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An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

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Re: An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

#81

Post by RileyJames »

pfundstein wrote: post #46
pawnednow wrote: post #4

Australian government and more specifically Rod sims, the chair of ACCC should get some counselling. Really good counselling. They clearly don't understand how publishing works and have a biased understanding of who is benefitting from this relationship. However, the entire Australian media has been nothing but puppets controlled by murdoch. The one true less biased source is ABC which has been muddied by constant fe…

> the entire Australian media has been nothing but puppets controlled by murdoch You're going a bit heavy on hyperbole there. There's a decent amount of non-murdoch news; ABC, SBS, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian, The Conversation, etc.

TheAge has gone to sh*t. It’s basically a collection of government press releases now. I’d been noticing just though reading it, and then their own journalists made the same point. It had become pretty blatant.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/14/journalists-at...

Re: An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

#82

Post by chrismsimpson »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #51
chrismsimpson wrote: post #33

I am no fan of this right wing government, which is letting Fake News Corp write it’s media policy, but Facebook does not have an inherent right to other people’s content. Rather than redistributing ad dollars away from big tech, this is likely to force people consuming news to go directly to the source. Either that or it will further dumb down our discourse (though Fake News Corp is doing a pretty good job of that a…

Facebook is not taking anyones content. News companies willingly submit their content to facebook and now demand that facebook should pay for the stuff they submitted. So facebook is taking the logical step by stopping them from submitting the content. I can't walk up to someone and hand them the keys to my car and then demand that they now owe me the value of the car.

This is exactly what Facebook are doing (as evidenced by Facebook stating they'll block this feature for Australian users if the proposed law goes ahead). A third party generates the content then Facebook's user base shares it within their network. Any advertising revenue generated in the meantime is pocketed solely by Facebook.

My point still stands. The state of online advertising as of 2020 is such that there are essentially two vast monopolies (Facebook and Google) and you can't advertise anything online without going through one of their systems. In addition, they generate essentially no valuable content themselves (I emphasis content here, I'm not suggesting they provide no value whatsoever).

For a bit of context here, the Australian Broadcast Corporation (ABC) is arguably Australia's most respected media organisation but as it's publicly funded it generates no advertising revenue itself directly and takes no donations. It also has been hit hard by austerity from this same right wing government in recent years.

To suggest we do nothing and continue to let any revenue generated be vacuumed up by the big tech giants is unacceptable.

Re: An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

#83

Post by floatingatoll »

boloust wrote: post #75
valleyjo wrote: post #10

I don’t like FB as a company. However I have to admit, they are correct that news organizations benefit the most from this relationship. Why doesn’t google do the same thing? Don’t index news sites. Googles response seemed less effective than FB’s.

The legislation explicitly prevents platforms from deindexing/downranking news sites that participate in the code in favour of other sites that do not. Which places Google in a more difficult position, because if a user searches for some news, Google is essentially forced to return results from a participating news organisation, or not show any relevant news results at all. While Facebook can just prevent users from…

Google absolutely can stop users from searching for News, by removing all News tabs, News boxes, and News News-specific metadata uses (such as current events timeliness) in search results at Google.com.au. They can then legitimately claim that they are no longer indexing news, only websites in general, and if site operators don’t wish to be indexed they can follow the standard practices for exclusion.

Whether they (Google) will do so or not is a timely question to consider.

Re: An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

#84

Post by joshuamorton »

Barrin92 wrote: post #57
joshuamorton wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because the argument being made is that facebook is paying the news orgs less than they're owed. But the reality is that facebook is providing a free service to the news sites. You normally have to pay someone for advertising. Facebook (and Google) give it away for free.

This seems to miss the point because normally platforms also have to pay for content. Facebook is a platform that hosts user/business produced content. No content, no reason to go to facebook. Likewise, Facebook brings attention to content owners. All of this is 'free' nominally. That's not the question, the question is who has more market power and squeezes who.

Are you saying that Google should pay me to include my website in it's search results?

Re: An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

#85

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

Barrin92 wrote: post #57
joshuamorton wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because the argument being made is that facebook is paying the news orgs less than they're owed. But the reality is that facebook is providing a free service to the news sites. You normally have to pay someone for advertising. Facebook (and Google) give it away for free.

This seems to miss the point because normally platforms also have to pay for content. Facebook is a platform that hosts user/business produced content. No content, no reason to go to facebook. Likewise, Facebook brings attention to content owners. All of this is 'free' nominally. That's not the question, the question is who has more market power and squeezes who.

> normally platforms also have to pay for content

? This doesn't seem generically true to me. Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, Instagram, Vine, FourSquare, Yelp, Pinterest, DeviantArt, LiveJournal, Xanga, Medium, etc. None of these platforms pay for user-generated content like link posting. When analyzing this issue you can't get away from considering what the platform is a platform for. If it's a platform for UGC, the general rule is that the sharing of the content is a service provided to users at no cost. The vast majority of users receive no monetary payment from these platforms. Some of them rev share if they advertise on content, but that's about as far as it goes. Facebook should rev share on any revenue from advertisements they place on news content ($0).

Re: An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

#86

Post by themacguffinman »

tempestn wrote: post #67
Barrin92 wrote: post #9

I haven't followed this debate too closely but this seems pretty disingenuous. >The ACCC presumes that Facebook benefits most in its relationship with publishers, when in fact the reverse is true. News represents a fraction of what people see in their News Feed and is not a significant source of revenue for us News may not directly contribute much ad revenue but it surely is a huge driver of engagement on the website…

It says they must negotiate, and crucially, that if they can't come to an agreement they must enter binding arbitration. Currently publishers can go to Facebook and say, "Pay us for linking to our pages." And Facebook can say, "No, we don't derive benefit from links to your pages; we're not paying you for them." Under this law, the publisher could then force FB into binding arbitration where, presumably, their $0 off…

The draft law explicitly prevents Facebook from blocking only news outlets that attempted to negotiate [1]:

> The draft code would prohibit digital platforms discriminating against the news content of news media businesses on the basis of their participation in the code.

This is crucial. A negotiation that you cannot genuinely back out from is not a negotiation at all, it is effectively extortion. If Facebook cannot back out of a negotiation with an individual news outlet, I think it will choose to back out of news altogether. If Facebook is being honest that news is not much of a commercial interest for them, this is the rational choice.

[1] https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/DPB%20-%20Draft%20news%...

Re: An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

#87

Post by jsnell »

Barrin92 wrote: post #9

I haven't followed this debate too closely but this seems pretty disingenuous. >The ACCC presumes that Facebook benefits most in its relationship with publishers, when in fact the reverse is true. News represents a fraction of what people see in their News Feed and is not a significant source of revenue for us News may not directly contribute much ad revenue but it surely is a huge driver of engagement on the website…

> Also I haven't figured out yet what part of the law actually would imply that Facebook needs to blackout news wholesale. As I read it the law merely requires that Facebook negotiate with each publisher.

A negotiation is something that ends up with mutually agreeable terms, or no deal.

That's not the case here. The news companies do not need to negotiate in good faith, they are allowed to force the tech companies into binding arbitration. The arbitration will of course be done by people in the pockets of the news companies. It's legally mandated that what is considered is the cost of producing news and the benefit that the tech companies get from news. The inverse of the benefit for the news companies and the costs for the tech companies are not to be considered.

Oh, and that no deal option you'd usually have? Not in this "negotation". If the tech companies serve any news from any source, including non-Australian sources, they're at the mercy of any qualifying news org that wants to fleece them in this kangaroo arbitration.

Re: An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

#88

Post by chrismsimpson »

tempestn wrote: post #69
Polylactic_acid wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is not taking anyones content. News companies willingly submit their content to facebook and now demand that facebook should pay for the stuff they submitted. So facebook is taking the logical step by stopping them from submitting the content. I can't walk up to someone and hand them the keys to my car and then demand that they now owe me the value of the car.

They're not even submitting their content; they're submitting links to their content. Readers still need to go to the publishers' pages to read the articles.

This isn't even true when you consider news articles that are cached by Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

Re: An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

#89

Post by ludston »

stephen_g wrote: post #74
pfundstein wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the entire Australian media has been nothing but puppets controlled by murdoch You're going a bit heavy on hyperbole there. There's a decent amount of non-murdoch news; ABC, SBS, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian, The Conversation, etc.

It's actually getting worse and worse. The Age and the Herald, having been sold to Nine are much lower quality than they once were. The Government is putting more and more pressure on the ABC, with constant (effective) funding cuts, and both direct editorial interference or indirect (i.e. threatening more funding cuts because of journalists publishing articles they don't like). With the ABC, this has been going on fo…

That's not even mentioning that the chairman of 9News is former treasurer of the conservative party which Murdoch is backing.

Re: An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

#90

Post by harry8 »

jedberg wrote: post #76
harry8 wrote: post #63

2 Points: Underscoring that facebook is not now, nor was it ever a good source of news is a very good thing. Don't get your news from facebook. Don't get it via facebook. Anything on facebook that isn't actually personal is tainted and horrible to be treated with extreme suspicion. Facebook have earned that reputation and deserve it. People going elsewhere on the internet than facebook to get news will reduce faceboo…

I get lots of news from Facebook. My friends who I trust post articles that they've read. It's a perfectly fine source of news if your friends are the kind of people who actually think critically and read the articles. If the news you get from Facebook is suspect, it's your friends that are the problem, not Facebook.

you get that news from your friends that facebook algorithms deign to show you.

They have algorithms to influence. They have said so. They were trying to manipulate people's mood with it for "research"

This isn't contraversial.

It's a garbage source of news because of that filter. Even if your friends are lovely, wise, empathetic, intelligent and critically minded and their editorial selection is beyond reproach - that isn't what you get.

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