What Happens When Facebook Slows the News Flow

The residents of Thursday Island, a speck on the archipelago Torres Strait Islands, have relied for years on Facebook to learn of everything from cyclone warnings to crayfish prices. The platform doesn’t eat up data the way other websites do, a priority for the remote communities, where people often use prepaid phones. Newspapers and radio stations with staffs made up of indigenous reporters publish Facebook updates in local dialects—a critical feature for those for whom English is a third or fourth language. It’s as real-time as the island can get. By the time papers from mainland Australia arrive, the news is about a week old. Mark Zuckerberg cut off a critical piece in the chain of communication from such regions when Facebook blocked news from the social-media platform across the country, a drastic counterpunch to the Australian government’s plan to force the company to pay news services for the content shared on the site. The effect of Facebook’s sudden absence was particularly felt among Australia’s indigenous people, those often remote communities that use the social-media platform as more of a utility, especially in a time of climate-change induced weather patterns and a pandemic.