Between settler government and settler Facebook Indigenous media gets shafted: Naomi Moran, ‘First Nations media has been caught in the crossfire of Facebook’s battle with Australian news’, The Guardian, 23/02/21 | settler colonial studies blog

Between settler government and settler Facebook Indigenous media gets shafted: Naomi Moran, ‘First Nations media has been caught in the crossfire of Facebook’s battle with Australian news’, The Guardian, 23/02/21

24Feb21

Excerpt: Facebook has provided a free and relatively easy solution to content sharing to interest groups. It also provided us with an accessible way to share our stories globally. Social media has been a useful tool for leap-frogging commercial media in Australia who have shown scant interest in our positive outcomes. Our media is more than just doing the bare minimum – it is the avenue for telling those stories to the world, and social media has been a valuable space to broaden our audiences in this way, educating non-Indigenous people in the process. We believe Facebook has not been stealing our stories but amplifying them. Would we like to see the data they collect about our media services in the process? Sure. Would we like to better understand their algorithms to pre-empt disruptions to connecting with our audience? Of course. Is that the focus of the news bargaining code going to parliament this week? Not really. It’s about protecting the commercial news businesses who have ignored us. The reason First Nations media exists is due to the complete and ignorant failure of mainstream media to represent our interests and perspectives. That’s why Facebook’s abrupt shutdown of many of our pages, in a sweeping measure to punish the Australian government for its somewhat clumsy attempt to support Australian journalists, is a particularly bitter pill to swallow.

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