After watching this play out in Australia, it doesn't feel like there are many new arguments to be made. It's just sad to watch.
As a Canadian, it bothers me that our politicians are willing to jump through mental hoops to avoid considering the most obvious solutions.
If news companies don't want people accessing their content through the web, shouldn't they simply take down their web sites? If they aren't willing to do that (because, say, the benefits outweigh the costs), then perhaps this isn't an issue that warrants legislation...
The problem here is that people are not, at scale, hitting the news company website. Users of social media platforms see headlines, sometimes an alt text/description followed with a picture, and that is it. They start jumping to a discussion on said topic with whoever posted the news piece.
People are not reading the articles in full (and therefore being presented with ads, or a subscription paywall), but they are engaging on the social media platform that in turn is making money with ads and other features thanks to the engagement produced by the shared news article.
News companies are being cannibalized by social media companies who get all the engagement (and ad revenue), while people at scale are not signing up for paywalls or even visiting the news site to read the article in full.
I believe this will hopefully make news companies get back to a profitable business, while making conversations on social media platforms a lot healthier.
Maybe the news companies should figure out how to attract more people to their sites rather than trying to charge rent on other sites?
Maybe the news companies should write articles that are worth reading in full?
If Facebook links to an article people might follow the link and read it. If they don't link to an article, nobody will read it. There is nothing but upside for the news companies, and people with business savvy would love to have their site linked on Facebook (that's why people pay them so much money for ads!).
They have simply made this calculus and decided that there is no way to monetize the Facebook posts. It turns out minor attention engagement just doesn't get enough click throughs ever. Simply. The only things that can exist in earnest on social media sites is junk food, similar to infomercial spots at 4 AM on cable
They could embed ads in their cover photos. Just a banner or something. Not sure how the tracking would work, but there would certainly be value in it since sharing headlines can get many millions of views.
Do cover photos even get viewed often? When I see a News post it's usually just in my feed. If I click to view comments it expands in my feed. There's no reason to visit the news website's page directly.
This also isn't about stories posted by news organizations on Facebook. It's about people posting links to news stories on their own pages.
If people aren't clicking, then their headlines and summaries are either not interesting enough or too revealing.
The news media needs to put up strong paywalls and give up on full subscriptions. No one wants to pay $100 per news source to access hundreds of articles they don't want to read. They need to let people pay per article. Paying one article at a time is too expensive due to transaction fees. They need to offer something like 40 articles for $20 and request another payment when the 40 articles run out.
The news media needs social media to spread their article links around. Charging social media per click will result in their article links being reduced or blocked because of the cost. News media with lower cost links will be promoted.
Or maybe people just aren't interested in news beyond headlines at all and if society wants news to exist it needs to be subsidized. What better way to subsidize than forcing the people who are profiting off it to pay its creators?
> if society wants news to exist it needs to be subsidized.
Does society want to subsidize mostly clickbait journalism and incentivize creators to predominantly write articles that will be shared widely? Or if society wants to subsidize news beyond headlines, might there be other content they would prefer is subsidized?
I think giving everyone $10-50 a year or something as a tax rebate to be spent on news organizations is a better way to subsidize news that people actually want, but that seems like a tough political sell.
> multiplying the lowest personal income tax rate (15%) by the total of all amounts paid by the individual for qualifying subscription expenses in the year up to $500.
Not a Canadian so I've never heard of this before, but does this mean it's just a 15% discount?
Real journalism is dangerous and often thankless job because it must report inconvenient facts. Much easier to watch twitter feed, pick hot takes and wrap them into a "news article" burrito. Even Reuters today is pure rubbish.
There's a store giving away "free" coffee, if you agree to have your photo taken and shared publically on social media. And you agree to sign up to their mailing list. And, in the very fine print, you implicitly agree to have your contact info shared with other companies for the purposes of direct marketing. (Of course, you can opt out of the mailing list after you receive your first email... but as for the other companies that now also have your email address, well then it's not so clear. I suppose you'll just have to deal with those, individually, over the course of the weeks/months/years that you receive (and try to opt out of) their marketing barrage.) But hey, free coffee, right?
Next to that store is another coffee shop. This store charges $1.75 for a rather plain, unmarked cup of surprisingly adequate coffee. The store has a tip jar on the counter that's clearly labeled as going towards supporting the local kids' hockey team. (Does it actually go there? Who knows. But people report feeling good dropping loose change in there once in a while, and that's sufficient.) The store clerk knows the regular patrons by name, and the staff tend to "source locally" (not just their materials, but even for their part-time and student help during peak seasons). They're small. They're struggling. And thanks to the "free shop" next door, there's even talk of raising their prices to $2/cup for a small.
Given that scenario, will people choose the "free" coffee? You bet your ass they will. But know these 2 things: there will still be a sizable portion of folks that, given the above scenario, would STILL choose to pay for a product if they knew the "warm fuzzy benefits" that came along for the ride. In other words: money isn't everything.
The 2nd thing to note is that, after a while (perhaps, after being sufficiently educated? Or just being tired of treated like a product themselves?) there will be folks who jump ship from the "free store" in search of a more sustainable and ethical alternative.
I suppose it might happen in the other direction as well (people leaving the pay shop in order to get free coffee next door) but I hope by now you can understand WHY someone would want to pay a nominal fee for something that is apparently "free" somewhere else.
Re: “news companies should write articles that are worth reading in full”.
Tell me: why is the first, highest-upvoted comment to every paywalled article posted on HN, actually just an archive.xx link that defeats that paywall? Coincidence?
It strikes me that writing quality content is not actually the challenge; people here certainly read paywalled content, for free, on the regular. Perhaps monetization is actually just really hard.
For me, the problem is there isn't a lot of high-quality content centralized in one or two services I'd be willing to pay for like that. There's maybe one or two articles worth reading a year in a given pay-for service, and that's just not worth my money.
I'm certainly not going to subscribe to every service out there to get a variety of news, because it's cost prohibitive, and yet I'd like a variety, because high-quality content is so spread out. What I want, and what I suspect several others want, either isn't available or isn't easy to discover.
If there was a way to pay small fee to read just one article, say $1 article, I would pay. Someone needs to come up with micropayment system that works for news media. Another alternative that may work is a single subscription that gives you access to all major publications, similar to what Spotify did for music. Did anyone try building a startup like that? Would it be possible to get major publications on board for that kind of system?
The problem is that some people would prefer to pay with a subscription, and others with micropayments. If two vendors compete between these options, the result is a natural price war with a price of zero.
Given that subscriptions are generally more profitable for the provider, we should expect subscriptions to dominate over micropayments.
This argument is from https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/price.war.pdf and is one of the few economic analyses from the dawn of the web age that has proven truly prescient. To quote another of Odlyzko's papers from several years later, "Micropayments are the payment method of the future, and always will be."
Yes! Check out axate.com. It's a tool that publishers can add to their site, which enables them to charge per article or per day/week as well as offer subscriptions or ask for voluntary contributions.
Apple news does this. And it has the backing of a big company that keeps gaining outlets rather than losing it like the other option linked. I can't find a single one that I read that isn't on it. https://www.apple.com/apple-news/publications/
I think Blendle is slowly dying. There are less and less news orgs publishing through them, so it seems like it isn’t a viable model either, which is a shame.
I see lots of articles get posted which are worth reading in full, but the comments under them make it clear few if any people actually read them.
I don't really see how you change that behavior. People are drawn to the path of least resistance, and that path is often just reading the headline and brief summary before making your comment and moving on to the next thing in your social media feed.
The value social media companies add is creating a space where users feel like they get all their news (and other things), and can converse about it either with friends and family or like-minded strangers. I don't see how news outlets themselves can compete with that without essentially seeking to replace Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc.
I think it's fair to say that social media companies profiting off other people's labor should share that financial liability.
Facebook can just replace corporate media with alternative media outlets that provide the same news. In fact, the alternative media was doing extremely well on social media until around 2017 or so when they changed the algorithms to favor corporate media content.
From the perspective of Facebook, Reddit and Twitter, they can just replace CNN and Fox News with Jacobin and Breitbart and nobody will care that much except people who work for those outlets. In fact, most people will probably be happier to have sources that care less about pretending to be "objective" and just support their party's agenda (such outlets were successfully outcompeting corporate media on the social platforms before the circa 2017 algorithm changes).
In other words, the corporate media should be careful what they wish for because they might lose the fantastic gift horse they got from "big tech" 6 years ago. The value of a media outlet is in its influence over public opinion not its profitability and this greed driven proposal is a good way for corporate media to burn down their own influence.
I understand people's grievances with "mainstream media", but the fact that Jacobin and Breitbart get propped up as "better" alternatives is kind of terrifying.
At least they are more honest about providing a particular editorial lens to the type of news and content they produce.
Edit: that said, having them as primary sources for consumption is obviously much worse than actual journalism built on journalistic principals. We simply don't have much of that at all anymore (if we really ever did, which I think an argument could be made it was somewhat better previously).
> I see lots of articles get posted which are worth reading in full, but the comments under them make it clear few if any people actually read them.
This is how people have always read the news. In the old days, there was TV and radio news, which are really just headlines and a brief summary of stories, and newspapers. Most people didn't read the majority of the stories in the newspapers -- they'd skim the headlines, maybe read the first paragraph of a few, and read one or two of the stories that particularly interested them.
That's what's hard to monetize online. I have no answers for this problem, but it's certainly a problem.
Yep, and I don't mean to imply that this is necessarily bad, just pointing out how shifting the place where that headline and summary are consumed from radio and TV where the news source makes money to a third party social media site where they don't is a problem.
Good journalism follows an inverted pyramid writing structure, where the most important information is at the top (the headline) and the information becomes less critical the further down the article you move. This has conditioned people to think they can rely on the headline and the first few sentences to get a rough but accurate idea of what's going on. Getting them to actually go to the news website after they've gotten the most important bits from Facebook or Twitter is an incredibly tall order.
> they'd skim the headlines, maybe read the first paragraph of a few...
Yeah, we have newspapers at work. I still read them that way, not needing to read a whole segment unless it is obviously interesting beyond the core story.
I think you could easily argue that social media links to the news websites provides more value to the news website than vice-versa. If, for example, only the headline and sub-headline were quoted in the posts without the link -- which the Heritage Minister indicated would not constitute a fee -- any discussion could still take place, and certainly there would be even less benefit to the news organization.
Any news website can already prevent Facebook from generating link previews through meta tags, as I understand. But very few, if any, websites do this indicating that they understand it's not in their interests.
Perhaps people are not reading the articles because the _discussion_ is more valuable to them than the content of the article? Don't we all occasionally jump to the comment section on HN/reddit instead of reading the article? Seems to me that many news organizations have not yet figured out how to provide their customers with a product they are willing to "pay" for.
I mean, any brief visit to a small news website without an ad-blocker or, worse, a scroll through the comment section, should make this fairly evident.
"I think you could easily argue that social media links to the news websites provides more value to the news website than vice-versa. If, for example, only the headline and sub-headline were quoted in the posts without the link -- which the Heritage Minister indicated would not constitute a fee -- any discussion could still take place, and certainly there would be even less benefit to the news organization."
I don't see an argument here that supports it, though? How are they making money off having their content cannibalized?
The content isn’t being cannibalized, it’s being ignored. The customers they’re trying to extract revenue from have overwhelmingly decided that the content of the articles these outlets write is not worth reading. There isn’t an appropriate legislative solution for “customers aren’t interested in my product anymore”.
Then why are they making their content cannibalizable? They could make their content a walled garden, they could stop populating meta tags to make their content sharable, etc. The fact that they are choosing not to means that they like the traffic that is being generated from their content.
Presumably some people click-through to the article. In fact, I would guess that the majority of site traffic is generated through social media postings.
These organic posts/shares likely have significantly better CTR better than a similarly formatted ad, as they would have a "Sally likes this..." header.
People were content only reading headlines before. They couldn't be bothered to click the link and read the articles. I get why that's a problem. But now that the users aren't even being given links... the expectation is that users will go out of their way to find and read those articles?
Is their strategy litterally just playing hard to get?
The news company is in the biz of making money for themselves not for facebook. People not clicking the links and reading the articles weren't generating income for them (nor were they getting informed in any meaningful way) however they were enriching another platform (facebook).
So now the users aren't being given links, which they weren't really clicking to begin with, so the news company isn't losing any significant money but at least their work (articles) aren't being used to enrich facebook.
Thier strategy is that the users will eventually want news from somewhere and either they will go to the source, or they will grow dissatisfied with facebook since they don't show news anymore and facebook may pay for the content to keep their own users happy.
it's a minimal risk proposition for the media companies.
Except Facebook will still show news. Just not news articles from Canadian outlets. Unless the plan is to turn CBC readers into BBC readers, I still don't see how this is supposed to work out.
Is Canadian news so superior that a significant portion users who were previously content with Facebook's news feed will become so dissatisfied with it that they'll leave?
Is Canadian news so superior that a significant portion users who were previously content with Facebook's news feed will become so dissatisfied with it that they'll leave?
No. We just have a government that is captured by the media companies. We pay some of the highest fees in the world for internet and phone plans. Those providers happen to be the same media companies [1] [2] pushing for this crap legislation because they own all the newspapers and sports channels. Deep down, they would love to just block Google and Facebook for Canadians, but they know that’s not possible. So now they’re going to use their legislative cronies to ram this law through the House of Commons.
You're right, but this law does a terrible job of tackling that problem.
It only affects links, not the headline/description/picture blurb. A plain text link would cost FB money, while a headline/description/picture with no link would cost FB nothing.
And presumably FB would only block link-sharing if doing so was a net positive for them.
This implementation is based off fundamentally backwards understandings of the flow of value on the web. The appropriate implementation of this would just be a straight-up corporate tax of social media companies and an accompanying subsidy of news orgs, not this weird linking nonsense.
The news sites can certainly add a robots.txt page or stop crawling from Facebook/Google in other ways. I'd even be fine with the law saying "Google/Facebook can't do automated summaries of the page content" or whatever, allow that to be opt-in/out.
The bullshit part is saying Google has to pay for the privilege of linking out to the sites. Ridiculous.
The issue with this is that news is largely fungible. If any news source adds a robots.txt that stops aggregators than other news sources will instantly rip off their content and put it on google. Since they don't actually employ any journalists but just an AI summarizer bot their expenses are low enough that they can make money off the few people who actually click the link.
The problem with this strategy is that eventually all the actual news sources will run out of money and the journalists will be laid off, at which point there's no news for the scalper sites to copy.
That's just your assumption. Don't get me wrong - it sounds plausible, but it is unlikely that such scenario would have played out.
Maybe we have too many news outlets - you can even read that some employ AI already to write articles for them. They are going for quantity over quality.
There are always going to be people wanting to gossip over a headline and if a news source doesn't provide much beyond that, are they actually providing anything of value?
When we didn't have internet, many people would have looked at newspapers on display and discussed headlines without actually buying a newspaper. Was it a problem then?
Most of the Canadian media market is owned by American interests so really we're just watching two American companies duke it out over who gets advertising money paid by companies selling American consumer shit.
As a Canadian it's really hard to give a shit about any of this.
> People are not reading the articles in full (and therefore being presented with ads, or a subscription paywall), but they are engaging on the social media platform
There are no SEO summaries here, commenters are encouraged to read full articles before commenting (and often shamed if they obviously haven't), and what's posted here is often non-journalistic "news" (blogs etc) or outright non-news.
> I believe this will hopefully make news companies get back to a profitable business
It won't. Very few people who current aren't paying for news are just going to start. The incenssent news readers pay for news already. The others will move on to other less reliable content.
Would a robots.txt-equivalent solution satisfy both parties?
Media orgs could ban the indexing of their pages by specific scrapers, and users on those social networks would just see a raw URL, not a preview with headline+image+blurb?
> The problem here is that people are not, at scale, hitting the news company website
Maybe that's something the news companies have to work on - such as working on making these sites more useful and attractive to the users, instead of adding more ads and paywalls and then running to the government screaming "people don't want to visit our sites, please save us".
How is this different to people from yesteryear just skimming the headlines at the local grocers then putting the paper down and buying their cigarettes?
I'm old enough to remember my grand father doing that in the 90s in the same store he visited since the 50s.
> If news companies don't want people accessing their content through the web, shouldn't they simply take down their web sites?
That's clearly not the issue. The news companies obviously do want people to access their sites over the web and pay for the privilege. This argument is both incorrect and disingenuous.
The problem is that search and social media companies have been permitted to appropriate and monetize other people's content in different ways. They're parasitic. I don't think that links are really the problem and I'm not surprised that the Liberals have missed the forest for the trees. They do that. The real issue is providing the significant part of the content without requiring people to go to the actual site.
> The problem is that search and social media companies have been permitted to appropriate and monetize other people's content in different ways. They're parasitic.
By this logic, Facebook, Google et.al. dropping links to these news outlets would help these companies. Furthermore, they can already opt out of being crawled through their robots.txt file. But of course, this logic is total BS which is why they don't opt of being indexed.
Then the news media needs to modify their headlines, images and summaries to be less revealing so their content isn't stolen and so people will want to click through and read their articles.
Forcing social media to pay for links users post or click is only going to end up in the news media becoming poorer because social media will demote articles that cost more and promote articles that cost less.
I scanned through the bill (at third reading [1]). On the face of it, it seems to be intended to "level the playing field" between powerful search engines and social media platforms and Canadian news organizations, allegedly because "there is a significant bargaining power imbalance" between the platforms and the journalists.
But if you have lived in Canada for any length of time, you will know that this is a country ruled by a small number of highly profitable corporations, which are largely controlled by a few wealthy families. For instance:
- Corus Entertainment is 80% controlled by the family of JR Shaw.
- Rogers Communications is controlled by the family of Ted Rogers (via a trust)
- Quebecor is controlled by Pierre Péladeau
Indeed, only BCE (the company that owns Bell Canada) is truly a diversely controlled public corporation.
So really, this bill could be considered as the government acting to protect the interests of three wealthy Canadian families.
Good. Payment for links is a really dumb policy, and if it works for news it will leech into other areas until the internet is a minefield of tolls and taxes for anyone who wants to aggregate information in a useful way -- including sites like HN and Wikipedia.
Seems like the news companies are shooting themselves in the foot, but it sounds good to me.
I would love a world where google and facebook are full of links to primary sources instead of news articles.
Imagine a world where you search "supreme court decision X", "California covid policy", or "FDIC action today" and the top result is the responsible agency statement followed by blogs.
Under C-18 it also includes "indexing", and Google has indicated they will also remove them from search results, this isn't just shooting in the foot, its suicide.
Canadian news organizations don't care, because they're all heavily subsidized by the government, and so essentially state media[1]:
> But given the trend in Canadian media, I’d guess low Thousands… possibly 10-20k if they do really well, but also quite possibly down into the hundreds some episodes… C-SPAN, a sorta equivalent network, got 440,000 viewers for the 2020 republican convention and 76,000 for the 2020 Democratic convention (Citation)… so divide by 10 for the Canadian population…divide by 2 to 10 again for how exciting a week night of TVO isn’t compared to a 2020 US political convention… and ya a few single digit thousand, or even a few hundred viewers on an off night… that’s what we’d estimate for an Average episode of the Agenda.
> The Agenda was thriving as a property in the Internet age. If anything the internet was a massive boon to it. It went from this obscure regional talk show in Ontario to regularly getting hundreds of thousands of views internationally on YouTube.
> The Agenda had dozens of videos in the 2015-2016 period that got millions of views. One of Jordan Peterson’s more famous appearance on The Agenda got 8.5 million views. for a long form interview!? Those are Joe Rogan numbers!
> How the hell does that happen!? How do you go from Joe Rogan big, to smaller than my hobby Substack?
> Hell How does The Agenda pay the production costs!? As of writing, this substack doesn’t pay for the coffee I drink writing it. (please subscribe) How do they produce a 5 day a week show with multiple full time staff for…
I would love a world where google and facebook are full of links to primary sources instead of news articles.
That's great if you have time to read whatever it is and/or have the knowledge to parse through the language. Most folks aren't going to read the paper nor the overall decision. Time constraints, stress, and simply not being educated in the field (or understanding legal terms) keep folks from doing this.
On top of that, there are definitely times that the news is the primary source. Where else are you going to learn about war, drought, weather, protests, food recalls, and other such things? You'll probably find weather, but nothing on protests. Sure, you can go to "sources", but you have to actively find them.
News might not be the same as it was, but it isn't like it doesn't still have a use.
I'd really like to have rules about headlines/reporting accurately portraying things, but that's a conversation for another time.
That is because most of the "news" is not original reporting any more. Everyone is just feeding off each other so if the store is not at site A, it will be on Site B through 184,284,756 of which at least one of them will still be sharable on Facebook, and in Google news thus the traffic will just move to those sites and users will share and engage with them losing nothing...
Life is really weird for me. If you go by the numbers, we seem to have the best availability of, well, everything, compared to 30 or 40 years ago.
But as someone that has lived through that timeframe, it feels like those things are a cheap, hollow, plastic piece of shit version of their former selves.
I am still undecided if quality has actually dropped, or if culture has just gotten more consumerist and we use "everything is poorly made" as a trope to justify more consumption.
For example, when I bought my home 5 years it came with a Washer and Dyer in the basement, these were not high end units, and I fully expected to need to replace them. However getting large appliances out of my basement is a pain in the ass, so 2 years ago when the dryer broke I was faced with having to get it out of the basement.
You know what I did instead, I watched a YT video, bought a rebuild kit on Amazon and spent a Sunday afternoon fixing it myself. Cost me about 5 hours of time, and $75 in parts. Been working fine since.
In the "old days" the expense of the item required them to be repaired as a large appliance would be a big purchase. Today because of the efficiency and automation in modern manufacturing the cost of a large appliance may be higher in real terms, if you looked at it from something like "per hour of average labor to buy" it is very cheap, to the point that paying a repair person to spend 2 hours + $75 in parts to fix my dryer likely exceeds the cost of just buying a new one down at Lowes.
In the end I dont know of quality has dropped or if things have just gotten cheaper to make....
Same with news... Information used to be very expensive to disseminate. Printing Press, Books, etc. as Technology has increased the cost to disseminate has dropped to the point where information flow is basically free today.
> But as someone that has lived through that timeframe, it feels like those things are a cheap, hollow, plastic piece of shit version of their former selves.
Tech companies said the same in Australia. They are all now paying. Because as soon as their ability to bully content companies due to their monopoly scale is taken away, turns out they still making a ton of money scraping news content, even if they have to pay for it now.
I think that is highly wishful thinking. In reality the links will just go to misinformation sites that are not on the up-and-up and thus not classified as actual news sources.
Rupert Murdoch literally forced google and facebook to pay him money for directing traffic to his sites.
> Imagine a world where you search "supreme court decision X", "California covid policy", or "FDIC action today" and the top result is the responsible agency statement followed by blogs.
That would be ideal but ultimately, the social media companies always cave. Shows you the power of news companies and what they truly are when they can bully the likes of apple, google, facebook, microsoft, etc.
You would think that news publishers like news corp or the nytimes or cnn are no match for the tech giants. But history has proven otherwise.
Over here (New Zealand) the newspaper websites never link to anywhere. Especially not the webpage a story is talking about. Pictures get grabbed off websites[1] and credited to "Supplied".
This seems to mean that fewer Canadians will be engaging on Facebook, and that news articles from outlets that meet the official standards of Facebook and the government will have a smaller audience.
In terms of improving the quality of public discourse, how is this not win-win?
Arguably fewer news articles means less outrage, yielding lower engagement. The recipe for a news story requires events and a conflict to tell the story of, and official news sources largely fabricate that conflict and decorate it with the events of the day.
The fabrication comes from ideology, one that percieves everything as conflict and power struggle. It's why the news often seems like utter nonsense. I don't watch it anymore because I can't sustain a state of cringe that long, but anything that reduces its reach is something I can get behind.
But this will not lower engagment, User will Quote the headline and part of text and you just don't have the original link. The discussion will follow from there and worse than before. Now every discussion can by default be taken out of the context and cause even more outrage because it will not be verified by 99% of the users who will not go out of their way to search for the orginal link if it's not there. The discussion will continue as is shown uo until now without the need to read the article itself.
"What's you reference for this claim?" is not a valid question anymore because linking the reference is not allowed.
I don't get people who don't understand www make these laws. The concept of linking something is core to the idea of web. It is beautiful and useful and no one should need to pay for adding an hyperlink.
If media publications want others to not get access to the content, they can choose to not add OG tags or just not let the Google or social media bots scrape the information.
It's not about not understanding the web or the concept of linking. It's a reaction to a fundamental way that users are engaging with content.
User behavior has changed online, people are conditioned to tiktok / twitter length information snips, having off the cuff reactions, being the first to be outraged, etc.
It used to be that if someone linked something the BULK of the people who saw that link and were interested would click it and if they wanted to engage, they likely engaged on the site hosting the content first... now the bulk to the people don't click the link to read and instead engage only on their social media platform of choice.
This leads to:
* Increasingly divisive click bait titles
* Less informed populace (although they FEEL more informed)
* Echo chambers where people get re-enforced on their view of the TITLE (not content) because they are sharing and commenting with likeminded people rather than getting opposing opinions on the source website.
Not saying this bill is the solution but I disagree that it's being considered because people don't understand how linking on the web works.
> It used to be that if someone linked something the BULK of the people who saw that link and were interested would click it and if they wanted to engage...
I find myself reading comments more than news articles these days because almost every site is littered with modal popups, floating autoplay videos, dickbars covering most of the screen, consent banners, notification consent, location consent, not to mentioned ads, after every paragraph and sometimes almost impossible to scroll past without clicking. The internet has become extremely user hostile, and the true irony here (I can't believe I'm saying this) is that social media sites are focused on engagement so they're actually motivated to not make their UX a painful experience.
> now the bulk to the people don't click the link to read and instead engage only on their social media platform of choice.
but this is the fundamental issue with the bill, if I am hanging out with my friends IRL and I bring up a news report, the discussion happens between us without them going to the media site. They are confused about what happens when offline behaviour moves online.
As I said if they were really bothered about the users reading the title/subtitle from the news report on the social media site, all they need to do is to stop the bot from crawling and not add OG tags. That way a user just sees a hyperlink. It was mostly media sites who added OG tags willingly so that their content looked good in the feed.
Oh no. Users will have to interact with content other than largely low-quality, reposted, copied news articles. This will surely be the downfall of general public discourse online, as social media sites simply don't have a purpose beyond resharing news.
Good riddance. News sites lose, facebook loses, this feels like a net gain for sanity online.
Yes, exactly my first thought. Too many people get their news from FB headlines.
There was a user here who said something about people reading an obviously unresearched news article in a newspaper, knowing it is saying bullcrap BUT kept reading other pieces from that paper. Because one bad article doesn't make the whole newspaper worthless.
Find yourself a couple of newspapers and read them. Scan the front page. Get a wholer picture of the news. It's sad really printed newspapers have vanished so extensively.
Meanwhile on FB, people read a headline and that's it.
That isn't exclusive to FB. It's everywhere, reddit, twitter, hackernews. People have low attention spans and its getting lower and lower when you watch hundreds of 30s videos these days.
It's actually a bit concerning that I am unable to find any details on the proposed Online News Act. Will HN or Wikipedia be designated as digital platforms? Are digital platforms allowed to link to non-Canadian news sources? What are the enforcement mechanisms for web sites with no Canadian operations?
I think so, since Reddit was included in the stakeholder engagement process, along with Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Apple News Canada, Twitter, and Verizon Media (Yahoo) [1]
How stupid and self-defeating. Sharing links with your friends is the best way to get free advertising for your newspaper. Denying it will cut the revenue from newspapers, and I hope they all die from their short-sightedness. They may think I'll turn around and subscribe, but I'll just forget about them entirely.
Didn't they say the same thing to Australia when they tabled their version of this bill? And then did not Facebook cave? How is this statement at all credible in light of this?
> And Facebook knowingly and grubbily caused extra chaos as part of their effort to get their way
There is exceptionally little merit to this claim. They blocked links news outlets that would have subjected them to the link tax, and this block wasn't perfect. There was nothing to indicate that blocking sites that wouldn't have incurred the link tax was deliberate.
Nothing in the article contradicts my comment. Facebook deliberately took down links subject to the link tax, that much is not disputed. The notion that they also deliberately took down links to NOGs, government sites, and other sites not subject to the link tax is not substantiated. Facebook knew false-positives existed, but there's no evidence to suggest that they wouldn't have deployed a perfect filter were it feasible to to do.
Their filter for blocking sites subject to the link tax caught some NGOs and government agencies, there was zero evidence that this was intentional. "Some think X happened" is a vastly weaker claim. Some think the earth is flat. Some think the 2020 election was stolen.
For clarity, Murdoch was a proponent of the bill because the bill forced Google and Facebook to pay Murdoch for links. The Australian government literally wrote a bill that forced money to be paid to a media tycoon. Incredible, but true.
If you're not Australian, this is completely unsurprising.
Murdoch owns 2/3rds of all news media here. His headlines ensured the centre-right election victory in 2011 which was terrible for many reasons.
That government then cancelled our already in-progress national fibre broadband rollout in favour of inferior VDSL2, because (at the time) higher bandwidth was seen as a threat to cable TV. This was a multi-billion dollar waste of taxpayer money, and we now have the ~70th worst internet in the world for the ~10th highest price.
> Murdoch owns 2/3rds of all news media here. His headlines ensured the centre-right election victory in 2011 which was terrible for many reasons.
So then his headlines also ensured the centre-left election victory in 2022. Was that also terrible for many reasons?
> Have a guess who owns the cable TV networks.
Are you genuinely trying to make the claim that pay TV providers like Netflix and Disney Plus and friends don't work in Australia when they plainly do and have done for a long time? VDSL2 was always capable of it.
As conspiracy theories go I think your one needs some revising.
Pretty weak, kid. Admit to yourself that your conspiratorial thinking is irrational, straightforwardly dumb, and unsupported by the practical realities. You'll feel better.
Crony capitalism is one thing, but I think it's unheard of for the federal government of a Developed country to write and pass a bill that requires Google and Facebook to pay money directly to the monopoly media company in that country.
Note: The law only applies to Google and Facebook, and only requires money to be paid directly to NewsCorp (not other media outlets that might be "impacted"). The federal government is now writing laws to collect money for a private company.
The bill is straightforward and mandates paying for simply linking to a website. It's completely absurd. Facebook was in the right here, if you have any value for an open internet and free flow of information.
The bill seems rediculous. Imagine the non internet version where you weren't allowed to discuss the days headlines with a friend without buying the paper.
The great forces of those interested in suppressing the spread of news and those interested in being paid for their stories to be read are pretty much insurmountable but there is a way past this that neither will like: Simply deliver their conclusions, reasoning, mistakes, and an accurate report through Fair Use, &c.
I wouldn't be surprised if the benefactors of this tripe are even more upset about that. Maybe they will take the uphill fight and challenge fair use, and so on and so on. The foundation they stand on will evaporate beneath them over time and they'll rely on lobbying and ever more pretentious foundations than they had before.
We all wonder how the newsrooms and newspapers of yesteryear were so well funded and so able to nail an absolute home run in a time long gone but the answer is right in front of us. So much of the "news" is just a conduit of public relations, from the advertisers and worse, straight to the audience. At the same time, so much news made by actual reporters is not great for advertisers, the government, important people, etal.
There are absolutely answers but nobody wants to pay for them with money or other means.
Allowing quotes from news or summary re-wording of articles (which are pretty darn hard to prohibit) without allowing URLs to sources... is not so great for reliability and trustworthiness and fact-checking of news shared online.
I get what they are trying to do. I don't think there's a way to do it that isn't going to make everything much worse.
I'm going to say it: news articles are bad (and always have been) and AI will make it better.
The problem is that they usually provide too much context, or not nearly enough. So you either get bored reading it, or don't have the right information to know what's really going on. ie, it's not personalized.
Let's take the stuff going on with SVB right now. Your typical news article is going to start with new information, provide some additional context briefing the reader on how it happened, then go further into depth on what the new info its providing, or just ramble on with additional filler. But the reader doesn't know if its going to actually provide more useful info to them. And that's an actually interesting and complex story. How many news articles do you come across thats pretty much all filler, especially on social media?
AI would make articles interactive. "Tell more more about fractional banking", "does the Fed's statement mean this is a bailout?", "what does this mean for the broader economy?", "what are economists/politicians saying about the government's actions?" are all questions you could ask and get reasonable responses.
Perfect. Meta is doing good things as of late, like telling the UK govt to fuck off with the 'drop E2E encryption' bs. I hope more tech behemoths start to stand their ground.
Companies trying to maximize their profit >>> Authoritarian dystopia 24/7 surveillance governments ran by lunatics
The good time here is greedy Canadian news companies suffocating and crumbling thanks to such shortsighted legislation, which is exactly what they deserve. Facebook will not hurt one iota from this.
This bill is dumb and anti-internet/anti-information in every way possible.
As a Canadian, it bothers me that our politicians are willing to jump through mental hoops to avoid considering the most obvious solutions.
If news companies don't want people accessing their content through the web, shouldn't they simply take down their web sites? If they aren't willing to do that (because, say, the benefits outweigh the costs), then perhaps this isn't an issue that warrants legislation...