It’s hard to overstate just how ruthless Facebook has been in its (Meta) quest to dominate pretty much every facet of social and internet communication. This is, after all, the House of Zuckerberg that recently hired a Republican consulting firm to help smear their biggest rival, not to mention the very same company that bought up people’s digital prayers in order to then turn around and sell to advertisers. A new exposé from The Wall Street Journal published yesterday, however, lays out a paper trail pointing to perhaps one of their grossest and borderline villainous strategies yet: Holding the Facebook pages of Australian hospitals, charities, and emergency services hostage as leverage amid discussions with the country’s government regarding contentious reform proposals last year.
According to internal documents and emails provided to The WSJ, Facebook not only shoddily took down pages for the Children’s Cancer Institute, women’s shelters, and fire rescue services (during fire season, no less), they prevented certain COVID-19 info pages from reaching users during initial vaccine rollouts. Facebook slowly restored these pages a few days later, following tentative alterations to Australian legislation regarding compensating publishers for their original news content.
