Facebook accused of deliberately blocking government and health pages in Australia
Whisteblowers are accusing Facebook of purposely blocking government, healthcare and emergency services pages in Australia in order to thwart a potential law that would require platforms to pay for news,. The accusers say the platform last year created an algorithm to identify pages that would affect the most publishers. But Facebook reportedly didn’t just take down pages for media outlets — it also removed pages for hospitals, governments and charities.
According to the documents, Facebook put together a team of roughly a dozen employees who were tasked with removing news content from Australia. The team sidestepped an existing Facebook database of existing news publishers. Instead, the Facebook employees quickly created a new algorithm with a definition of news broad enough to grab a large number of non-news pages.
The end-result was that — for several days — Australians weren’t able to access or share any news or information from governments and healthcare services pages on Facebook. The timing was particularly bad, since the nation was just about to embark on a mass vaccination campaign for Covid-19. A number of Australian health officials decried the move.
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