According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, Facebook's internal information praised some teams for their seemingly tough strategy of closing the websites of some Australian government departments, including emergency services and charities** It is reported that all this happened when the country is considering a new law requiring companies such as Google and Facebook to pay for news published on their platforms.
The report includes a document sent by an informant to Australian and U.S. authorities detailing how Facebook did not follow the standard process of changing its functions when it began banning news on its platform in Australia a year ago. Facebook said at the time that its action was to avoid potential litigation. But the informant accused the company of trying to influence Australia's political process by exerting "the biggest bargaining chip".
The Wall Street Journal quoted documents and people familiar with the matter as saying: "although it is only for news organizations, the company uses an algorithm to decide which pages to close, and it knows that this will certainly affect more publishers. It is reported that the affected pages have not been notified in advance, and there is no system to appeal the removed pages."
A spokeswoman for meta, Facebook's parent company, disagreed with the magazine's findings, noting that, The document provided by the informant "makes it clear that we intend to exempt the restrictions on the Australian government's website in order to minimize the impact of this misleading and harmful legislation. When we cannot proceed as expected due to technical errors, we apologize and try to correct it. Any suggestion to the contrary is categorical and clearly wrong".
The Wall Street Journal report is the latest in a series of whistleblowers who have exposed the company's aggressive and sometimes deceptive business practices. In one case, the Wall Street Journal reported that meta's instagram social network was aware of the negative impact on young users of its application, but did not take action. In another case, a former Facebook product manager became a whistleblower, accusing the company of putting profits above user safety.
Some earlier complaint documents also detailed how Facebook is trying to control harassment in its next big technology, virtual reality.