Facebook's Australia news ban overblocked on purpose, whistleblowers claim

Image source, Getty Images

Last year, the pages of Australian emergency services were taken down by Facebook as a negotiating tactic.

All news outlets in Australia were blocked by the social network.

During fire season and Australia's vaccine roll out, fire services and state health services were blocked.

It was an honest mistake to block other pages.

The company over-blocked the Australian pages to gain leverage over the Australian government, according to former employees.

One employee who worked on the project said in submissions to Australian and US authorities that it was clear this was not complying with the law, but a hit on civic institutions and emergency services in Australia.

The high-profile row began in February last year, when lawmakers were in the middle of voting on a landmark bill that would have forced social networks to pay news organizations for the content they used on their platforms.

All news pages in Australia were taken down by Facebook the day after the first vote.

The ban was lifted after the government struck a deal with the tech giant.

According to documents provided by the Wall Street Journal, the company did not use its long-standing database of news organizations, but instead built a new "crude" algorithm that would label any page that shared 60% news content as a news provider.

According to the whistle blower, internal planning documents showed that the takedown was pre- planned to be ready before an appeals process for errors.

The documents show that employees were worried about the damage being done to Facebook's reputation and urged a fix.

Guidance from the policy and legal team has been to be over-inclusive as we get more information, according to a product manager.

Image source, Getty Images

According to the WSJ's documents, Facebook tried to exclude government pages and they had their ban reversed within days.

After Australian officials agreed to change the law to effectively exempt Facebook from being forced to negotiate with individual publishers, the company's top officials celebrated.

The best outcome in Australia was said to be by founder Mark Zuckerberg and senior executive Sheryl Sandberg.

Meta denies the substance of the claims.

The documents in question clearly show that we intended to exempt Australian government pages from restrictions in order to minimize the impact of the legislation.

We apologized and worked to correct the problem after we were unable to do so. Any suggestion to the contrary is categorically false.

The chief executive of Whistleblower Aid said that Facebook has a lot of power over information.

She said that they used that power in a way that threatened public safety during fire season and in the midst of a global epidemic.

A partnership between Whistleblower Aid and The Wall Street Journal was behind the revelations of a woman who provided internal Facebook documents on a wide array of issues last year.