“The motivation was pretty clear in terms of why they did the Australian takedown and how they did it,” he told Guardian Australia. The whistleblowers’ lawyer, Andrew Bakaj, said the employees felt compelled to speak out to set the record straight about what really went on. “We were able to execute quickly and take a principled approach for our community around the world, while achieving what might be the best possible outcome in Australia.”

“This is something we’d been preparing for, but the last couple of weeks were intense,” Zuckerberg said in a screenshot included in the submission.

Senior Meta executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, sent out congratulatory emails to the staff involved in the ban. Soon Meta had signed agreements with the largest news publishers in Australia to pay for their news content, but because it wasn’t designated under the code, it didn’t have to enter agreements with all of them. Publicly, the company was arguing that the blocking of non-news pages was an accident, but the whistleblowers allege the company deliberately blocked non-news sites as a ploy – one that ultimately worked.Īfter the news ban, the former treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, and former communications minister, Paul Fletcher, cut a deal with Meta that stopped it from being designated under the law, as long as it could demonstrate it had made deals with enough media companies. The move to ban it as the legislation was moving through parliament was a show of force. Platforms that refuse to negotiate with media companies face fines of $10m, or 10% of their annual Australian turnover, or three times the benefit obtained – whichever is greatest.ĭuring consultation on the code, Meta warned it would mean news would disappear from Facebook. Screenshot of internal Facebook conversations regarding the Australian news block.

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