Facebook’s Petty Unfriending of Australia
Facebook shocked the world last week with an abrupt ban of all news content for an entire continent. Like many things the platform has done, its action was clumsy: In the process of banning news sites in Australia, Facebook managed to turn the lights out on women’s shelters, nonprofits, charities, and public health information pages, and by this week it had already announced plans to reverse course—soon, temporarily.
The immediate impacts have been that Facebook’s core product is less interesting, less traffic is flowing from it to publishers, and an unusually broad coalition of society is angry with Facebook. Keep in mind that, according to some local polling, Facebook was already the most distrusted brand in Australia.
On one level, the story appears simple: Facebook doesn’t like a new law that will cost it money. Rather than pay, it walked away, hoping other countries will think twice before doing anything similar.
