Facebook blocked all news in Australia — and wiped bushfire and COVID pages by mistake

On February 17, 2021, with Australia's Senate about to vote on the News Media Bargaining Code — which would require platforms like Facebook and Google to pay news outlets for displaying and linking their content — Facebook announced it would no longer allow Australian publishers or users to share or view news on its platform. Because the draft law gave no clear definition of 'news content', Facebook said it had 'taken a broad definition in order to respect the law as drafted'.

The broad definition swept up far more than news: government-backed pages were wiped, including pandemic support updates, mental-health services, bushfire threat information and the Bureau of Meteorology. Prime Minister Scott Morrison wrote that Facebook's move to 'unfriend Australia' was 'as arrogant as they were disappointing'; Treasurer Josh Frydenberg called it 'wrong', 'unnecessary' and 'heavy-handed'. Human Rights Watch called cutting a country off from vital information 'in the dead of the night' unconscionable.

The same day, Google — facing the same law — announced a revenue-sharing deal with News Corp, leaving Facebook isolated as the aggressor. Morrison said he would not be intimidated by Big Tech pressuring the parliament and pointed to Google's 'good faith' as the model. Facebook said government pages 'should not be affected', pledged to reverse 'any Pages that are inadvertently impacted', and many of the affected government pages were restored by mid-afternoon on February 18.

The Prime Minister called the move 'as arrogant as they were disappointing'; government COVID, bushfire and weather pages went dark.

A deliberately broad definition of 'news content' swept government health, weather and emergency pages into the blackout.

The block landed on citizens mid-pandemic and in bushfire season, converting a platform-versus-parliament dispute into a public-safety story.

Google chose deals while Facebook chose the switch, making Facebook the lone heavy in every headline the next morning.

Threatening a parliament in the middle of its own vote invited the 'intimidation' frame from the Prime Minister down.

Bargaining by switching off the product only works if you don't break unrelated things on the way out — overbroad enforcement turned a policy fight into a national news story.

Many affected government pages were restored by the afternoon of February 18, 2021, after Facebook acknowledged they should not have been caught by the block. The Senate vote on the code was still pending at press time.