Although social media seems public, the platforms can extinguish access or delete content at their whim
Recently Facebook banned news from its platform in Australia in opposition to the proposed news media bargaining code. The ban not only disabled Australian news organisations from sharing content on their Facebook pages, it also hid all their past posts and, with them, ordinary users’ discussions in the comments.
Facebook has since reversed the ban. Still, the extraordinary move revealed something many of us technically knew but perhaps hadn’t fully grasped before: we don’t own the content we post on these platforms and can lose access to it at any time. For academics whose research depends on these sources, this may have devastating consequences.
