Facebook’s Australia news ban is the best decision it’s ever made
►https://www.wired.co.uk/article/facebook-australia-rupert-murdoch
#Facebook did the right thing. Its decision to ban all Australian media organisations from its platform has been derided as a brazen act of censorship. It isn’t. For too long Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pretended that his creation is a “town square” – a place for friends and communities to connect freely. Recently, Zuckerberg pivoted, insisting instead that Facebook was a “digital living room” – whatever that means. In fact, Facebook is neither. Facebook is an advertising platform hellbent on dominating the #attention economy. Zuckerberg himself pithily summed up his company’s mission during a 2018 Congressional hearing into the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Asked how Facebook operates without making people pay, Zuckerberg replied, quite simply, “Senator, we run ads”.
What Facebook has done in Australia could now be repeated around the world. And, largely, it already is. Just four per cent of the posts on the Facebook News Feed are news, the company claims. That’s not because people don’t care about news, it’s because Facebook doesn’t. Everyone needs to start being honest about that. Such is Facebook’s contempt for the media that four years ago it fired its trending news team and replaced them with an algorithm which immediately pumped out a story about a man masturbating with a McDonald’s chicken sandwich. If that was funny, what happened next wasn’t.
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