Beyond Cory’s great thread, I have one other comment no press seem to want to dig into. Facebook is a menace to society yet they’re being covered as if they’re a respectable actor. Everything about their pulling out of Australia is hostile and a PR stunt. Why not ask question /1
https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1363517777856794625
Why did they pull out Wednesday? Prior to law passing. Here is what still happens...law passes. Facebook gets designated. A pub starts negotiation. 90 days. If no deal, baseball arbitration. Price determined. And still then Facebook could exit market. So why do it last week? /2
One news exec speculated Facebook did it last week because Google’s deal with News Corp was dominating press that day and maybe they could do it quietly. But do you know what the problem is with this hypothesis??? /3
Facebook’s original threat to exit Australia months ago was pushed out to half dozen American news outlets under an embargo. Why? Because their audience wasn’t australia but to generate false outrage about what they wanted to wrongly characterize as Australian dumb regulation. /4
And last week they didn’t want to bury their news, they teased it and aggressively promoted it to press. They wanted it to be the big story. They needed a fight. They run their PR like Trump. They weren’t otherwise breaking through and law was moving forward so gas on flame. /5
They set up their favorite influencers with briefing materials and yelled and screamed falsely with outrage terms like link tax, break the internet, hurts small publishers, random arbitration pricing and all sorts of misleading and false characterizations. /6
We so quickly forget the company runs its business to protect its core biz model using PR and government relations. They sent out their Simon Milner as spokesperson, same exec who lied to UK Parliament and was tore apart by other parliaments for doing it. zero credibility. /7
Anyway, remember they’re a menace to society. They wanted global outrage. They wanted Murdoch vs Facebook. This is all false. Small to midsize pubs are better off the day after the law is passed than today. Listen to Microsoft. Ignore Facebook. You can’t trust them anymore. /end
for those tracking the news, a friendly reminder not to link to Facebook's blog posts. Sure, include a statement in a report but they don't deserve a link to their full, crafted version of history. Remember, you can't trust them?
https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1364071799533797381?s=20
Here is a thread with a lot of the best coverage of the news overnight.
https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1364074993731133444
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