This is the best summary I could come up with:
Meta informed Australian publishers on Friday that it won’t be renewing the deals it made when the government introduced a highly contentious media bargaining bill.
The Australian government wanted local publishers to benefit when links to their news content appeared on sites like Facebook and Google.
As a threat of what would come if the bill passed, it temporarily blocked users and publishers in Australia from sharing local and international news on Facebook and Instagram.
Dr Burns said if Facebook continues to make news organisations’ content less visible, there’s also a risk that the circulation of disinformation and misinformation will rise.
“The fact that they’re pulling out of the deals with news publishers is appalling … it means around a $200 million loss for public interest journalism,” Professor Martin said.
“We will work constructively with the ACCC [Australian Competition and Consumer Commission] and Treasury to ensure their designation,” Seven West chief executive James Warburton said.
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Zagorath@aussie.zone 8 months ago
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.
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.
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.
Salvo@aussie.zone 8 months ago
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
Zagorath@aussie.zone 8 months ago
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.