The whistleblower’s claims come days after Facebook admitted it had violated Australian law by repeatedly and deliberately sending notifications to users in the country. The company has been accused of exploiting their influence over a new data policy that allows them access to user profiles without consent, in order to shape public opinion on the issue.
The “facebook whistleblower allegations” are a recent development in the Australian government. The social media giant allegedly caused havoc in Australia to influence new laws, according to whistleblowers.
When Facebook FB -6.03 percent censored news in Australia last year, it also pulled down the pages of Australian hospitals, emergency services, and charities in reaction to impending laws requiring platforms to pay publishers for content. The resultant turmoil was widely referred to be “inadvertent.”
The preemptive attack was regarded as a strategic masterstroke internally.
Whistleblowers allege in documents and testimony filed with US and Australian authorities that Facebook purposefully created an overly broad and sloppy process for removing pages, allowing swaths of the Australian government and health services to be caught in its web just as the country was launching Covid vaccinations.
According to the whistleblowers and documents, the purpose was to gain maximum bargaining power over the Australian Parliament, which was voting on the world’s first bill requiring platforms like Google and Facebook to pay news organizations for content.
Despite claiming to be targeting just news organizations, the business used an algorithm to choose which sites to remove that it knew would damage more than just publications, according to documents and others familiar with the situation.
It didn’t provide impacted pages early notice that they would be banned or a way to appeal after they were.
Multiple Facebook workers attempted to raise concerns about the damage and provide alternative remedies, according to the papers, only to get a little or delayed reaction from the team’s management.
After five days of chaos throughout the nation, Australia’s Parliament changed the proposed legislation to the point where the most onerous aspects have yet to be applied to Facebook or its parent company, Meta Platforms Inc., a year after it was passed. FB is down 6.3%.
In a jubilant email to her colleagues minutes after the Australian Senate voted to pass the watered-down bill at the end of February 2021, Campbell Brown, Facebook’s head of partnerships, who pushed for the company’s hard position, said, “We arrived exactly where we wanted to.”
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, and Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s COO, both expressed their congratulations, with Ms. Sandberg applauding the “thoughtfulness of the approach” and “precision of execution.”
Following the passage of the new legislation, Campbell Brown, Sheryl Sandberg, and Mark Zuckerberg issued emails complimenting workers on their efforts.
“We arrived precisely where we intended to — and only because this team was brilliant enough to pull it happen in record time.”
“The strategy’s intelligence, accuracy of implementation, and
The capacity to remain agile as things changed sets a new bar.”
“We were able to act fast and with integrity for our global network while reaching what may have been the greatest possible result in Australia.”
“We arrived precisely where we intended to — and only because this team was brilliant enough to pull it happen in record time.”
“The strategy’s intelligence, accuracy of implementation, and The capacity to remain agile as things changed sets a new bar.”
“We were able to act fast and with integrity for our global network while reaching what may have been the greatest possible result in Australia.”
“We arrived precisely where we intended to — and only because this team was brilliant enough to pull it happen in record time.”
“The strategy’s intelligence, accuracy of implementation, and The capacity to remain agile as things changed sets a new bar.”
“We were able to act fast and with integrity for our global community, resulting in what may have been the finest possible conclusion.”
“I’m from Australia.”
The actions were not a negotiation strategy, according to Facebook.
According to Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone, “the papers in issue clearly reveal that we planned to exclude Australian government Pages from limitations in an attempt to reduce the effect of this foolish and bad law.” “We apologized and attempted to solve a technical mistake that prevented us from doing so as planned.” Any claim to the contrary is unequivocally and unmistakably untrue.”
Mr. Stone said that Facebook required a wide tool since the law didn’t define news.
According to people familiar with Facebook’s thinking, executives were aware that the company’s procedure for categorizing news in order to remove sites was so wide that it would likely include government and other social services pages. They chose that path because Facebook was concerned that a broader definition would put them in violation of the statute, which included a nondiscrimination provision prohibiting platforms from providing connections to certain news publishers but not others, according to the sources.
According to the sources, Facebook opted to delete pages before the law took effect because it was concerned that publishers would sue to prevent them from removing news after the legislation was passed.
As comparable laws is adopted throughout the globe, Facebook’s tough stance serves as a model for future battles. Last month, Canada filed legislation patterned after Australian law that would compel Google and Facebook to participate in a process that might involve “final offer” arbitration with publishers to determine payment, a procedure that favors publishers. The US Congress is considering similar measures.
The parent company of The Wall Street Journal, News Corp., was one of the publishers in Australia last year who struck arrangements with both Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook, and has been a vocal champion for such platforms paying publishers for their content.
Last year, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, and Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s CEO, met.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images photo
The Facebook documents, reviewed by the Journal, have been submitted as part of whistleblower complaints filed with the U.S. Department of Justice and the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission, or ACCC. The documents have also been shared with members of Congress.
At the time of Facebook’s news takedown, Rod Sims, the head of Australia’s competition regulator, said he trusted Facebook’s explanation that the unlawful banning of certain sites was an error. He said, “I gave them the benefit of the doubt that they merely overshot.” “I was figuring it was either a conspiracy or they got it wrong and messed it up, and I was assuming the latter.”
He believes the law was not significantly damaged by the tech giant’s last-minute amendments, referring to the many private content-payment arrangements that Facebook and Google have struck with Australian publications since the legislation passed.
Mr. Sims said that his current opinion is that the Australian government obtained the majority of what it sought, while Facebook had to pivot from its initial stance. “They’ve made a big turnaround,” he remarked. “They’re congratulating themselves on the back, which is intriguing.”
The project’s objective, as a negotiation strategy, was clear to all who worked on it, according to the whistleblowers. “It was evident this was not us following the law, but a strike against civic institutions and emergency services in Australia,” one project employee stated.
That employee is one of the project whistleblowers represented by John Tye, the founder of Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit group that previously defended Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who made public data showing the business is aware of severe faults in its systems. Mr. Tye claims “a criminal conspiracy to get an item of value, namely preferential regulatory treatment” in his complaints to regulators.
Australia has been at the forefront of a worldwide effort to change the way publishers and platforms interact. The ACCC released a report in 2019 condemning Facebook and Google’s commercial practices for eroding the country’s journalistic institutions, which it claimed “are critical for the proper functioning of the democratic process.”
The ACCC proposed legislation in July 2020 to address the problem by requiring platforms to negotiate payment with authors via binding arbitration.
Facebook and Google both opposed the proposal, claiming that it was untenable in its current form. Concerned about the precedent the bill would make, both Google and Facebook essentially threatened an Australian blackout, with Google threatening to shut down its search engine and Facebook threatening to remove news from its platform if the plan became law.
According to the whistleblower accusations, Facebook created a team of roughly a dozen employees within the corporation to plan to delete the news information. According to those familiar with the situation, the team was mostly made up of employees of Facebook’s News team, which generally focused on products like the Facebook News Tab.
According to papers and individuals familiar with the situation, the newly gathered team devised a primitive algorithmic news classifier that insured more than simply news would be captured in the net, rather than utilizing Facebook’s long-established database of actual news publishers, dubbed News Page Index. One internal paper said, “If 60% or more of a site’s material published on Facebook is classed as news, then the whole domain would be labeled a news domain.” The algorithm didn’t discriminate between news creators’ sites and news-sharing pages.
The complaints’ materials don’t explain why Facebook didn’t utilize its News Page Index. Because news publishers had to opt in to the index, it wouldn’t have included every publication, according to a source familiar with the situation.
According to the records, the team also devised a schedule for how it would implement the takedown, indicating that it planned to go live before an appeals mechanism was available. According to those acquainted with the takedown, the action did not follow standard practice.
Facebook’s “ideal TD [takedown] timing,” according to an internal planning document, was after the Australian Parliament voted on the legislation but before it was signed into law, and maybe before an appeals procedure was available, which wasn’t a normal practice for Facebook.
Mr. Stone said, “An appeals mechanism was being developed, but an agreement was made before it was introduced.”
As the bill neared a vote in February 2021, Google backtracked on its promise to shut down its search engine in Australia, instead striking private partnerships with journalistic organizations.
Jenn Crider, a Google spokesperson, said this week that the business has worked with publishers for more than 20 years to solve industry difficulties. “We also support intelligent regulation that promotes a diversified, sustainable, and creative news ecosystem that respects the open web and the freedom of speech it allows,” she said.
Facebook started removing pages on Feb. 18, a week before the final vote in the Australian Parliament. Despite Facebook’s months of warnings that it would take such action, the actuality of the blackout caught Australians off guard.
Because “the proposed law fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content,” Facebook said in a blog post that it was shutting down Australians’ ability to share news on its platform and international publishers’ ability to reach Australian audiences on it.
It was evident almost right away that Facebook has censored much more than just news. According to the Australian press and internal documents, Facebook also blocked pages for health services like the Children’s Cancer Institute and Doctors Without Borders in Australia; fire and rescue services like the Bureau of Meteorology and Western Australian Department of Fire and Emergency Services during fire season; and emergency medical and domestic violence services like Mission Australia and the Hobart Women’s Shelter.
According to Facebook’s planning papers, a domain is defined as news if “60 percent [or] more of the material published on Facebook is classified as news.” Many pages belonging to government, health, and emergency services were improperly removed as a consequence of the decision.
The health-service outages occurred on the same day that the countrywide Covid vaccine launch was announced on February 18, with vaccinations commencing on February 22.
Shona Yang, the content manager for Mission Australia, a nonprofit that offers housing and mental-health services, said her staff checks its Facebook inbox every morning for new queries and responds to requests for help from the night before. During the epidemic, Mission Australia utilized private Facebook Groups to remain in touch with customers who needed assistance, according to Ms. Yang. She noted that although many customers’ phone numbers change, they all have the same Facebook account, making the site an important method for the charity to stay in contact with those in need.
Staff employees found they couldn’t share a post on Facebook the morning of the news restriction. The company used other social media outlets to inform customers on how they may keep in touch. “Mission Australia is not a news organization,” it said on Instagram. “We are a nationwide Christian charity, and the stuff we distribute on Facebook is intended to assist our community’s most vulnerable members.”
Ms. Yang said the charity’s PR agency notified Facebook about the problem, and her team monitored Facebook’s blog and Twitter often to see whether the situation had changed. “Being caught up in the proposed media bargaining regulations is quite frustrating since we are not a journalistic organization,” she added.
Some Facebook workers were worried by the banning of pages that should not have been blocked, and they reported the issue to Facebook’s internal platform for tracking issues and remedies. The internal logs allow a wide variety of workers to engage in and read the conversations.
According to the internal logs, on the first day of the operation, one employee who was not on the team blocking pages wrote, “We pulled down pages that were plainly not owned by news media.” “Official government sources, fire and emergency services, universities, official health sites, and charities for problems like homelessness and domestic abuse maintain such pages.”
The employee highlighted sites that had been wrongfully banned and then restored, including the Bureau of Meteorology and the City of Perth, as well as those that were still impacted, such the Women’s Legal Service Tasmania and WWF-Australia.
Employees reported that pages were being banned incorrectly in an internal log to monitor issues. Later in the log, the product manager stated that the team had been encouraged to be “overinclusive” on the prohibited pages.
“We took down pages that were plainly not owned by news media as part of these modifications.”
“…since the code we’re responding to is so wide, the policy and legal team’s advice has been to be too broad and modify as we learn more.” “We’re fast iterating to get more people out of the block.”
“We took down pages that were plainly not owned by news media as part of these modifications.”
“…since the code we’re responding to is so wide, policy and legal advice has been to be too broad and comprehensive.”
edit as additional information becomes available “We’re fast iterating to get more people out of the block.”
“We took down pages that were plainly not owned by news media as part of these modifications.”
“…since the code we’re reacting to is so wide, policy and legal advice has been invaluable.”
overinclusive and edit as additional information becomes available “We’re fast iterating to get more people out of the block.”
The employee proposed that Facebook should “proactively find all the affected pages and restore them.” The person added: “We should be proactive here, not reactive, given the damage this is doing to Facebook’s reputation “I’m from Australia.”
The procedure was neither slowed or reversed by Facebook. Over the following few hours, it stepped up the takedown, increasing the usage of the algorithm from 50% to 100% of all Australian users.
Mr. Stone said that Facebook’s fear of legal action was the basis for the fast deployment.
According to those aware with the removal, this was in contrast to standard Facebook process, which would be to employ the “canary” approach of testing a modification on a limited number of users, obtaining input on any issues, and correcting the product before releasing it to all users.
One of those employees added, “The way this entire rollout was organized went counter to conventional processes for putting out large changes with possible negative effects.”
In 2020, Facebook’s head of partnerships, Campbell Brown, spoke at an event.
courtesy of Getty Images/Dimitris Kambouris
A few hours later, another employee not on the project’s team noticed the unlawful blocking in the internal logs, wondering whether Facebook kept track of “false positives.” According to the records, the employee did not get a response.
“Hey everyone—the [proposed Australian legislation] we are reacting to is pretty wide, so direction from the policy and legal team has been to be overinclusive and revise as we acquire more information,” the company’s product manager wrote in the internal logs two hours later.
She then explained the team’s strategy for undoing the wrongful blocking, which included beginning with “the most apparent situations,” such as government and healthcare sites, and referring “more complicated” matters to outside legal counsel.
This email was remarkable, according to Facebook personnel involved with the campaign to delete pages, since it didn’t mention any steps to prevent removing key accounts and information ahead of time.
As previously revealed by the Journal, Facebook has a number of tools, including “whitelists” that remove select individuals from enforcement attempts, as well as XCheck, which assures that high-profile users receive preferential treatment. The accusations claim that “not even evaluating any of these methods before enforcing the restriction was not a technological fault, but a decision.”
According to the data obtained by a whistleblower, Facebook attempted to block government and educational sites. However, sources familiar with Facebook’s reaction claim that some of these whitelists failed to work during the deployment, while others didn’t cover enough sites to prevent widespread wrongful filtering.
Timeline on Facebook
According to whistleblower complaints filed with regulators and the Australian government, this is how Facebook’s takedown of pages in Australia went down. (All times are Australian.)
- July 31, 2020: Australian Competition & Consumer Commission, or ACCC, publishes its initial legislative proposal, which would automatically subject platforms such as Facebook and Google to a process that could lead to binding arbitration.
- If the proposed legislation passes, Facebook would remove news from its platform in Australia on August 31, 2020.
- The first version of the law, named News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code, is passed by the Australian House of Representatives on February 17, 2021.
- On February 18, 2021, Facebook began removing pages in Australia, prompting extensive allegations of unlawful banning in the press and from Facebook staff.
- The initiative to take down pages is progressing according to plan, according to Facebook staff working on the team on February 19, 2021.
- On February 23, 2021, Facebook and the Australian government strike an agreement to change the legislation in a manner that allows internet corporations to bypass its most onerous component. Following the agreement, Facebook’s first move is to unblock the Australian government’s page.
- 24 February 2021: The amended law is approved by the Australian Senate. Facebook execs congratulate the team through email within minutes.
- The Australian House of Representatives votes to pass new legislation including Senate changes on February 25, 2021, and Facebook restores pages that it had taken down.
- 26 February 2021: Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, sends the staff an email congratulating them on their “precision of execution.”
- 1 March 2021: Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, sends an email of congratulations, calling it the “greatest possible result.”
According to emails obtained by the Journal, Facebook officials addressed how the network had blacklisted approximately 17,000 pages as news that shouldn’t have been, including 2,400 “high priority” pages like government organizations and NGOs that they were attempting to unblock first.
Three days later, Brian Rosenthal, the engineering director who led the team that took down the pages, wrote in the internal log that the group had “manually reviewed all” of the affected pages in Australia and “re-instated all of the pages where our manual reviews indicated we should re-instate,” with exceptions for things like pages that Facebook strongly believed its algorithm had classified correctly.
“Is there a reason the sites were not evaluated this way before the rollout?” the employee who had before questioned whether the firm was monitoring false positives wrote on Feb. 21, four days after the removal. I believe the deployment would have gone more smoothly if additional checks had been done earlier and the crucial Government health sites had not been unintentionally disabled.”
Mr. Rosenthal answered in the log, “We’re largely currently troubleshooting the active issue but will post-mortem it thereafter.”
On Feb. 23, Facebook and Australian officials reached a handshake agreement to change the proposed law, including adding language allowing the Australian Treasurer to weigh private deals between publishers and platforms before “designating” a platform, a label that would obligate it to participate in a government-sanctioned negotiation process with publishers that could end in binding final-offer arbitration.
The prior version of the legislation required platforms like Facebook to go through a lengthy and onerous negotiating process, which the platforms found impractical.
According to internal papers, when the handshake agreement was made, Facebook’s first step was to manually unblock the Australian national government’s page—a modification that took just three lines of code.
According to Mr. Stone, the Australian government did not notify Facebook that the page had been disabled until February 22. “We acted quickly once they informed us that it was down,” he added.
When announcing the accord, Australian authorities justified the change in the legislation by stating that Facebook had committed to negotiate partnerships with publishers on its own.
Ms. Brown revealed the partnership publicly two hours later, stating, “It will enable us to support the publishers we wish to.”
The Australian Senate voted the following day to approve the amendments to the statute. Ms. Brown congratulated the team through email minutes later. The next day, the Australian House of Representatives passed the modifications into law, and Facebook reversed its action, restoring all of the prohibited sites.
Over the next couple of days, Ms. Sandberg and Mr. Zuckerberg emailed their congratulations to the team, with Mr. Zuckerberg writing, “This is something we’d been preparing for, but the last couple of weeks were really intense,” adding that the company had achieved “the best possible outcome “I’m from Australia.”
The Australian government is reviewing the first year of the legislation and soliciting feedback in order to improve it.
The Australian communications minister, Paul Fletcher, cited partnerships struck by Google and Facebook with at least 19 and 11 news organizations in Australia, respectively, to pay them a total of more than $100 million per year as proof that the legislation is functioning.
Ms. Crider of Google said her business had signed 60 partnerships with Australian publishers, totaling 170 titles.
According to Mr. Stone, Facebook has agreements with 13 publications in Australia, representing 200 newsrooms.
As a consequence, the firms have not been “recognized” by the treasury, which means they are exempt from participating in the government-mandated negotiations with publishers.
Mr. Sims, the former chair of Australia’s competition regulator, said the treasurer could “designate” Facebook because it has refused to do business with two organizations he believes qualify as news outlets: The Conversation, a website that publishes academic articles, and SBS, a television and radio broadcaster.
Keach Hagey, Mike Cherney, and Jeff Horwitz may be reached at [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected], respectively.
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