Australian arts and cultural organisations and venues are scrambling to plead their case with Facebook to have their sites restored after they were caught up in the social media giant’s blanket ban on publishing news.
More than 250 cultural organisations woke on Thursday to find their Facebook pages had been wiped of content.
They argue they do not meet the social media giant’s loose definition of “news publisher” under the ban, which swept the site of news and news-related links this week.
Many still had not had their sites restored by midday on Friday, with Facebook requiring organisations to appeal its decision by filling out an online form and awaiting the outcome.
The Fremantle Arts Centre, which usually fields traffic of more than 10,000 visits a day on its Facebook page, was down for 24 hours just as it was preparing Friday’s opening night exhibition, A Forest of Hooks and Nails, as part of Perth festival.
“It has significantly disrupted events that are happening at the centre,” a Fremantle Arts Centre spokesperson told Guardian Australia.
“Facebook is our primary communication channel outside of our own website so it has had a significant impact.”
Among the arts organisations still without operational Facebook sites on Friday were many who would appear to fail to meet the broadest definition of news publisher, including the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, Bangarra Dance Theatre, Bell Shakespeare, the Art Gallery of Ballarat, Black Swan State Theatre Company, La Mama and Opera Queensland.
#Facebook has stripped our Sydney theatre website @AudreyJournal Sigh. This is tough for the tiny publishers and arts orgs. We are still here on Twitter and Instagram, and you can go to the website. #FacebookNewsBan #FacebookWeNeedToTalk https://t.co/DBwlsXz5D9
— Elissa Blake 😷 (@elissablake) February 19, 2021
Venues such as Sydney’s Carriageworks and the Brisbane Multicultural Arts Centre remained without a social media platform to promote their works on Friday, and a slew of arts publishing sites, including ArtsHub, Artlink magazine, Australian Arts Review and Audrey Journal, and literary magazines were also hit.
As the country’s peak performing arts body, Live Performance Australia was giving evidence at a federal government into creative and cultural industries during Covid-19 in Canberra on Friday, its Facebook site remained unoperational.
Australia’s largest online bookseller, Booktopia, which had approximately 130,000 followers on Facebook, has also been captured under the ban.
“We’ve heard absolutely nothing from Facebook,” said Booktopia’s head of marketing, Steffen Daleng.
“We’ve been introduced by other people in our network to a page on Facebook’s help page, it talks about what people can do to circumvent the ban. It seems to require us to remove any old posts that that might link to news, but that’s an insurmountable task for companies like ours.
“We have a production team, a production studio, we’ve put significant investment into producing and creating unique content on Facebook. [The site] contains thousands of author interviews.”
Elliott Bledsoe, who runs a boutique communication consultancy for arts organisations, Agentry, began collecting the names of cultural bodies who had their sites wiped by Facebook on Thursday. By Friday morning, more than 270 were on his list, although some have since become operational again.
“I know that a lot of organisations that wouldn’t know how to handle this issue, they’re not overly familiar with the process of reporting an issue to Facebook and providing the right evidence, like screenshots [to appeal the ban],” Bledsoe said.
“For a lot of smaller organisations, this probably wasn’t even on their radar. They wouldn’t have even anticipated the idea that they would get caught up in the rollout of the news block on Facebook.”
The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), the union which covers artists, arts workers and performers as well as journalists, described Facebook’s extreme reaction to the Australian government’s move to force the social media platform to pay for news content as “the desperate act of a company with too much power that thinks it is beyond the reach of any government”.
“This move by Facebook, which has refused to negotiate as recommended by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, will only lead to its audience being denied reliable, factual news and will inflict massive reputational damage for its brand,” said MEAA media section federal president Marcus Strom.
“Unlike Google, which has sensibly begun negotiating content agreements with publishers and broadcasters, Facebook has abused its dominant position and is holding Australian news agencies, advertisers and consumers to ransom with this cowardly response.”
Guardian Australia has approached Facebook for comment.