Rupert Murdoch called on the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison (AKA Scotty from marketing, Scumo, Scamo, Slacko), to impose costs onto facebook and google for sharing news media content.
This didn’t include the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission), nor any other independent news outlets.
Yet all are being penalised for Murdoch’s whims acted out by Morrison.
What facebook could have said is, if you want to charge us for your content being shared, we will make it so your content can’t be shared.
Instead what has happened, is a total media blackout via the facebook platform for all Australian media outlets, and this means Australian content can not be shared overseas either. Here is facebook’s own statement.
This blanket decision to block all Australian media by facebook is not one facebook ought to have the power to make. Facebook is the world’s electronic town square, supposedly open for all as a huge swath of society uses facebook as a conduit to news items they are interested in.
The timing of this could be considered beneficial for a government wanting to keep important issues out of the news cycle.
The ban started the day before the Senate, Environment and Communications References Committee (Media diversity in Australia). As the Government link was only live at the time, see link to (former Australian Prime Minsiter) Kevin Rudd’s contribution.
What if this stoush is actually a way of silencing all the small independent media ?
So far main stream media (MSM) traffic is down about 13%, and I imagine it would be a lot more for the small independent outlets, though that is an area the MSM is clearly not interested in. So no MSM reporting on that.
It is also worth noting that all Australian media outlets have had their own facebook pages wiped, including WikiLeaks.
So far Zuckerberg’s action has made very little difference to Murdoch et al, but it has shut down discourse for everyone else, and this is very much in Morrison’s favour.
While writing this, I was alerted to an article by Caitlin Johnston.
It is a most worthy read “One of the most consequential collective delusions circulating in our society is the belief that our society is free. Our society is exactly free enough to create the illusion that we have freedom; from that line onwards it’s just totalitarianism veiled in propaganda.” and ties into what I am referring to.
We can see how Julian Assange is being treated as emblematic of what Cailin in referring to in “They Don’t Work To Kill All Dissent, They Just Keep It From Going Mainstream”.
