A message from Australia's only (remaining) news service

Dear Reader,

Yesterday morning we were removed from Facebook. This was clearly a massive overreach by Facebook that demonstrated the need for its power to be reigned in and regulated.

The Chaser decided it would not be cowered by such bullying. We didn’t moan and complain about it and then hire a team of lobbyists to get the government to write legislation in our favour. (That role was already taken by News Corp.)

We simply changed our name to “Mark Zuckerberg” on Twitter, replace our logo with a photo of him, and then sent out the following tweet, instructing Facebook to unban us:

Within hours, our ban was lifted, and I am proud to announce that The Chaser is now the only news outlet left in the country.

With that decision, Facebook demonstrated that it is a wise and benevolent overlord, which deserves only our praise and obedience.

Now some people are questioning what happened. Why was The Chaser unbanned, while everyone else remains banned? Is it that Facebook is so incompetently run that if you pretend to be Mark Zuckerberg on Twitter, it’s possible to trick it into doing things? Admittedly, that is a highly plausible explanation. 

Our theory is that Facebook realised that their main business model is spreading misinformation, and that without The Chaser, they were missing Australia’s main source of misinformation. Their whole business model was in jeopardy.

What is the new Media Code about?

For those that don’t understand the new media code, let me explain it briefly. Essentially the idea is that journalism in this country is currently underfunded because Facebook and Google dominate online advertising, starving news organisations of ad revenue.

The solution seems pretty obvious, doesn't it? Surely we should just tax all those large international companies that take their profits offshore?

That sounds good, except that every time you design a tax like that, it ends up with News Corp also paying tax. So that approach had to be immediately scrapped.

Instead, the government designed the “media code”, a complicated system of transfers that made the bad capitalists (Facebook and Google) have to pay money to the good capitalists (News Corp and the TV companies).

It was sort of like tax, except instead of the public getting the money, only big Australian media companies would get it.

And the great thing is for some reason, all the big Australian media companies loved the idea and threw their support behind the government. What a surprise!

Anyway, so that’s where we are. The Australian public is currently swept up in a battle on behalf of big media companies against big tech companies. What a time to be alive! Viva la Neoliberalism!

Our role

I’d like to assure all Australians that as Australia’s only news service, we take our role incredibly seriously. 

We have set up a thread on Facebook to allow other, lesser news organisations such as the ABC and the Bureau of Meteorology to post their news on our page.

And last night, we published a complete list of the Liberal Party’s corruption over the past 7 years.

And please be assured that the power won’t go to our head. As long as the government accedes to our demands for a universal three-day work week, the reestablishment of all penalty rates and a commitment to net-zero carbon emissions by 2030, we’ll be fully supporting them into the next election.

Now that we’re the only news service, I’m sure they’ll be just as subservient to us as they were to Rupert for all those years.

Anyway, have a good day. And if you’re in Adelaide, please buy tickets to our show which premieres tonight. It happens to be all about the destructive power of Facebook to spread misinformation. It’s called The Anti-Expert’s Guide to the Pandemic, and you can book tickets here.

Charles Firth
Publisher
The Chaser

P.S. On the off-chance that our unbanning was a mistake by Facebook, please subscribe to The Chaser Daily, which is an automatically-generated email of all our news stories of the day, sent out at 4pm (Melbourne time). Think of it as a Zuckerberg-free way of staying up to date with Australia's only news service. Sign up now

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