Washington: Facebook’s decision to ban Australians from sharing news stories is an “unacceptable bullying tactic” that demonstrates why governments around the world are cracking down on big tech, one the most senior Democrats in the US Senate says.

Facebook’s dramatic move has attracted the attention of American politicians and featured on the front page of top-selling tabloid The New York Post.

Mark Warner, the vice-chairman of the Democratic Senate caucus, said Australia was one of many countries, including the US, “grappling with the market dominance of Google and Facebook and trying to craft regulatory solutions to the very real power these firms possess”.

Democratic Senator Mark Warner says social media giants such as Facebook have abused their market power. Credit:Bloomberg

“It’s worrisome that large tech companies – which routinely tell policymakers they acknowledge the need for regulation – continually resort to using their large scale and dominance to undermine democratically-adopted laws,” Warner told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

“We have seen this again and again and it’s an unacceptable bullying tactic that only underscores concerns with their market dominance.”

Warner, who previously served as governor of Virginia, recently became chair of the powerful Senate intelligence committee.

Earlier this month he introduced legislation that would overhaul internet regulations by making social media companies legally liable for harassment, scamming and hate speech posted on their platforms.

The New York Post, one of the biggest-selling newspapers in the US, devoted its entire front page to Facebook’s Australia news ban on Friday, US time.

The News Corp tabloid showed a map of Australia emblazoned with the word “censored”. A subheading described a “worldwide call to boycott Facebook as it tightens control of what we see”.

When Facebook announced its decision to bar Australians from sharing news articles, Democratic congressman David Cicilline tweeted: “If it is not already clear, Facebook is not compatible with democracy.

“Threatening to bring an entire country to its knees to agree to Facebook’s terms is the ultimate admission of monopoly power.”

Cicilline is chair of the House of Representatives’ anti-trust subcommittee which is examining steps to curtail the market power of tech giants such as Google and Facebook.

British politicians from both the Conservative and Labour parties have urged the Morrison government to push ahead with its media bargaining code, which would compel social media companies to pay Australian media organisations tens of millions of dollars for the news content shared on their sites.

Both Republicans and Democrats in the US Congress have grown increasingly critical of the power wielded by social media companies in recent years although they have strong disagreements about how to respond in terms of policy.

Warner is one of several senators who have proposed amendments to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act – a law that gives social media companies legal immunity for content posted on their platforms.

He said the law had provided a “get out of jail free card” to social media companies for too long and that it was time to hold the firms accountable for the “harmful, often criminal behaviour enabled by their platforms to which they have turned a blind eye for too long”.

President Joe Biden has called for Section 230 to be revoked, a rare point of agreement with predecessor Donald Trump.

Trump called for the protections to be scrapped when Twitter started applying fact checks to his tweets.

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