Meta starts process to end news access in Canada over law on paying publishers
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Re: Meta starts process to end news access in Canada over law on paying publishers
#2This is excellent news. For one, there will be a significant drop in fear mongering click baiting news, and then news publishers will be starved of traffic. The industry needs a hard reset. Would love for this to happen in the UK as well.
Re: Meta starts process to end news access in Canada over law on paying publishers
#3Rephrased: Meta starts process to leave Canadian news sites alone (eg: stop scraping sites for content).
This has nothing to do with our access to news sites in Canada.
Longer version: Meta has been copying content from Canadian news sites, to republish on it's own sites. News sites liked this because it referred free eyeballs & traffic to their sites.
Canadian news biz got Gov to write a law. The law forces some platforms to pay cash if they scrape news (and send free traffic/users to the site). Meta is fine with sending free traffic but is opting out of sending free cash too.
Re: Meta starts process to end news access in Canada over law on paying publishers
#4People in support of this need to consider how this type of legislation affects the integrity of the internet.
This bill is not about supporting independent media like they claim. This is first and foremost a link tax, and the result of it is damaging to free press. Independent media sources depend on traffic from social media platforms to function. They themselves are often the ones sharing the links to their own content to drive traffic and readership from in which they monetize through ads. Furthermore, many of these local publishers leverage their social media following to share content on behalf of other local businesses through sponsored articles and posts. The Canadian government playing strong man here when repeatedly warned of the outcome is putting independent media companies in serious jeopardy of remaining solvent.
Meta and Google are in the right here, and I hope they continue to stand their ground. If they cave on this issue, it sets a terrible precedent that jeopardizes the health of the internet as we know it. Companies should not have to pay the source whenever a link is shared on their platforms. It's just backwards.
If you are talking about situations where they are scraping and displaying the contents of an article, that is a different issue, and seemingly not one that is the primary target of this bill.
Re: Meta starts process to end news access in Canada over law on paying publishers
#5Platforms copy news stories because news sites explicitly allow it. News sites can revoke platform access at any time - and don't.
Re: Meta starts process to end news access in Canada over law on paying publishers
#6Rephrased: Meta starts process to leave Canadian news sites alone (eg: stop scraping sites for content). This has nothing to do with our access to news sites in Canada. Longer version: Meta has been copying content from Canadian news sites, to republish on it's own sites. News sites liked this because it referred free eyeballs & traffic to their sites. Canadian news biz got Gov to write a law. The law forces some pla…
> Rephrased: Meta starts process to leave Canadian news sites alone (eg: stop scraping sites for content).
Not sure what your purpose here is but when you share an article on facebook, you usually get "the title", a leading picture, and occasionally a summary. Now you'll just get an unprocessed URL. It doesn't copy the article verbatim into feeds as you have described.
Now it will just push through links as links. That seems fine as well. I like the fact that you can present or not present content, for whatever terms are negotiated.
Re: Meta starts process to end news access in Canada over law on paying publishers
#7This is excellent news. For one, there will be a significant drop in fear mongering click baiting news, and then news publishers will be starved of traffic. The industry needs a hard reset. Would love for this to happen in the UK as well.
> For one, there will be a significant drop in fear mongering click baiting news. The industry needs a hard reset.
While most news orgs need schooling, what a hard reset typically means is some action that would expand the growing news vacuum absolutely.
What we see filling the existing vacuum is worse than worthless content. It is patently false content (often posing as local news), specifically crafted to advance harm-based agendas. That would seem to indicate a hard reset isn't the way forward.
Re: Meta starts process to end news access in Canada over law on paying publishers
#8Rephrased: Meta starts process to leave Canadian news sites alone (eg: stop scraping sites for content). This has nothing to do with our access to news sites in Canada. Longer version: Meta has been copying content from Canadian news sites, to republish on it's own sites. News sites liked this because it referred free eyeballs & traffic to their sites. Canadian news biz got Gov to write a law. The law forces some pla…
> Rephrased: Meta starts process to leave Canadian news sites alone (eg: stop scraping sites for content). Not sure what your purpose here is but when you share an article on facebook, you usually get "the title", a leading picture, and occasionally a summary. Now you'll just get an unprocessed URL. It doesn't copy the article verbatim into feeds as you have described. Now it will just push through links as links. Th…
> Not sure what your purpose here is
To illustrate that a platform that withdraws from republishing news content doesn't end our news access.
> but when you share an article on facebook, you usually get "the title", a leading picture, and occasionally a summary. Now you'll just get an unprocessed URL
This doesn't seem transformative to my point. Could you expound a bit?
Re: Meta starts process to end news access in Canada over law on paying publishers
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Rephrased: Meta starts process to leave Canadian news sites alone (eg: stop scraping sites for content). Not sure what your purpose here is but when you share an article on facebook, you usually get "the title", a leading picture, and occasionally a summary. Now you'll just get an unprocessed URL. It doesn't copy the article verbatim into feeds as you have described. Now it will just push through links as links. Th…
> Not sure what your purpose here is To illustrate that a platform that withdraws from republishing news content doesn't end our news access. > but when you share an article on facebook, you usually get "the title", a leading picture, and occasionally a summary. Now you'll just get an unprocessed URL This doesn't seem transformative to my point. Could you expound a bit?
They aren't inserting the bodies of the articles into the feed. It is like when I hit a paywall site and they tell me what I could get if I just paid for the subscription.
If they were scraping complete articles and re-publishing those, that would be a totally different thing.
Re: Meta starts process to end news access in Canada over law on paying publishers
#10I have skim read a bunch of articles on this, and I still cannot understand what is actually being charged for and what this law mandates.
I am trying to understand whether this charges for copying of news, or just linking to it.
It seems to be implied that the content is being copied. But news is already copyrightable. Why were existing copyright protections not sufficient?
Or does this law actually change for links?
And what about users sharing links? So if I just send a facebook friend a link to a newspaper, does the newspaper receive money for that?
Does Google need to pay for indexing news sites?