Rob Nicholls is a member of the UNSW Allens Hub for Technology, Law and Innovation from which he receives research funding. He is also the faculty lead for the UNSW Institute for Cyber Security (IFCYBER), which provides support. UNSW has received an untied gift from Facebook, which is used to fund some of Rob's research.
On Friday, the Wall Street Journal published information from Facebook whistleblowers, alleging Facebook (which is owned by Meta) deliberately caused havoc in Australia last year to influence the News Media Bargaining Code before it was passed as law.
During Facebook’s news blackout in February 2021, thousands of non-news pages were also blocked – including important emergency, health, charity and government pages.
Meta has continued to argue the takedown of not-for-profit and government pages was a technical error. It remains to be seen whether the whistleblower revelations will lead to Facebook being taken to court.
The News Media Bargaining Code was first published in July 2020, with a goal to have Facebook and Google pay Australian news publishers for the content they provide to the platforms.
It was passed by the House of Representatives (Australia’s lower house) on February 17 2021. That same day, Facebook retaliated by issuing a statement saying it would remove access to news media business pages on its platform – a threat it had first made in August 2020.
It was arguably a reasonable threat of capital strike by a...
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