, regardless of political stance.
What you end up with is the most convincing and popular narrative becoming the only lawful story that can be told.
No thanks.
Newscorp’s power corrupts the political landscape as well, ousting multiple Australian Prime Ministers (Labor and Liberal), as recently heard by PM Kevin Rudd at the Enquiry Into Media Diversity. https://youtu.be/Ap_LuSQ5NSc?t=953 Newscorp has created an atmosphere of fear in the political landscape and those who do not obey, are dismembered slowly but surely.
In my opinion, it’s an absolute crisis with media in Australia lulling people into uneducated and misinformed opinions, often pandering to fear whilst often exploiting minorities for headlines.
We need to act now to fix it.
They have to say that to bypass a bunch of legal standards, since they regularly run stories that are demonstrably false.
For instance, they blamed the Texas outages on wind turbines, when the energy shortfall was greater than the total wind production. During the Portland protests, they were caught photoshopping up photos of rioting that never happened. There are many, many more examples, to the point where when they lie, it’s not really newsworthy.
But in reality "social network" as a product is a bit thin, since it's really just a crossover of blogging and communication.
There's nothing of value that facebook does which the general populace can't replace with something else within a week.
People won't run out of ways to communicate with each other, and they won't run out of ways to shout and throw pictures into the void.
In fact people used to change platforms like clothes and the continued dominance of facebook in a lot of countries is a bit of an anomaly.
Also only about 50% of Australians even are on Facebook, which is slightly more than Europeans, but way less than north Americans.
Scaling for cheap is the winning strategy here. Google had its social network before facebook too. Orkut. Didn't scale cheaply. Invite only to limit load.
Facebook could do it. Fast loading pages serving billions. I was trying gab.com recently. Too slow. Too much non responsive. Even after they are trying their best. And even though they make money from premium membership.
> There's nothing of value that facebook does which the general populace can't replace with something else within a week.
This is a very engineer-y way to understand the value of Facebook. No one logs on to Facebook because it automates publishing and messaging extraordinarily well.
They log on because it's the only place to access enormous amounts of data created by friends, family, groups, and local businesses.
If using Facebook is the only way to see daily photos of my grandchildren, I'm going to use it.
> Also only about 50% of Australians are even on Facebook.
How many are on either Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp? I guarantee the number is far more than 50%.
While I was reading this article I was reminded of the phenomenal book by Tim Wu, The Master Switch. Facebook is a “new”technology-monopoly that appears to be working to supplant an “old” technology - the news industry, but the news industry won’t die.