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Your views: on Facebook’s Australian news shutdown

Today, readers comment on Facebook pulling the plug in its news payment brawl with the Australian Government.

Feb 19, 2021, updated Feb 19, 2021
Photo: AP/Jenny Kane

Photo: AP/Jenny Kane

Commenting on the story: ‘Disgraceful, bully-boy’: Facebook news ban hits SA Health, essential services

They should now be called “FakeBook” as there is no verifiable news on their site. – Joe Mifsud

Time to wean ourselves off Facebook. It is full of fake news and no news. – David Price

Time for all services private and public to find a more secure, sovereign-owned way of communicating any type of messages, either important or just informational.

No longer can we be held to ransom by a foreign entity and no longer should the Australian Government/people be subjected to bully tactics. – Andrew Nourse

Maybe, just maybe, the Federal Government should have thought about  the consequences of their actions when they proposed the law in the first place.

Facebook have called their bluff and not backed down, and as usual us “mere mortals” have to pay the price.

They may be labelled as corporate bully-boys but this is a very heavy-handed method by government  trying to help out their corporate media mates. See Murdoch and Google deal to see who benefits! – Graeme Crook

Facebook is indeed a bully and is using tactics guaranteed to get Aussie backs up.

They’ve taken down our Facebook  page and we’re just an information service helping parents find age-appropriate screen content, plus we advocate for children’s rights as media consumers. The Australian government needs to stand its ground. – Barbara Biggins

Facebook banning Australian news is a good thing. The rampant promotion of false narratives and fake news is made much harder when users now know that if it is posted on Facebook, it is not real news.

While this was primarily about advertising revenue, the result is a win for the truth and integrity. – Michael Baragwanath

Having managed the building of a start up web based site with significant complexity, it would not be expensive to duplicate this and re launch a similar competitor.

Although it was a long time ago, I estimate $10 million would be  an order of magnitude estimate to do this, the challenge is getting users and a business model. That’s competition. – Robert Lloyd

I don’t understand this fuss about restricting sharing of online news.

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Anyone with the slightest knowledge of internet publishing should know that they can prevent indexing of their pages by simply adding the ‘noindex’ meta tag to their pages, which tells search engines to ignore them.

If News.com and Nine-Fairfax don’t want their news reported by Google and Facebook, this is all they need to do! I am happy to restrict my news reading to high quality sites like InDaily and the ABC.

In fact, Google only ever reports the snippets which news sites make available for free, and then directs users to click through to the news site itself, including display advertising. Google search increases visits to news sites. If news sites are unable to monetise those visitors, it is their own business model which is at fault.

Now if Facebook can also stop showing me unsolicited advertising posts, I shall be left in peace with my friends’ discussions, which is what I really want to see! – David Leske

Just like we realised 12 months ago how reliant we were on China, and how that rug could be pulled out from under our country, now we realise how reliant we are on – how ingrained in our lives we have allowed – a foreign company to become in our everyday lives.

Overnight, they can cause chaos, as they have demonstrated. If this is their idea of a bargaining tactic, then who needs them? There are alternatives, and if nothing is suitable for various essential services and public info, then we need to create such a digital site/app and not be held to ransom every time an American billionaire wants to make a point. 

FarceBook is just more cultural imperialism by the US, like TV shows and movies; we end up losing our own identity. FarceBook’s addictive model steals so much time collectively from people that they should be banned from this country anyway. Worse than the CCP trying to flex its power against us.

If one million Australians spend five hours a day on FB, and five million others spend two hours a day, we have lost 15 million hours per day that could be used more productively – volunteering, reading with children, walking bored dogs, calling elderly relatives etc. Every day.

The cost to our society is huge – my example above is conservative. They pay little tax, employ few locals, overload the NBN that they get to ride on rent-free. They impose their standards on our society and refuse to be accountable. They manipulate our minds and turn us against each other just for $$$$$. Let alone the privacy issues and how intrusive they are in our online lives. I

I don’t even use FarceBook, but they seem to follow me around the Internet. The way that FB manipulate, omit, promote or otherwise mess with news and information is reminiscent of the Ministry of Truth – re-writing history and ‘facts’ to suit the current situation. – David King

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