Karratha businesses boycott Facebook following news ban

Pilbara businesses are fighting back against Facebook after the social media giant banned Australian news pages. Karratha-based companies KAW Engineering, Pilbara Party Hire and the Karratha and Districts Chamber of Commerce have all joined the boycott which will see the businesses discontinue paid advertising through the site. The social media banned Australians news pages and even stopped people from posting Australian news on the site on Thursday. The ban on news media came after the code, which would see Facebook and Google face fines if it did not compensate media companies for content, was passed by the Lower House. Kaw Engineering founder Jared Fitzclarence said Facebook had a monopoly on its market and there was an expectation for the company to behave better. “They clearly made significant revenue over traffic driven to their platform, and a lot of the traffic driven to their platform is people consuming information, and information in the form of news,” he said. “They're aware of that — everyone's very aware of that — which is why it's so ubiquitous that news media platforms publish their content within the Facebook ecosystem. “For them to be profiting off other people's content so latently and being completely unprepared to even start a discussion about content was unacceptable.” Mr Fitzclarence said the ban would lead to a vulnerable local community. “By excluding and silencing any Australian stories on that platform is effectively cutting off communities from that information, and a lot of that information is important for them in how they choose to perform and how they choose to operate,” he said. ‘That's creating a lot of opportunity for fairly significant negative impacts, whether that's in terms of political misinformation or, in the case we saw in WA, silencing an opposition leader two weeks out from an election is just unforgivable.” Meanwhile, KDCCI president Tony Simpson said local businesses were attempting to flex their muscles at the social media monolith. “The businesses have to do something, they can't take this lying down and to use the analogy ‘the fight is on’ to make sure we can get our word out and what great businesses they are in the community and if we have to take it up with Facebook we will,” he said. “It's a frightening thing that Facebook has done and probably bigger picture for us is how much we rely on social media to get word out about whatever business that may be.”