Amidst A Monetary Dispute, Facebook Bans Australian News
In a stunning flex of power, Facebook has banned the sharing of posts from Australian news outlets and some government services after a dispute over a new law that would require Facebook to pay a fee to host Australian content.
Under a new law proposed by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, major tech companies from which people get their news would have to pay a fee to Australian publications as compensation for the right to host their content. Google and Facebook have both fought to prevent the law from being implemented, but whereas Google caved and reached a $100 million settlement with Australian news publications to host their content, Facebook has stuck to their guns and banned the posting of Australian media on their platform.
"The proposed law fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content," said William Easton, managing director of Facebook Australia and New Zealand. He also went on to say the legislation "seeks to penalise Facebook for content it didn’t take or ask for," and that the value exchange between the platform and publishers actually "runs in favour of the publishers."
The effects of the immediate ban were immediately felt by the site's Australian population. Multiple major news outlets were shut out of the platform, as expected, but so were pages such as the Department of Fire and Emergency Services, ACT Government, and the Bureau of Meteorology. These public services had their pages wiped clean and were unable to share new content relevant to Australians.
The New York Times viewed the split between Facebook and Google as indicative of the way both companies view news. Google, it writes, "has long been to organize the world’s information, an ambition that is not achievable without up-to-the-minute news. For Facebook, news is not as central. Instead, the company positions itself as a network of users coming together to share photos, political views, internet memes, videos -- and, on occasion, news articles."
Australian Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has stated that he and Mark Zuckerberg are in discussion to "find a pathway forward."
This morning, I had a constructive discussion with Mark Zuckerberg from #Facebook. He raised a few remaining issues with the Government’s news media bargaining code and we agreed to continue our conversation to try to find a pathway forward.
— Josh Frydenberg (@JoshFrydenberg) February 17, 2021
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googolplexbyte
It would be nice if this leads to a facebook competitor emerging in Australia
TvTropesRuinedMyLife
Mega Gangsa
As an Australian who doesn't like how our news is running rancid with Rupert Murdick's testicles, this please the mates.
ed
ah yes, link tax, this will work out. yep. totally.
Goddamn, is every government run by brain-dead boomers sustained by oil executives doing dark magic in their basements or some shit?
Timey16
There is one context that makes it a bit understandable and that is less the link itself and more how it's presented.
Essentially it will auto generate a snippet with a summary of the entire article… but now the argument is that people see this summary and decide that based on the summary they no longer need to click the link.
That way Google for example received the ad revenue for the article of another website (because they have ads on the side when seeing the news collection on Google), while THAT website never got anything for the article they wrote because they were skipped by the user based on the snippet.
And based on what I know about attention span in front of a screen, combined with just looking at the average Reddit comment thread where people comment based on the article title alone, this seems to be more of a rule than the exception too.
So in this case the "Fair Use" argument of copyright is certainly up for discussion in this specific case.
The discussion is more nuanced overall, but Big Tech of course is so hostile to having to pay OTHERS for their creations, they have a vested interest to simplifying that discussion and remove all context.
That said Australian media is cancer anyways so removing them from FB may actually be an improvement.
CatsGoneWildVol4
I hate Facebook with a passion, which is why I don't have a FB account, but in this one situation, I will defend them, because these laws are utterly fucking stupid.
These laws basically say, "We, the Australian government, have picked out two companies by hand, Google and Facebook, and decided that both of them, have to pay money, to provide hyperlinks on their websites to news articles, hosted by a handful of news organisations we have picked by hand, mainly the biggest and most wealthy news organisations in Australia."
Facebook said 'No, we just won't allow links to Australian news websites then.'
Australia: surprise pikachu face
ObadiahtheSlim
Correct me if I am wrong, but didn't Spain pass a similar "link tax" law and it hurt their news media?
Timey16
The Spanish (and German) model required the acquisition of licenses to show snippets, Google just didn't buy any and just refused to ever include Spanish/German news in it's news aggregate… so Spanish media just made the licenses free, defeating the law entirely.
Although this may also show how extremely powerful large tech companies like Google are to make the entire media sector of nations bend their knee to them just like that.
I do think big tech sites siphoning away revenue from journalistic outlets is a real and legitimate problem, the conundrum is how to deal with it. It's especially longer more detailed articles that suffer the most from that… quality journalism is being punished the most.
People don't want to read long texts online, it's psychological. So they will take any summary they can get and just fuck off. People kind of need to be sat down and "forced" to read longer texts.
Omega MISSINGNO
so i guess facebook can't have this