Ironically, no FB users will be able to read about this from a Canadian news source.
It's kind of weird to describe FB users as being in a cage where their browser is incapable of going anywhere else.
Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
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Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#52Why was the government of Canada advertising on Facebook and Instagram anyway?
Same reason it, and other governments advertise programs, PSAs, etc, on television, YouTube, etc. It reaches eyeballs.
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#53Isn't the issue that Google/Facebook sell ads and make money from linking to news sources? And those news sources have their costs but don't see any income? I think about this often when I read a story on some small-town newspaper, and know that the newspaper is making nothing off of me and millions of others reading their story. Didn't Australia implement a similar law and get Google/Facebook to pay something? There…
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Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#54Why was the government of Canada advertising on Facebook and Instagram anyway?
Tourism.
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if you think newspapers are vital to democracy, that doesn't oblige other businesses to sell newspapers. These newspapers own their own distribution mechanisms (websites) that are unaffected by the decision of one third party website to part ways with them. Okay, but facebook is really ubiquitous so that makes it different... How is this any different from... the one grocery store in town removing their newspape…
It is, however, an interesting hypothetical to ask: if journalism itself is entirely unprofitable, such that all the newspaper companies eventually shut down, and private journalism stops being done — then what should we, as a public, do to retain our duty to be informed? Can there be such a thing as "non-partisan state-sponsored media"?
> Can there be such a thing as "non-partisan state-sponsored media"?
You can add enough layers of indirection and semi-elected committees and cultural expectations to make it mostly non-partisan (Think the process for awarding government-funded research grants)[1], but a government devoted to turning it into a partisan organ can, with enough effort, eventually corrupt any such system.
That's why you need to push back, and punish governments that are trying to shift cultural expectations that prevent weaponization of various public institutions.
[1] The incentives for corrupting this are far greater for media than they are for science, so I can't expect it will work well in practice. PBS, NPR, CBC, BBC are always a political football for this reason.
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#56Isn't the issue that Google/Facebook sell ads and make money from linking to news sources? And those news sources have their costs but don't see any income? I think about this often when I read a story on some small-town newspaper, and know that the newspaper is making nothing off of me and millions of others reading their story. Didn't Australia implement a similar law and get Google/Facebook to pay something? There…
My understanding of the core issue is people aren’t clicking through to read the article, but they’re commenting on Facebook based on the headline. Facebook gets ad views and user-generated content/comments, and the organization doing the reporting sees nothing of the economic value generated in this scenario. (Hacker News is specialized in audience and news orgs generally aren’t posting all their stories here)
CBC tried to head this problem off by disabling comments on all their Facebook posts so people would comment on CBC.ca.
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#57Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#58The TLDR of this issue: Canadian govt: When someone posts a link to a news article on Facebook, that is like stealing from that news publisher. Facebook: Your logic makes no sense, but okay, we will stop doing that. Govt: No, we don't want you to stop posting the links, we want you to pay a fee every time someone posts a link. Facebook: No thank you. Govt: You're bullying us and behaving irresponsibly! We won't stand…
Isn't the issue that Facebook/Google don't just share the link, they share the content behind the link as well?
Close. Sharing it on Facebook means you’ll comment on the story on Facebook and not on the linked website hosting the comment. Facebook gets the linger time to show you more ads but the organization doing the actual reporting misses out.
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#59Isn't the issue that Google/Facebook sell ads and make money from linking to news sources? And those news sources have their costs but don't see any income? I think about this often when I read a story on some small-town newspaper, and know that the newspaper is making nothing off of me and millions of others reading their story. Didn't Australia implement a similar law and get Google/Facebook to pay something? There…
My understanding of the core issue is people aren’t clicking through to read the article, but they’re commenting on Facebook based on the headline. Facebook gets ad views and user-generated content/comments, and the organization doing the reporting sees nothing of the economic value generated in this scenario. (Hacker News is specialized in audience and news orgs generally aren’t posting all their stories here) CBC t…
My issue with this, is this a problem that needs to be solved? Do we need to guarantee monetization of every human interaction?
If my friend and I go a cafe, see a newspaper headline, and have a discussion about that headline without ever opening that newspaper should the cafe have to pay for that discussion? Why should any media adjacent interaction anywhere happen without payment? If the cafe is playing music, they're paying licence fees for that. Why not everything?
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#60Isn't the issue that Google/Facebook sell ads and make money from linking to news sources? And those news sources have their costs but don't see any income? I think about this often when I read a story on some small-town newspaper, and know that the newspaper is making nothing off of me and millions of others reading their story. Didn't Australia implement a similar law and get Google/Facebook to pay something? There…
> And those news sources have their costs but don't see any income? Don’t those news sources have ads too ? How are they making income from local views?
Because very few people click through to the article, they just read the headline, summary, and comments on Facebook. Facebook is capturing most of the economic value generated by these articles.