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Prime Minister Scott Morrison says he will not respond to Facebook's threats, saying they are "not a good way to deal with this government".
Key points:
- Mr Morrison says the government wants to resolve the stand off with Facebook
- The government wants news companies paid for the online content tech companies share
- Facebook remains critical of the proposal and has banned Australians from accessing news on its site
The government is standing firm on its plans to legislate a code of conduct aimed at ensuring news companies get paid for content shared online.
While the code is yet to pass Parliament, Facebook took early action and blocked Australians from accessing news content on its platform yesterday.
It led to widespread confusion, with Australians being blocked from accessing the Facebook pages of the Bureau of Meteorology, governments and fire services early on Thursday. Facebook allowed access to non-news sites later in the day.
"I would just say to Facebook: This is Australia. If you want to do business here, you work according to our rules," Mr Morrison said.
"We're happy to listen to them on the technical issues of this ... but the idea of shutting down the sorts of sites they did yesterday, as some sort of threat, I know how Australians react to that.
"I thought it was not a good move on their part.
"They should move quickly past that, come back to the table and we will sort it out. Our record as a government is resolve."
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg confirmed he had spoken to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for the second time in two days as the tech giant and federal government deal with a stand-off over proposed media laws.
Mr Frydenberg said he and Mr Zuckerberg spoke again this morning.
"We'll talk again over the weekend.
"I reiterated Australia remains committed to implementing the code."
Mr Morrison said he had spoken with his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi, as well as French President Emmanuel Macron and Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, hoping to gain support for Australia's actions.
"There is a lot of world interest in what Australia is doing," he said.
ABC managing director David Anderson said he thought "trust had been handed away" by Facebook.
He also said a range of non-news-related ABC Facebook pages were still down.
"The ABC Kids community page is not up at the moment.
"It is quite heavy handed and broad in, I guess, the removal of all of those pages."
Mr Anderson said around 7 million people visited ABC websites via Facebook every month.
Overnight, the head of the UK Parliament's digital and media committee said Facebook should be "ashamed" of its behaviour.
Simon Milner, Facebook's head of public policy for the Asia-Pacific, told the ABC on Thursday the blocking of access to non-news pages reflected what Facebook argued was a broad definition of "news" as defined in the law.
"One of the criticisms we had about the law that was passed by the House of Representatives yesterday is that the definition of news is incredibly broad and vague," he said.
He wouldn't address whether the mass blocking had been tested, but he conceded some pages were "inadvertently" caught in the dragnet.
