The Australian government passed a law that would force Facebook to pay every time someone shares a news article on their platform. Facebook decided that this was not a privilege they were willing to pay for, and in response have instead blocked Australian Facebook users from sharing or viewing news content.

As a result, they have also inadvertently blocked many charities or government pages which are not news sites, which has made people very angry. It does beg the question of how they were meant to be expected to identity news sites in order to pay for them, if they couldn’t identify them to shut them down.

Is this a David Vs Goliath story with Facebook being expected to pay “their fair share”, or is this just a Goliath vs Goliath story, with the Rupert Murdoch juggernaut News Corp using the government to get money from Facebook, and small, independent journalists are just the collateral?

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