Residents of the island on Thursday, a bit of the Torres Strait Islands archipelago, have trusted Facebook Inc. for years. to learn about everything from cyclone warnings to crab prices to a recent outbreak of parvovirus among neighborhood pets.
The platform does not eat data like other websites do, a priority for remote communities, where people often use prepaid phones. Newspapers and radio stations staffed by Indigenous reporters post Facebook updates in local dialects, a key feature for those for whom English is a third or fourth language. It’s as real-time as the island can get. When mainland Australian newspapers arrived, the news was about a week ago.
“Websites are our second stop,” said Kantesha Takai, a 29-year-old small business owner on the island. “We depend a lot on giants like Facebook.”
Mark Zuckerberg cut a critical piece in the communication chain of these regions when Facebook blocked news from the nation’s social media platform, a dragon counterpoint to the Australian government’s plan to force the company to pay for services of news for the content shared on the site. Although the company reached an agreement earlier this week, the experience of Ms. Takai and her neighbors in a small town on a tiny island revealed one side of the company’s largest social media platform. world that can be blunt and brutal when challenged in a negotiation.
His past week illuminates a new chapter in the company’s 17-year-old grumpy adolescence, which turned users who form the platform into collateral damage in the battle between the titans who run tech companies and those who want to. regulate them.