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.
The Conversation is doing it.
mastodon.social/@theconversationau
The BBC are experimenting with it. social.bbc/about
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
PotjiePig@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I don’t think that’s the full story.
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 done 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.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 8 months ago
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.
pendulum_@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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 vitality of the content has passed, the original creator doesn’t even get 1% of the same clicks.
Now multiple the number of content networks by about 50. 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.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 8 months ago
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.
Here’s a brilliant article about what it is and why it’s so dumb.
pendulum_@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Freebooting of news article is distinctly what this is about
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Yes - there’s a problem. Why is Meta the company that should fix it? They are not, and never have been, a news platform.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 8 months ago
Eh, hardly. News corp is, but their “reporting” is trash anyway.
The former Fairfax sites are all behind a soft paywall (easily bypassed by clearing cookies/opening in Incognito).
But our best media, sites like the ABC, the Conversation, the Guardian, are all completely paywall-less.