Whistleblowers claim Facebook’s chaotic Australia news ban was a negotiating tactic

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

When Facebook briefly blocked all news from being posted on its platform in Australia last year, it used an overly broad definition of a news publisher that INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals The company is accused of engaging in a criminal conspiracy to obtain a thing of value, namely favorable regulatory treatment, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The news ban was put into place by Facebook last February in protest over a proposed Australian law that would effectively force platform-holders like it and Google to pay news publishers when sharing their content. There were widespread reports of the ban blocking government organizations and nonprofits.

Government organizations like the Department of Fire and Emergency Services Western Australia were among the pages that were blocked. The WSJ notes that the ban took place during the fire season in Australia. According to the WSJ, Facebook recognized that it shouldn't have blocked 17,000 pages on the first day of the ban.

It was clear that this was not complying with the law, but a hit on civic institutions and emergency services in Australia, according to one whistle blower. The House of Representatives passed an initial version of the bill on February 18th, but before the final votes of the Australian Senate the following week.

Facebook admitted at the time that it had taken a broad definition of news content in order to comply with the law. Records of internal conversations obtained by the WSJ offer more evidence that this was the case.

If more than 60 percent of the content it shared was classified as news, the company classified a page as a news publisher. The company planned to exclude government and education from the ban.

According to the WSJ, the list of organizations who saw their Facebook pages removed as a result of the ban suggests these safeguards malfunctioned, and that Facebook ignored approaches that could have more precisely targeted news organizations. The company decided against using its database of news publishers known as the News Page Index because it relied on news publishers to opt-in, and the complaints say it failed to use existing whitelisting tools to protect important accounts. It failed to put an appeals process in place before blocking pages.

Facebook officials praised the company's response to the legislation despite the technical issues. Campbell Brown, the head of partnerships at Facebook, said that the team's efforts were genius, while the COO said the thoughtfulness of the strategy, precision of execution, and ability.

The documents in question clearly show that we intended to exempt Australian government Pages from restrictions in an effort to minimize the impact of this misguided and harmful legislation. We apologized and worked to correct the problem after we were unable to do so. Any suggestion to the contrary is completely false.

The law was passed later that month. The amended language means that the Australian government needs to consider private deals between publishers and platforms before designating a company like Facebook as a platform under the law. Over a year after the law passed, neither Facebook nor Google have been designated as platforms under the rules.