I think FB was absolutely right to do it. Asking for payment for links embedded in hypertext goes against the ethos of www. It sets up a dangerous precedent for the web in general.
If they really had to find a nice middleground with FB profiting from news consumption from within; they could have not put `og` tags on the page or asked FB to block metadata extraction. But asking for payment for links in search results or shared posts is just bad regulation.
What is surprising is that outside of HN everyone blame Facebook. I mean, Facebook is giving free traffic to news websites in exchange of users' longer time spent on Facebook. How could Facebook to blamed by publishes ? By users maybe, but how come by publishers?
The publishers see it as people just read the headlines and summary on Facebook, then never ever go to the actual web site to read the story.
It's similar to the way web site owners are unhappy with the way Google scrapes microdata from web sites and presents the information as its own content in those search side panels. It removes an incentive for people to visit the web site that actually created the content.
Facebook and the rest of the doomscrolling industry have trained people to think that "Reading the news" is just scrolling scrolling scrolling, rather than actually going to a publisher's web site to see what's on offer.
>The publishers see it as people just read the headlines and summary on Facebook, then never ever go to the actual web site to read the story.
This is going to be a hot take but maybe it's because people have been conditioned to think that the articles themselves are often low quality clickbait offering little beyond the headline and stuffed with more ads than content. Quality of journalism and consumer trust in media has been declining for years.
I don't disagree that the majority of news web sites are terrible. That's one of the things that drove me back to print subscriptions.
But the web sites didn't get to be the way they are because people were visiting them. They got to be the way they are because people stopped visiting them.
Yeah, the irony of clickbait headlines, which would initially entice the person to go buy the newspaper/magazine is that they ended up making people think the headline was the news
But users don't want to visit Axios for only Axios news, or Buzzfeed for only Buzzfeed news.
People turn to specific sources because those sources provide coverage over hot issues, but what people are interested in are the hot issues, not Axios or Buzzfeed. Google and Apple's content aggregation is giving customers what they want.
But users don't want to visit Axios for only Axios news, or Buzzfeed for only Buzzfeed news.
Says who?
People have been picking their brands for hundreds of years. Some people would watch CBS News. Some would watch NBC News. Some would read the Houston Chronicle. Some would read the Houston Post.
Then when they wanted to drill down into something more specific, they'd look at Gardener's World, Birdwatching, Sky & Telescope, etc...
The all-you-can-eat buffet of information is a recent invention promoted as the be-all and end-all of "choice" by the people who make money off of low-quality information gluttony.
Drinking from a firehose is not the best way to slake a thirst.
The only way for NYT/WSJ/Buzzfeed to have an edge on curation and relevance is if they became more specialized; otherwise they are aiming to be as general as Apple or Google News but not as good.
I'm not sure people appreciate the balkanization of TV content either. The problem isn't that HBO does or doesn't make great hits, the problem is that the hot original content can randomly pop up in another content kingdom, and HBO doesn't have a stranglehold on relevance or hotness. The same is true with all these news outlets wanting individual subscriptions and "brand loyalty".
I think what people want is one Apple TV to rule them all.
I’d say the majority of news consumers get by without getting the details behind stories. They want to get a sense of what’s going on and drill down on a few items of interest. If I read sports (which is almost never), I want the scores, to know who won or lost, but the details of the game or games are unimportant. The same with politics or local news - I don’t need the details, my mind is already made up.
Note, I’m not saying this is a good thing, just using myself as an example. And I am guilty of just skimming headlines most days.
But this is the problem publishers face. Facebook and Google, et al, provide news from publishers in a format that is good enough for most people. I don’t think they’re wrong for doing this. In fact, I think the onus is on publishers to be compelling enough to draw people in further. They may have one or two good writers, but they’re hidden in a pile of manure and ads.
> Facebook is giving free traffic to news websites in exchange of users' longer time spent on Facebook. How could Facebook to blamed by publishes ?
FB is not entirely to blame for the position publishers find themselves in, but saying FB gives them free traffic is too generous of a take IMO. FB and others have worked hard to shape the internet as we have it today, where most traffic is centralized in a few “portals” to the rest of the web. Publishers need FB traffic because there’s few other ways to get it, and that dependency on FB is not unintentional.
The fact that the ad revenue share shifted from publishers to facebook may indicate that it's not such a huge deal for them. I'd argue it actually shows that the traffic increase may not exist at all.
Anecdotal, but what I see a lot of time is that people don't even read the news being posted - only the title, the preview and the text it was shared with and then jump into commenting. (Pretty much like what I'm doing here now :) ). Actually, I may have even seen a piece of research on this.
So at the end it doesn't seem like it's such a great business for the publishers.
Coal mines used to be in the business of giving employment to hungry children. Who did choose "freely" to work there, sometimes, when the alternative was starvation.
Nobody is denying that it was in publishers' own interest to be linked to on Facebook. Indeed, the law only makes sense that way. Where economics or physics makes something impossible, no law is needed to stop it.
At issue is the power imbalance between Facebook and publishers. the latter is a group of many, who cannot coordinate because of prisoner's dilemma mechanics and maybe even antitrust reasons. The law is supposed to rectify this perceived power imbalance by external enforcement.
A very good contention. Goes to bolster opposition to any link tax.
Note that having to negotiate extra surcharge with news publishers would make online even harder for smaller, independent websites, and (relatively) easier for large platforms. A link tax incentivizes centralization.
And the current excuse of "only large platform" is just that - an excuse, easily changed with a stroke of a legislative pen, once the precedent of link tax is established.
Noting that decentralisation requires a lot of effort, otherwise monopoly is a natural outcome in any competitive field.
So regardless of the egalitarian ethos of the Web, the natural result of leaving the environment to invent itself is that there will be one search engine that basically everybody uses, one social network that basically everybody uses (and that one network might change from generation to generation).
It's aggregation at most, not centralization. Hacker News and Reddit are also aggregators -- the content still exists elsewhere and can be accessed directly with ease.
Is that the issue? An account is required because the Facebook feed is largely dictated by who you're friends with. It's not based on a public popularity contest like Hacker News and Reddit. I'm not sure I follow.
I also agree with you, though I wonder about the copyright to the headline and blurb content when other people share.
IMO I agree any website should be able to opt out (or in) of Facebook if they like (i seriously doubt they would), and then everyone can run their own website.
Copyright is an exclusive right to reproduce a work in order to inspire the creation of works. It is not a moral right to control others communications.
The reasons it is nonsense to own exclusive right to a title
-It hamstrings communication about the work including both criticism and the ordinary business of civilization where we communicate things that we have learned with one another. The title is the only proper referent.
-It never stands in for the work itself unless the work is itself so trivial as to be not worth protection. For example [insert name] died that is all.
There is no reason to suppose one ought to be able to opt in or out of being shared on Facebook than one could opt in or out of being shared in an email or in a coffee shop.
Can you imagine going into starbucks and seeing a list of authors whose works were licensed to be discussed there.
A lot of people confuse there being a handle somewhere with the right to grasp it. Facebook being at a central point in many people's communication could pay the parties being discussed, so could your email provider, or your cellphone carrier.
Any of the above could allow parties to censor your communications at the behest of others like you suggested.
The fact that copyright is so adaptable as to readily be twisted into such ridiculous ideas is a good argument for throwing the whole thing in the trash.
> I wonder about the copyright to the headline and blurb content when other people share.
I think this is a slippery slope on copyright enforcement, we have seen it getting ridiculous on YouTube. What if someone shares a screenshot of the article? and if we do this, are we not allowed to write dialogue exchange from movies in social media posts as well?
I think you raise the kind of grey area legislation would be good to look at (fair use), not what we are looking at now. I guess from my brief thinking is once your bot visits the site to scrape it (and uses resources from the vendor) it’s a bit different to a screenshot.
There is a trivial way to avoid being scraped by a search engine robots.txt
For facebook most of the time when it creates a screenshot to show next to the title in a share results in 1 or possibly many views driving revenue for the linked site for a small increase in bandwidth.
For example their site gets pulled once and read a dozen times.
I'm often very critical of FB, but this approach makes absolute sense. Australia is demanding payment for every shared news story so FB decides it no longer allows the sharing of news stories.
This is like if politicians were shocked that raising cigarette taxes resulted in a drop in cigarette sales. FB now has an explicit monetary incentive NOT to allow news in AU and it is a direct result of government actions.
I haven't used FB in 7 years but I wonder if FB will become a much better platform in Australia after the news ban, with just posts/photos from friends and less noise.
I've never quite understood the, "Facebook would be so much better without news," comments I've been seeing the last few days.
I follow ~60 people on FB, most of whom I know IRL. I'm pretty ruthless in unfollowing those that are noisy with memes or other junky stuff.
I'm also conservative with the groups and pages I subscribe to.
You have the controls to curate what goes into your Facebook feed. So the, "So much better," remarks feels like someone flailing around fecklessly when they actually have the power.
Anecdotally I've noticed very little change in my feed since the change here in the Antipodes.
What I've been seeing is different groups of friends have switched to slack and barely use FB anymore. Slack is vastly better for social stuff than FB.
Sharing screenshots of news sites? Copy-pasting text verbatim or non-verbatim? Any number of ways users can - and will - get around it to maintain the toxic environment.
Congrats on not using FB. Personally, I would pay NOT to have news on my FB feed. I want to see pictures of your kids and hear updates about your life ... not your thoughts on whatever political issues in in the news today.
So yea, it may actually make it better. FB considers "engagement" as all-important. But engagement occurs most frequently when someone sends out a controversial news article. It devalues the service and makes it a less enjoyable experience.
The problem is that the substitution isn't always posts from friends. It could be posts from websites that don't qualify as reliable news sources. That doesn't have to be true but I don't think it's a clear win for average FB feed quality in Australia.
> whether or not taxing things causes less of the thing to be produced.
It causes less to be consumed and this is part of New Zealand’s strategy to make the country (tobacco) smoke free. The numbers shown below are a little misleading as the black market increases as the tax rises, as the link notes.
‘The collective impact of the initiatives that make up New Zealand’s tobacco control programme, including tobacco excise tax, is having the desired impact on smoking rates which are trending down. Among Māori, daily smoking prevalence fell from 39.2 percent to 37.7 percent (1.5 percent) between 2006/7 and 2011/12, but during the period of annual tobacco excise increases they fell from 37.7 percent to 31.2 percent in 2017/18 (6.5 percent) –a substantial acceleration in the decrease in prevalence.’
It's only been 2 days. People need time to adapt to other methods of sharing news. The article mentions this:
> If this shutoff continues, I’d imagine that the more dedicated news consumers might adapt in ways that are, on net, positive for publishers. Maybe they go to a newspaper’s website more often, or they sign up for a daily newsletter to get their fix.
It does go on though.
> But the casual reader of news on Facebook — and that’s most users, given that news stories make up only about 4 percent of the typical News Feed — might just skip out on news entirely.
Time will tell whether this ends up a net win for publishers. Not only in terms of traffic/revenue but quality of journalism, ie freedom to post non-clickbait articles.
My prediction is that this will just send publishers deeper into a death spiral if it continues. People won't stop sharing information, the publishers will just become even less relevant and they'll be replaced by alternatives which, even if Australia walks back this rule, will do long-term damage to the current publishers.
When I made an active effort to reduce my Facebook news consumption I’ve narrowed down on about 2 sources I’d visit daily.
It was win for the big guys, and loss for smaller publishers that I’d get exposed to occasionally via FB algorithms. And given the polarization of the press overall, I think that it also made me more polarized, just due to limited sources I utilize, that are doing same clickbaity and outrage fueling stories on their webpages, as clicks matter everywhere, not only on social media.
Wouldn't this be an obvious result since they suddenly pulled the rug less than 2 days ago?
I'd be interested to see how this would play out over a timescale when folks get used to going direct to news sites for their news? //*using the term news lightly, of course
Or as it gets worse (I consider equally likely), as the news sites lose mindshare (as they stop showing up on social media) and people stop visiting them at all.
> the news sites lose mindshare (as they stop showing up on social media) and people stop visiting them at all
That's the main problem for them. They are missing right from the place where people socialize, debate, tag and search. They are hanging from a thread, it's only when people intentionally seek their news that they will get to display them. Maybe that will show how much people care.
Australia and publishers really set themselves up for this one.
The implication of this rule is that FB is the one benefitting from the sharing of news on their site, and by giving FB an out (letting them simply ban sharing of news links) they had a chance to forego that 'benefit.' They took it, and lo and behold, FB isn't hurting but the news sites are suffering.
Australia should've just taxed Facebook directly and funded the news sites with grants based on that revenue if they wanted the government to rescue publishers. This move really reveals who benefits the most from news on Facebook, and surprise, it's not Facebook.
This might be a short term hit to publishers, but maybe readers will eventually retrain to visit news sites directly rather than relying on Facebook and friends to select articles for them. This is very much a fight over who controls the entrance to the web and it's probably better it not get centralized into Google and Facebook. It didn't work out well for AOL and Yahoo.
The other possible scenario is even more enticing: that smaller, or entirely new, outfits raise in popularity on Facebook and bring back the much needed plurality of voices.
There are more than enough voices on the internet most of them make as much sense as the voices some hear in their heads.
Its never been easier to share your perspective online. We are only barely now trying to make it a little harder to share evil and crazy and I think we aren't near done.
We haven't heard the other half of the story - what has happened to Facebook's traffic within Australia? Yes, the Australian publishers are taking a hit, but we can't guess at the outcome without knowing how much pain this might be causing Facebook.
I'm not sure what chartbeat is or how they have this data -- how would anyone know how much traffic from facebook to the publisher sites had dropped off unless they had access to either facebook outbound data or publisher referral data. Chartbeat is on the inside of publishers analytics data perhaps?
Not saying I don't agree with the premise of the article, for sure this hurt the publishers initially -- but data is suspect / weak anyways...
It'll take time for ppl to adjust their habits and start picking what news sites they're going to visit, if at all. or start using twitter or reddit or something to find links to news. The whole mess is so stupid
Content creator posts content on their site that they own and pay to operate. Mega-3rd-party shares links of this content, sometimes posting blurbs from this content, driving traffic to Mega-3rd-party site and (to a much lesser extent) boosting traffic to content creator's site. However, Mega-3rd-party site also derives revenue from this by extracting information from user behavior and user interests, enabling them to improve ad-sales.
Am I misunderstanding something? Why is everyone here so pro mega-3rd-party?
Another question is this similar to remixing in the music industry? Feels like royalties in a twisted kind of way.
Me bringing Tacos to a party may bring people to the party and I may parlay the social experience into a profitable new job but I'm not going to pay a portion of my income to taco bell.
Taco bell's defined benefit in the situation is selling 100 tacos.
The content creator's benefit is 100 clicks.
People are pro facebook because allowing someone to force others to pay to link to you presupposes controlling interpersonal communications for the purpose of monetization.
It would be such an ill turn that removing copyright entirely would be preferable.
It's like if someone was planning on murdering Zuckerberg they would suddenly be the bad guy even if you hate him.
I don't believe this was the right call by the government, and I think FB are well within their morale obligations to kick up a fuss.
But I also hope it stays this way. News on FB is like crack for the older generations just getting their first taste of the firehose of content that is the internet. It's making so many people absolutely insufferable and worse, misinformed, and I can only imagine that it's generally hurtful to society because of this. Young people aren't immune, but they certainly have an advantage by "growing up" with the internet, and learning some survival skills along the way.
This is all under Facebook's right as a platform.
We can use the same argument here that people use to defend Apple and the App Store.
Don't like Facebook sharing news, or as of now, blocking news? Then don't use Facebook, they created their platform, they should be allowed to do however their please, after all, it is stated in ther ToS that they can do pretty much anything they want.
/s If not obvious at first. I am merely pointing out the hypocrisy how people are willing to defend Apple on the same grounds they bash Facebook for.
I don’t really understand this comment in this context. I’m hardly a free marketeer but if zuck wanted to put nothing but his giant smiling face on the news feed 3 times a week, it’s his website after all.
Sorry but this comparison does not hold. Australia or anyone else is more than welcome to ban Facebook and other companies but because of very nature of internet would needlessly waste resources.
Few things to note:
1. Just because Facebook is from California and LocalBook Inc. is local does not mean LocalBook would be any better. For sheer scale, the Localbook is more likely to be corrupt.
2. Australia's regulation is hare brained. Sorry, but such moves are expected from third world despotic dictators and not a country that calls itself developed.
3. Shouldn't we all cheer the fact that at least for Australia Facebook will not be handling "news' thus wont be influencing people ?
> Shouldn't we all cheer the fact that at least for Australia Facebook will not be handling "news' thus wont be influencing people
That conclusion does not follow from the premise. There are many ways to influence without being “the news”, and the news is at least wearing the clothes of shining a light on the hidden places of political and economic malfeasance (the fact that the term “yellow journalism” is older than any living person notwithstanding).
If they really had to find a nice middleground with FB profiting from news consumption from within; they could have not put `og` tags on the page or asked FB to block metadata extraction. But asking for payment for links in search results or shared posts is just bad regulation.