Shockwaves worldwide after Facebook turns off the news for Australia

Use MeWe instead of Facebook. It doesn’t steal your data and sell it.

People are still using Facebook for things beyond finding dates? Crazy people.

"The idea that with a flick of a switch you could shut down a civic infrastructure -- that's a wake-up call."

Oh please! Since when was Facebook civic infrastructure?!

I strongly get the sense that FB has employed a PR firm to drive this nonsense narrative.

If you want news - go to a news website. Facebook is a place where people post pictures of their dinner.

Still can’t believe that people are so lazy to not to use other websites for news apart from Facebook

It started off as a kind of "BonkBook" - a free rating page of students' photos at Harvard; morphed to a 'family and friends' picture sharing website, and has now ended up like the ubiquitous 'Borg' sucking the life and information out of people for sale to anyone.

Just use it for sharing pictures, if you like, though there are other platforms for that.

Get the news direct from news site, the weather direct from a weather site, Covid info from a Covid site, etc..

What's even funnier about this is that FB... blocked itself in the process!

Facebook fear the implications to its future business of/to the News media bargaining code.

https://www.accc.gov.au/focus-areas/digital-platforms/news-media-bargaining-code

The effect these tentative first steps to full or partial regulation and the inevitability that EU/UK Government will soon follow suit has Facebook rattled to such an extent Facebook blacked out the reading and sharing local news.

Also, an alleged failure to fully carry out algorithm tests prior to the mass-blocking, meant a whole host of vital pages for Health and Emergency services, Charities, Sports, Weather services, Trade Union to name but a few were ‘inadvertently' blocked in the ban.

Within the News media bargaining code, is the legislation to formally bring into creation arbitration panels to set a binding price for news in such events that social media giants fail to reach agreements with news media broadcasters for original content.

This is a new level of arrogance, that Facebook feel the necessity to act the playground bully.

Seems fb is all ok about making $$$ off the net but doesnt want to pay some of the costs to do so!!!

fb & goggle need to be reigned in for a lot of things