A decade ago the ban would have been no big deal – Facebook was mainly for posting glamorous holiday shots and boasting about your children.
Today, however, it has become central to the way that Australians receive their news. The University of Canberra's 2020 Digital News Report found 39 per cent of Australians use Facebook for general news, with 49 per cent using it for news about Covid-19.
Now, as Australia prepares the biggest vaccine programme in its history, there will be no journalism on Facebook to counter the misinformation and bizarre conspiracy theories from mad and paranoid anti-vaxxers that proliferate on the site.
Instead of news based on interviews with mainstream scientists and doctors from credible sources, such as the ABC or the Sydney Morning Herald, there will just be the anti-vaxxer nonsense.
At a time when we need as many people to be vaccinated as possible, this is dangerous.
When it turned off Australian news late on Wednesday night, Facebook hamfistedly also cut off some other important sources of news for Australians – such as Western Australia's Department of Fire and Emergency Services, Fire and Rescue NSW and the Bureau of Meteorology.
Even the health departments in South Australia and Queensland, mainstays of information on Covid restrictions and the vaccine rollout, were caught up in the ban.
Facebook is busy restoring these non-news pages. But the fact it took the nuclear option in the first place and was so careless about how it went about it, shows it puts profit above all else, including the health and safety of its users.
The furore is over the Australian government's media bargaining code, which requires Google and Facebook to negotiate with media companies to display their content. Under the rules, the internet giants and the media companies will be forced into binding arbitration if they can't come to an agreement.
Facebook objects. It says each product update and new product release will require a new round of negotiation with media outlets after any initial agreement. This cumbersome process, it argues, will stifle innovation.
This is nonsense. Facebook is terrified Australia will succeed in forcing it to pay for the news content it benefits from, and that other countries will follow.
Hence the nuclear option.
It didn't have to be like this.
Over the past week, Google has struck deals to pay Australian news organisations for their content after winning some concessions from the government.
In particular, the government agreed if the internet giants could made deals outside the code, then the code need not apply. This worked for Google because it was able to agree to pay publishers for the "snippets" of news it displays – those single sentence descriptions which appear in search results and elsewhere – but not for providing links to the publishers' news sites.
Google had argued it shouldn't have to pay to link to news sites because this actually delivers an audience to them.
It isn't handing over huge amounts of money to the publishers. For instance, it is paying A$30 million a year Nine Entertainment, which owns the Nine Television Network and the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age.
It's hardly a vast sum of money when compared with A$4.8 billion Google earns in Australia each year.
Facebook appeared to be going down a similarly conciliatory path as Google before it pulled the pin. In doing so, it has shown it can't be trusted.
Arguably regulators and governments around the world have already let the genie out of the bottle in allowing Facebook to gradually become more and more central to our daily lives.
Australia has taken the brave – and at this point solo – stand in trying to rein it in.
Governments all around the world are grappling with the problem of these platform giants exercising too much influence and hollowing out local media by benefiting from the content produced by news outlets but not paying for it.
Facebook has gambled that in giving up Australian news, and raising the ire of its government and people, it will scare off other nations from doing the same.
It is ultimately a question of who has the power in our digital economy. Is it big tech media players trying to set their own rules? Or is it governments?
Will other jurisdictions follow Australia's lead or will they cave in and be picked off one-by-one by Facebook? That is the looming question.
