[HN Gopher] Facebook confirms it will drop news sharing in Canad...
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Facebook confirms it will drop news sharing in Canada under bill
C-18
Author : nohaydeprobleme
Score : 112 points
Date : 2023-03-13 12:25 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.michaelgeist.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.michaelgeist.ca)
| [deleted]
| drooopy wrote:
| I pray that they roll this feature out to the rest of the world.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| 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.
| wstrange wrote:
| Bill C-18 is a big wet kiss to a few large Canadian Media
| companies.
|
| Their business model is under stress because of the internet.
| Link taxes won't fix this and they set a terrible precedent.
|
| Quoting from Candaland[0]. "In Australia, an estimated 90 per
| cent of negotiated revenues flowed to the three largest media
| companies."
|
| That hardly bodes well for independent journalism. This is just a
| shakedown.
|
| [0] https://www.canadaland.com/canadas-online-news-act-must-
| be-t...
| ttul wrote:
| 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
| Peladeau
|
| 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.
|
| [1]
| https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/third-r...
| HappySweeney wrote:
| 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?
| clouddrover wrote:
| Yes, Facebook restored news content in Australia. Dropping news
| content was a negotiating tactic:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56165015
|
| And Facebook knowingly and grubbily caused extra chaos as part
| of their effort to get their way:
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-deliberately-caused-ha...
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > 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.
| clouddrover wrote:
| Except for everything that happened detailed in the article
| you didn't read.
| [deleted]
| Manuel_D wrote:
| 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.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| They also blocked NGOs and some gov agencies people were
| relying on to get critical alerts.
|
| It was a super shady move and some think it was
| intentional.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| 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.
| tqi wrote:
| *WSJ is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who was a vocal proponent of
| the bill[1][2]
|
| [1] https://www.vox.com/recode/22287971/australia-facebook-
| news-... [2] https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/media-
| bargaining-cod...
| grecy wrote:
| 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.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Why is that incredible? It sounds like simple crony
| capitalism, and we all know _that's_ alive and well.
| suprjami wrote:
| 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.
|
| Have a guess who owns the cable TV networks.
| clouddrover wrote:
| And Facebook was a vocal opponent of the bill, but you're
| happy to believe them?
| tqi wrote:
| You're choosing who to believe based on what, max
| outrage?
| clouddrover wrote:
| You're choosing who to believe based on what, a single
| source with a direct conflict of interest?
| zaltekk wrote:
| From the first paragraph:
|
| > the experience in Australia was that [Facebook's] removal [of
| news link sharing] had little impact on user engagement.
| HappySweeney wrote:
| Serves me right for commenting on the headline alone.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| But it did have a major impact on the traffic of those sites.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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.
| tensor wrote:
| 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.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| > I would love a world where google and facebook are full of
| links to primary sources instead of news articles.
|
| I would love a world where Facebook doesn't exist, and Google
| is but one player in a healthy search ecosystem.
|
| A boy can dream.
| suprjami wrote:
| You're 20 years too late. It was good at the time.
| badRNG wrote:
| Far more likely will be grainy reposted jpeg screen grabs of
| the title and first paragraph of the article being shared.
| choilive wrote:
| 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.
| brwck wrote:
| > Seems like the news companies are shooting themselves in the
| foot, but it sounds good to me.
|
| No. They are using their political power to extort money from
| social media companies.
|
| "Facebook to pay News Corp for content in Australia".
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56410335
|
| 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.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| There was no drop in user engagement when Meta tried it in
| Australia.
|
| However, traffic originating from Facebook has to represent a
| sizeable portion of incoming traffic for news site.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| 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...
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| yeah, that is kinda my point.
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| 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...
| brunoborges wrote:
| 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.
| twblalock wrote:
| 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!).
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| 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?
| viscanti wrote:
| > 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?
| marstall wrote:
| maybe Facebook should pay for the products it's using to
| engage to engage its own users?
| babypuncher wrote:
| 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.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| 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.
| babypuncher wrote:
| 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.
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| 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
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > 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?
|
| Why innovate when you can just regulate and rent seek "evil
| foreign tech giants"?
| CivBase wrote:
| I don't get it.
|
| 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?
| monkeywork wrote:
| What's not 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.
| CivBase wrote:
| 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?
| patmcc wrote:
| 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.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| 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.
| eloff wrote:
| > 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
|
| I feel like you just described Hacker News.
| suprjami wrote:
| 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.
| actuator wrote:
| FWIW, social media apps used to pull data using OG tags,
| media publications are free to not put those tags
| nvrmnd wrote:
| 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.
| kaczordon wrote:
| This is called hyperlinking. The entire web is built on this
| concept.
| Teever wrote:
| 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.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _Most of the Canadian media market is owned by American
| interests_
|
| What a weird thing to say, this is wildly untrue.
|
| Foreign ownership laws tilt this dramatically.
| justapassenger wrote:
| You'll get people sharing headlines from obscure blogs and
| then arguing about it.
|
| You cannot legislate changes to human nature.
| abigail95 wrote:
| Happy to support this bill extended to news sites that link to my
| personal website and information being forced to pay me for the
| privilege.
| slyall wrote:
| 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".
|
| [1] - Loophole in copyright laws for reporting
| favaq wrote:
| [flagged]
| dhritzkiv wrote:
| [flagged]
| h10h10h10 wrote:
| [dead]
| warkdarrior wrote:
| [flagged]
| bparsons wrote:
| [flagged]
| bawolff wrote:
| 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.
| h10h10h10 wrote:
| [dead]
| twblalock wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| motohagiography wrote:
| 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?
| CivBase wrote:
| Genuine question: Why would most users engage less with
| Facebook as a result of this?
|
| I'd expect most users to continue what they were doing before,
| but now their feed of headlines will come exclusively from
| international sources.
|
| I doubt I'd engage less with HN if they banned articles from US
| companies.
| motohagiography wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| Sounds good to me. I already block news pages on my Facebook
| feed.
| tensor wrote:
| I already block facebook pages and go direct to a few good news
| sources.
| actuator wrote:
| 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.
| monkeywork wrote:
| 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.
| pwinnski wrote:
| Lucky Canada!
| drbojingle wrote:
| Don't threaten me with a good time
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