“This is a really hard thing to do. We’ve never done it before. We are sorry for the mistakes we made in some of the implementation,” Mr Milner said.
The social media giantfollowed through with its threat to restrict news articles from being viewed by local users on Thursday,a directive by Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in response to a bargaining code that will require the tech giant to pay media outlets for producing news content.
More than 17 million local users woke up on Thursday without news articles from websites such asThe Sydney Morning Herald andThe Age,The Australian,Guardian Australiaand the ABC on the platform. They also found news posts from pages such as The Bureau of Meteorology and Suicide Prevention Australia had also been removed. Facebook admitted it was an unintended consequence of its blanket news ban and blamed it partly on the vagueness of the definition of news under the proposed code.
The company uses human reviewers to assess whether a piece of content is news. But to implement this week’s intended ban,it compiled a list of pages it believed fell under the proposed laws and then used machine learning and artificial intelligence to remove content.
“There’s still some pages that we’re looking at but some of it’s really difficult in that the law isn’t clear and therefore there may be some pages that were clearly not news but actually under the law they might be,” Mr Milner added. “That’s one of the challenges for us. We’re sorry for the mistakes that we made on that front.”
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg confirmed on Friday morning he had spoken to Mr Zuckerberg about Facebook’s concerns and was continuing to find a solution that was workable for both parties.
Mr Frydenberg spoke to the Facebook founder for about 30 minutes to try to resolve stumbling blocks including the company’s concern about the power of an independent arbitrator to force outcomes on the company under the bargaining code.