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Australia’s Scott Morrison slams Facebook’s move to block news as ‘arrogant’
- The ban, in response to a proposal that tech firms pay publishers, was criticised for cutting off health and weather pages amid the pandemic and fire season
- The Australian Prime Minister said the social media platform’s actions were ‘as arrogant as they were disappointing’
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Australians woke to empty news feeds on their Facebook pages on Thursday after the social media giant blocked all media content in a surprise and dramatic escalation of a dispute with the government over paying for content.
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The move was swiftly criticised by news producers, politicians and human rights advocates, particularly as it became clear that official health pages, emergency safety warnings and welfare networks had all been scrubbed from the site along with news.
“Facebook’s actions to unfriend Australia today, cutting off essential information services on health and emergency services, were as arrogant as they were disappointing,” Prime Minister Scott Morrison wrote on his own Facebook page, using the vernacular for cutting ties with another person on the site.
“These actions will only confirm the concerns that an increasing number of countries are expressing about the behaviour of Big Tech companies who think they are bigger than governments and that the rules should not apply to them.”
Facebook’s dramatic move represents a split from Alphabet-owned Google after they joined together for years to campaign against the laws. Both had threatened to cancel services in Australia, but Google has instead sealed pre-emptive deals with several outlets in recent days.
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Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp was the latest to announce a deal in which it will receive “significant payments” from Google in return for providing content for the search engine’s News Showcase account. Google declined to comment on the Facebook decision on Thursday.
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