CGPP 2021

Facebook’s Australian News Ban and Its Implications for Critical Platform Studies

Axel Bruns

• 26 Nov. 2021 – Invited presentation at the Griffith Centre for Governance and Public Policy, Brisbane

In February 2021, Facebook took the unprecedented step of banning the sharing of news articles on its platform in Australia. While this ban on news on the platform was rescinded one week later, after the company had extracted a number of concessions from the Australian federal government in its implication of the News Media Bargaining Code, the episode demonstrates the considerable control that Facebook and other companies exercise over the flow of information on digital and social media platforms in Australia. This poses a significant problem for independent, critical, public-interest research, too: empirical work that seeks to hold these platforms to account often inherently relies on the good will of their operators in providing access to platform data and related affordances. This talk will review the Australian news ban episode and its implications, and introduce a number of projects in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) that implement novel, data donation-based approaches to the independent scrutiny of major online platforms.

Video of the Presentation

Presentation Slides