As loath as I am to defend Facebook, the Australian news organisations crying about how this will harm them have done this to themselves. By pushing for this absolutely terrible wrong-headed law that our government so dutifully passed (with both Labor and the LNP supporting it), they’ve basically discouraged Facebook from sending them traffic at all.
Facebook and Google do not host news content. They provide free marketing for news organisations in the form of hosting links to that content and algorithms that surface that content to the people most likely to be interested in it. They make money on that free marketing not by leeching off of the news providers, but by selling advertisements against their own users. There’s room for debate about the ethics of their data collection and advertising, but that’s not the news orgs’ concern. These kinds of policies just fundamentally misunderstand what these companies are actually doing. Probably on purpose, as the dying right-wing media desperately scrambles for relevance.
How often do you think people ask Google a question, either to the assistant or just in the search bar and get served the answer scraped directly into the search results, and never need to actually click into the article at all?
Facebook does this too.
Between that and needing to adjust ones journalism style to appease click throughs and the algorithm just to get eyes on ads, dilutes the quality of the write ups as an added problem.
I think making social media pay might be misguided, but there is definitely a problem, maybe even a form of plagiarism committed by alot of these social media giants by taking other people’s work and serving it up directly, and summarized on their own sites next to a link that many people won’t click on. It is after all in their best interest to get you to stay on the feed feeding.
Reddit is absolutely guilty of this too. It’s just that we happily do it for them and create TLDR bots and the like.
It’s absolutely fair if Google is populating their feeds with weather, news and other content from other peoples hard work, and then having the balls to serve up ads, that these websites should have a right to claim a cut of the advertising or not have the information shown.
should have a right to claim a cut of the advertising or not have the information shown.
Seems like Facebook is not going to show their content. Guess they’ll see if that brings more or less people to their site. And seeing as they’re already complaining, I think they already know the answer.
This. Freebooting is a huge issue and Meta made it a big thing and profits from it.
A video or image goes viral. Creator has it on a platform where they can monetise or benefit from the views. Some chucklefugg at a content network like ladbible takes it, strips watermarks and logos, posts it on their own Facebook page. Facebook makes money off the adverts on that page.
Original creator is deprived of clicks, and likely revenue, dutifully completes a DMCA on their stolen content. Maybe a day or two later Meta takes it down. They don’t care, they still made money. Ladbible got a few thousand more subscribers to make impressions on their promoted posts, which nets then more money. The virality of the content has passed, the original creator doesn’t even get 1% of the same clicks and even less credit for their work.
Now multiply the number of content networks by about 500. Some of whom are fully automated with no human intervention.
This is not okay, and Meta should be held to task for creating a financial incentive for people to do this.
Sorry but what you’re describing is 100% not what this is about. There’s a case to be made for some sort of action being made by Facebook to stop freebooting (RIP HI), but it’s completely irrelevant to what’s going on here.
This is about links directly to news articles and the claim that Facebook and Google should have to pay for the right to link to a news organisation. News orgs couch this in language like saying Facebook “uses” their content, but this is a deliberate mischaracterisation.
No, it’s not. Did you read this article? Did you read earlier articles around the time that the law this article is referencing was first being discussed & came into effect? Did you read Mike Masnick’s article linked in my earlier comment?
This is about Australia’s link tax, the News Media Bargaining Code. It’s got everything to do with requiring Facebook and Google to pay companies for sending them traffic, and nothing whatsoever to do with freebooting.
edit: for what it’s worth, this isn’t just News Corp. It was most heavily pushed in its earliest stages by News Corp and other right-wing media, but the Guardian, ABC, and SBS also supported this. That doesn’t make it right. It just serves to further prove how traditional media fundamentally misunderstands how technology works.
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp wanted a law that says Facebook and Google have to pay News Corp for the privilege of allowing links to News Corp websites.
So Google has to pay News Corp for the links to News Corp in Google search results.
So Facebook has to pay News Corp for the links to News Corp sites that appear on Facebook.
The previous Australian federal government, under the previous Prime Minister Scott Morrison, gave him that law in 2021.
Google and Facebook struck deals to pay News Corp and other Australian media companies.
Facebook says it won't renew those agreements.
Yes, it is a stupid law. News Corp and other media companies profit from the traffic they get from Google and Facebook.
Look, here's the relevant part of the article right here:
"The Australian government wanted local publishers to benefit when links to their news content appeared on sites like Facebook and Google.
"It argued that there was significant advertising revenue being generated from this "premium content" and media organisations were missing out on their cut.
"So in 2021, the Morrison government introduced the News Media Bargaining Code, which aimed to address "bargaining power imbalances" by requiring tech giants to pay for displaying news on their platforms.
"Under the code, the government can "designate" digital platforms like Facebook and Google and force them into mediation to set terms for a revenue-sharing deal.
...
"Instead, Meta and Google struck a flurry of independent deals with news companies, all of which are due to expire in the next few months.
"The deals, with organisations including the ABC, Nine and News Corp, have brought around $200 million to the sector, according to the government.
"Now Meta says it's not renewing the agreements because news isn't a priority for Facebook users and it wants to invest its money elsewhere."
Yes - there’s a problem. Why is Meta the company that should fix it? They are not, and never have been, a news platform.
Meta is all about letting people communicate with each other. Obviously sharing news is one use case for that, but it’s not even close to the primary one.
Also as an Australian… virtually all of the local reporting is behind a paywall. So it literally can’t be shared on social networks (not legally anyway - any distribution there would be copyright infringement).
Why should Meta pay for content that their users can’t even access? It’s ridiculous.
How often do you think people ask Google a question, either to the assistant or just in the search bar and get served the answer scraped directly into the search results, and never need to actually click into the article at all?
The thing is, you can’t copyright facts. If Google takes an article and gives you its entire contents, that’s copyright infringement and we don’t need a new special law to stop them doing it. If their article is so devoid of insight that a brief snippet and the title (which probably qualify under our Fair Dealing laws—our nearest equivalent to America’s Fair Use) are enough to deter people from clicking, it probably didn’t have much of value to begin with. And they’re even better-protected if they’re extracting key facts from the article without quoting verbatim, such as the Knowledge Graph does.
The problem with this law is that it completely ignores the fact that Google and Facebook are actually providing value to these news organisations. People very rarely choose to go to a news site directly. They search for something on Google and click the relevant link, or they find things that people and pages have posted links to on Facebook. You take away a source from Google and that company loses a huge chunk of its business. If Facebook has to pay to send people to news organisations, those organisations are double-dipping. They’re making money from their regular revenue stream (advertising or paywalls) and making money on the side by grifting Facebook. It’s a model that makes absolutely no sense if you think for one minute about what’s actually going on.
I agree from a different direction. By capitulating to Meta for so long, they have lost all their agency in this issue. They should have given Facebook and Google a hard No when they first started being plagiarised.
If your readers are primarily getting access to your news articles through a third party, they are no longer your news articles. What the news services should be doing is Syndicating (as in RSS) through their own Activity Pub identities.
Press.coop are syndicating a lot of other news services. (And therefore is unofficially claiming possession of and controlling the user experience of the content) press.coop/directory
But they’re not being plagiarised. They’re being linked to. If you start saying “no, people can’t post links to us”, that breaks the entire foundation of the Web.
I agree completely that they’ve been far too reliant on Google and especially Facebook lately, and that investing in their own platforms that they control would have been a much smarter strategy. I just view this as a tangential concern to the one of link taxes.
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