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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2021-02-18 Daily Xml
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The Hon. F. PANGALLO (14:38): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking a question of the Minister for Health and Wellbeing regarding the nationwide shutdown of various Facebook sites by Facebook.

Leave granted.

The Hon. F. PANGALLO: We woke to the news today that Facebook has stopped access to various sites containing news, including government sites, without warning. My question to the minister is: which government sites have been affected by this and what impact will it have on users? What is the government doing about restoring their sites and, like the news outlets that are also making demands, shouldn't Facebook and Google also seek placement costs or fees for the vast distribution carriage its own service provides, much like the subscription fees news outlets demand from their readers?

The Hon. S.G. WADE (Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:39): I thank the honourable member for his question. My breath was taken away by the reckless censorship by Facebook today. They can have their stoush with the commonwealth about proposed legislation at that level, but to decommission not just clearly established news sites but to decommission, as I understand it, thousands of both government and community sites—my understanding is that the Bureau of Meteorology has been affected, when so many Australians rely on them for important warnings in terms of climate and so forth. But, obviously, in the middle of a global pandemic it was very reckless of Facebook to deny access to health departments in putting out their public message.

In that regard, my understanding is that three or four health departments were affected. I am pleased to tell the house that ours has been restored. About midday today the SA Health Facebook page was restored, and the first thing that came up was the COVID-19 update. It is a very important source of information for South Australians; it is how we know whether we even have a new case that day. It is the first step to getting the message out about how to respond to an outbreak.

It goes without saying that, whether it is an outbreak in Victoria and people need to know what the restrictions are, when it comes to important ongoing social messaging SA Health makes a lot of use of Facebook. Probably one of the most significant has been the direct streaming of the COVID updates. Almost all COVID updates delivered by the State Coordinator, the Chief Public Health Officer, the Premier or myself are Facebook streamed.

One of the interesting phenomenon that that creates is that people in South Australia get to hear all of the advice from the public health team without its being repackaged by media. To be frank, that includes the bit where the media asks the questions and people get to see exactly what the answer was. The way that Facebook can bring the community closer to key public messages, like those from Nicola Spurrier, has been an important part of maintaining public confidence and maintaining the flow of public information. The fact that Facebook could recklessly censor public health sites in the middle of a pandemic shows to me that they do not even understand their own product.

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