Faizel Patel – 22/02/2021
A media and communications expert at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia says Facebook has apologised for part of the ban blocking Australian users from sharing or viewing news content on its platform.
Diana Bossio was speaking to Radio Islam on Monday following the action taken by the social media company.
Australians last week woke up to find that Facebook pages of all local and global news sites were unavailable.
This comes in response to a proposed law, which would make tech giants pay for news content on their platforms.
Bossio says Facebook’s action also blocked links to important Australians including charities, weather channels and health departments among other sites, which Facebook later asserted was a mistake.
“So it was quite a heavy-handed approach to what was essentially meant to be a news ban. You could have seen that as a kind of strategy, they are trying to pressure the government to really define what’s going to be conceded news content in their legislation.”
Bossio says search giant Google has taken a different approach as opposed to blocking news content to Australians.
“They will pay news media companies for the content that they host on their curated news platforms. So a little bit of a different in approach, but we are seeing continued discussions with the Australian government and Facebook, but no change to the ban as yet.”
Bossio says Google paying for news is going to benefit the search giant in the long term while Facebook has indicated that it is not in the company’s interest to pay for content.
Listen to the interview with Diana Bossio
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