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How I Survived the Facebook News Ban
A Survivor’s Diary from the Facebook Apocalypse.
As you’re almost certainly aware, last week Facebook banned all news content for its Australian users. Despite already agreeing with the UK government to pay news providers for sharing their content on Facebook, the Big Zuck decided to come down on little old Australia like a ton of digital bricks. Everything even vaguely news-related was summarily snatched from the gaze of Australian Facebookers.
Not just the big media corporations like News Ltd and Seven West, either. Thousands of tiny independent news pages, weather channels, police and emergency services, charities, even satire sites like The Beetoota Advocate, all gone, just like that.
So, how have we survived, we Australians deprived of Facebook’s carefully curated, fact-checked, narrative-friendly, Zuckerberg-approved supply of news? Are we cowering, shivering in our houses like Texans in a snowstorm? Are marauding gangs of conspiracy theorists in mohawks and arse-less chaps roving the crumbling roads of the information superhighway, Mad Max-style?
Well, dear readers, allow me to offer my first-hand account. Hunkered down in my bolt-hole, by the guttering light of a kerosene lantern, I’ve penned this journal by ink and the blood of the occasional rat I’ve managed to catch for my meagre sustenance. I would’ve eaten my pigeons, too, but I needed them to fly this desperate appeal for help to the wider world.
Day One:
I woke to the terrible realisation that the Facebook madmen had done it. They’d really gone and done it. Zuckerberg, from his palatial compound, had brought his finger down on the nuclear button and cut Australians off from their Facebook news supply.
Of course, I only knew this because I’d followed my morning routine and checked in on The Australian’s news app. Switching over to my other bookmarked news sites for the Guardian, Age and ABC all confirmed the terrible news. I’d never have known if I’d actually relied on Facebook for news.
Day Two:
I logged in to see what horrors a news-less Facebook had to offer. It was truly appalling. Pictures of cats. Jokes. Memes. Grinning people posing at holiday locations or posting photos of whatever dazzling culinary treats they were about to enjoy. Dear reader, you can only imagine the horror of not being regaled with the latest updates on the Kardashians, or whatever shock revelations Meghan and Harry were unleashing.
Even worse, my Facebook timeline was utterly empty of the ominous sight of greyed-out posts with the stern warning that they had been “Disputed by Multiple, Independent Fact-Checkers”. What was I to do? However was I going to know what information was approved by the non-binary, far-left, them/they minions of a Silicon Valley global behemoth?
Day Four:
It’s some small consolation to see that some brave Facebookers were determined to make sure that nothing, but nothing, slipped through the cracks of Chairman Zuck’s Great Facebook Firewall. It transpired that a handful of sneaky, subversive news organisations had sneakily branded themselves as “entertainment” rather than news. But the Pavlik Morozov’s of Facebook weren’t about to let such rightist subversion go unpunished. Leftist snitches were proudly boasting of how they’d reported such counter-revolutionary fake news peddlers to Facebook’s vigilant cadres.
Double-plus good, comrades!
Day Five:
The terror was truly setting in. I was so deluged by non-Facebook-approved news that I was beginning to actually suspect that “the Great Reset” really was more than a lunatic conspiracy theory. Nagging doubts about the imminent climate hell that was only five years away began to gnaw at my Facebook-news-deprived mind.
I knew that all hope was lost when I learned, from a non-Facebook-vetted news outfit, that Facebook’s omniscient lord and master was actually harbouring doubts about the COVID-19 vaccine. Such shocking heresy would normally have been resolutely banished from his own platform. This was the maelstrom of fake news madness that the Australian government’s reckless bullying of one of the mightiest multinational corporations in history had brought me to.
Day Six:
All hope is lost. I have no access to news of the outside world. Apart, of course, from news websites, blogs, independent media sites, bitchute channels, even technologies as stone-aged as radio and newspapers…
My Facebook feed is a wasteland. It’s all jokes and happy-snaps and LOL reacts. Not a single vituperative argument to be seen. My only remaining hope for some properly bitter divisiveness and unhinged hatred is Twitter.
But I’m not that desperate, yet. Not while there’s a steady supply of rats, down here in my cellar. The buggers are getting harder to catch, of course, but never mind. I’ll live.
Just whether a Facebook news-less world is worth living for is the only truly serious philosophical problem.
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