Can someone explain to me what all the fuss is with Facebook? I get that its to reimburse the copyright holders for using their content, but I've never actually seen news articles on facebook, nor a news button.
How exactly is Facebook monetising this? via news links people are sharing with each other?
Woah there's a news button on mobile too. I never noticed before.
All the print news these days is just regurgitated AI malaka so I don't understand it either.
They are links back to the news websites.
The News Media should pay Facebook for redirecting traffic to their sites.
I bet if Facebook blocks the news links, the News Media will start jumping up and down complaining.
yes exactly! any links remotely related to news are all links to a paywall, which is in effect free advertising for the news sites? sounds like a win win to me.
I just clicked the news button for the first time and it's 90% ABC articles which are all free and ad free anyway. Facebook should have kept the news button and just given it to whichever legit news outlets want to publish stories on there which would basically just be the ABC who don't have a profit agenda anyway.
But the ABC is free and they can't afford to pay for advertising unless Albo gives them back all the money the libs took off them for telling the truth.
Yeah this.
The amount of money these media companies have to pay Facebook to have their content prioritised in people’s feeds is disgusting. If they don’t pay, their content isn’t displayed to users (even if you follow say, the abc page).
So what you say? This is how poor quality journalism/ai junk content (and the misinformation resulting from it) gets spread so much; they who have the money, get their version of the news widely read
steps down from imaginary soapbox…
I bet if Facebook blocks the news links, the News Media will start jumping up and down complaining.
Thats what they are doing now, having a cry that facebook isn't going to pay.
Its funny, they screamed people should pay to link to them, aka drive them traffic. Got the gov to agree, companies paid and went yeah nah this isn't worth the money. So have stopped paying.
Now MSM is screaming that the cash cow has been cut off, the clicks will disappear.
the clicks will disappear.
That's what they should do…
It won't affect 99.9% of facebook users in any meaningful way…
Hopefully this will speed up the death of MSM. It needs to die.
I think Facebook had news to draw more people to its platform and therefore generate more revenue through advertising. I would say the return from that revenue doesn't outweigh what they're paying media outlets (after the government set laws) so they decided to shut down the news section altogether.
I think Facebook had news to draw more people to its platform
Rubbish… Who goes to Facebook to read news.
Maybe some liked the aggregation? No idea.
You don't even get comments from other Facebook users on the news section, so there's really no special draw.
@jv This is an American article but the last time I saw Australian stats, they were very similar.
TLDR - almost half get their news from social media “sometimes or often”
almost half get their news from social media “sometimes or often”
That's not from the News tab, that's from people posting a story in a group you are a member of…
@jv: Which is very common in many groups on nearly every site, not just fb.
Given fb charges MSM for advertising, whilst stealing everyone else's readers and advertisers, and retains eyeballs inside its own walled gardens, wherever possible, and does not produce, or even effectively curate content, and instead publishes others', this is a big deal to them, and everything.
The world should wall fb inside its own walled garden. Govs should ban advertising with them.
Meta needs to be starved, and if it continues to mistreat users, left to wither and die. If not it will become a monster that no-one loves, other than its creator.
@jv: Because it's theft:
No 'masthead' can publish fear, uncertainty, and doubt without responsibility or consequence. Whereas Fb actually sells its immunity to this to advertisers and anyone who will pay (skynetcorps, state actors, and even their enemies). It uses it to attract (or steal) eyeballs (consumer attention) and then retains them within its own ecosystem. Not giving them back without a fee.
At the same time, it steals (again) and sells these same consumer's data (the PII belonging to the stolen eyeballs). Then it re-sells/ransoms (by auctioning re-targeted consumers), i.e. these same consumers' attention, back to the sites they have been stolen from, using the stolen PII to segment (target) individuals (and/or cohorts of them) for profit.
It was a dirty game of theft when it started, using a loophole few agreed to or wanted, and which countries other than the US never wrote into their statutes. But Meta and others like it, widen every day in every way, targeting everyone we know, inc children, pets… everyone/thing is a resource to be turned into a commercial asset. Inc generations yet to be born. Entire generations, perhaps cultures and nations, stolen by bots.
You might like to see it free-market capitalism, but it is in fact failures in public administration, creating loopholes, exploited by corporations, some with evil or commercial intentions, others following, using obscene amounts of logic, energy and stored data, leveraging AI, bots and algorithms steal attention from existing channels and ransoming it to the highest bidder for the highest returns
Because it's theft:
No it is not.
The article is still on the server of the news site…
I didn't suggest they stole an article
If nothing was stolen, there is no theft.
The goto when you're really scratching around the bottom of the barrel?
That's OK. We forgive you…
Just don't do it again…
@jv: Woot. Thank you.
BTW you can add democracy to the list: There are plenty of leaders, and pundits, saying fb is stealing that, too.
Hardly a small accusation, so straws have literally nothing to do with it
@jv: Yep. And in part at least, measurable by how much governments, and political entities [pay them] (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-earnings-call-politica…)
Thanks to fb not being held to account for anything they publish, statistics and accepted facts are no longer of much import.
Establishment of fact through forensic test, even basic checking of stories (or an individual's post content), is almost fully deprecated. Human endeavour and the value of academic discovery must now be sponsored and supported by those with means enough to support it against the establishment, and vested interests. The media, as well as those who care about the issue at hand, are regularly pilloried (publicly decapitated) by accusation and opinion, as more and more leaders only care about how 'click-baitable' a story is, than how well it records events, finds truth, exposes wrongdoing, etc.
Is it the that defines our (also stolen) discourse. Another for the list?
I would say the return from that revenue doesn't outweigh what they're paying media outlets
According to the ABC, Facebook are paying the media companies $70million/year. According to this article (paywalled):
In its interim report on its digital platforms service inquiry in March last year, the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission found that Australian advertising revenue for Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram in FY21-22 was between $4.7bn and $5.1bn.
Facebook is facing fines of up to 30% of their Australian revenue for breaching the news media bargaining code. ie about $1.5bn in fines.
news media bargaining code
LOL What bargaining happened though? It was basically the gov stepping in saying they have to pay xyz or else!!
That isn't how 'bargaining' works.
Fully support Facebook, Google etc cutting off the MSM cash cow that is the news media bargaining code. If they made decent content that people wanted to read, then people would gasp, read it.
Its nothing to do with MSN, MSN is owned by Microsoft who don't care about news, they make all their revenue selling Azure to Government orgs and through partners selling M365 etc the cloud computing arm is where all the money is.
The one bitching about this the most is News Corp AKA Murdoch owner of Sky News Australia and the Herald Sun ETC, if you watch or read it its all their jounos go on about basically bashing Facebook and the ALP 24/7 oh and they all love Trump as well.
Its nothing to do with MSN, MSN is owned by Microsoft
Oh darling, go put your glasses on before you play on the internet. I said MSM, not MSN!
MSM = Main Steam Media.
@JimmyF: Haha, fare enough I totally missed that acronym
The Pay walls shit me up the wall you go to read an article on Google discover only to find that half of it is hidden behind a pay wall. I'm not paying for every bloody newspaper just to read news on the internet.
Who goes onto facebook for news?
With the propaganda pushed out by news organisations, they should be paying readers
So why doesn't OZB have a news section? We should be getting our news from OZB.
cos then it'd have to pay the fees!
Facebook could just exit Australia completely like Diners Club, Citibank, MyRepublic, and soon to be motor vehicle companies (due to the incoming Emissions Standards) and it would totally be inconsequential to them. Google ends up being the monopoly and price will rise. Be careful what people wish for and how much they think they can shove people.
Australia needs to realize Facebook doesn't quite need Australia. It's the other way around. They would have already known Australia could have just pulled the "Designated" lever otherwise they would have already renegotiated the renewal contract.
The agreement ends in a few months. It will be interesting to see what card Facebook will pull out.
I doubt that will happen as Facebook have a lot of money invested in networking equipment and the like, yeah if they had just thrown everything on AWS or the like then yeah they could just exit Australia but they have a lot of agreements in place with ISPs. They are as big as Google now.
Microsoft own part of Facebook now a days.
Have done for a while actually.
Can someone explain to me what all the fuss is with Facebook
Facebook forces news companies to post (paywalled) news stories on FB, and therefore FB must pay the news companies for making them use FB.
how exactly is facebook forcing them to post stories on FB? if the media sites decide they must post on FB to attract attention, then isn't this advertising and thus they should be paying FB instead? Before social media, if someone wanted to promote their business and the only mediums that were available were essentially print/TV/radio, they were similarly 'forced' to advertise with that medium, and thus pay for the privilege no?
Sorry, I thought my sarcasm was more obvious than it seems.
I worked as a developer for News Corp maybe 13 years ago, the homepage, which just had headlines was a huge traffic driver and they made a lot of money selling ad space on that page. A very small amount of the traffic would click through to an actual news articles or two.
Companies like Facebook and Google would take all these headlines and show them on their own sites, with their own advertising and money generation around it, meaning people no longer needed to go to the homepage of news websites, thus these companies didn't get anywhere near as much money from advertising.
The ruling by the government was a good one I think as it forced these companies to pay for the content they were using for free and making money from.
But the newer generations aren't as interested in news, or at least not from established outlets, I mean I'm 40 and have always had almost no interest in news in general from anyone, I think this is why you are seeing Facebook decide not to renew, because they can't make more money from it than they pay anymore.
According to Meta, less than 3% of content on Facebook are news. No one I know actually use the News page on Facebook, which is going away next month. Makes total business sense — why keep a feature that no one really use? Keep paying $66 million a year for a feature that they are getting rid of? That doesn't make sense at all.
I think Facebook should just do a 2021 again by banning sharing any news media links. Blocking all Fairfax & News Corp properties' URLs, so their executives cannot claim that Facebook is creating value on those links. When you can't even paste in a news link for Facebook to retrieve the article, no one can claim that they are "stealing".
If the government asks OzBargain to pay Gerry so we can show Harvey Norman deals, I'll just ban the entire store on OzBargain. Might not be a great loss according to some here.
The issue here is that media & journalists should be financially compensated properly, which I agree — just not by forcing money out from an international organisation with government regulations. Maybe the end users should pay, or the government should tax more to fund ABC. Both aren't going to be popular though.
I don't know which side I should take on between bullies Facebook & News Corp.
However, on a positive note, congratulations must go to Rupert Murdoch (92) engagement to Elena Zhukova (67). Fifth time lucky, as nobody says.
This media bargaining code seems to be back to the agenda again. Must be close to the election. Link to SMH (which hopefully won't get us in trouble).
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is expected to release the plan on Thursday after months of talks about how to respond to Facebook’s threat to block news content if it is forced to pay and concern in some quarters that a tax on big American companies would upset US President-elect Donald Trump.
The approach is expected to mandate financial costs on the platforms if they do not negotiate in good faith with news providers struggling in a hard advertising market and pay for articles shared with their social media customers.
There's a news tab on the left hand side(on desktop)