The feckless, irresponsible and arbitrary way Facebook imposed its punitive Australian ban on news sites has confirmed the worst fears of critics who say the social media giant gives no thought to public interest and is obsessed with money and power.
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Mark Zuckerberg's organisation has tried to shrug off accusations it views its billions of users as nothing more than a collective commodity whose personal data can be flogged off to any interested third parties willing to meet its price.
If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer, but the product being sold.
RELATED NEWS: Police, councils' pages wiped in Facebook news ban
The fact Facebook was prepared to take this action at the height of a pandemic, on the eve of a nationwide vaccination roll-out and during the bushfire season is proof it has no sense of community obligation.
The black hole of naked ambition and greed around which the needle of the company's moral compass swings has been revealed. While the arrogance Mr Zuckerberg and his advisers have shown suggests he may think of himself as an emperor, the Facebook CEO is clearly a man running desperately short of clothes.
Matters have been made even worse by the fact the news site ban was apparently so shoddily conceived and hastily implemented collateral damage extended to public interest homepages and state and territory health departments.
Not even Facebook's own homepage was able to escape the company's "death star" algorithm.
Facebook's decision has also exposed its recent platitudes about being committed to the "long-term vibrancy of Australia's news and media sector" as no more than cant.
The message is clear. Facebook is all for Facebook and for its bottom line.
Facebook users are only factored into the equation as a convenient commodity.
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