21–29 of 29 posts
This 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.
This will do no such thing. News from international orgs (just as capable, if not more, of clickbait and bias) will still be shown to Canadians.
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News, even if it's only headlines, has value. Google knows this. If the news headlines had no value, Google wouldn't have launched Google News in the first place. Try scraping Google's content as a trillion-dollar company and see how long that lasts.
What's "Google's content" in this context?
People 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 co…
Newspapers existed before social media. They will exist after social media deplatforms them. Big Tech should not be able to hold the integrity of the Internet hostage.
Don't let your dislike for social media blind you from the reality that the world has changed, for the majority of the people in the world. People will spend their free time on these sites/apps, whether or not they have news.
The old local news model is dead. Niche sites like the WSJ, FT, NYT can survive with paid subscriptions, the rest have to find a different business model. This is not a conspiracy by Big Tech or billionaires, as much as we might want to find someone to blame. It's a structural change in the ether of society, information and distribution. Anything with near zero marginal costs of distribution needs is now in competition with the whole world, and unless they have something unique that people are willing to pay for, their days are numbered.
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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.
>when you share an article on facebook, you usually get "the title", a leading picture, and occasionally a summary. That's the content of news articles. They were scraping content for republication and now they're not. From Meta: in order to comply with Bill C-18, passed today in Parliament, content from news outlets, including news publishers and broadcasters, will no longer be available to people accessing our plat…
That content is provided by the publisher, via meta tags, specifically designed for that purpose. The publisher has full control.
It’s trivial for a publisher to even opt of search engine indexing entirely if they choose.
Rephrased: 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…
My best guess is that this is actually a collective action problem/prisoners dilemma. News sites would rather not have the summary (and get more traffic), but any one news site that drops it will lose traffic to those that dont.
Because news sites can't organize and collaborate effectively, they were stuck. In this sense, the law was a win-win. Either a hail mary shakedown, or a ban on all summaries.
It is like grocery stores passing a national ban on coupons.
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Which is hilarious because imagine a news site not being able to publish on google or Facebook. Short-sighted at best. Goodbye news site.
Will be curious to see how this comment ages in a year. I'm of the view that it's Google and Meta that are in trouble here. If they don't want to pay for quality news sources their content continues to noticeably degrade and become less attractive for use. They're likely trying to play hard ball with Canada and Australia because the markets are comparatively small. If the EU or the US see merit in this approach the t…
Mediocre Canada once again focusing on the wrong things. Solve your housing and healthcare crisis instead of focusing on nonsense.
Or, you know, function as a government that can tackle multiple issues simultaneously. With previous comment gems like "Canada's healthcare is so bad that if you are not immediately dying, you get no healthcare whatsoever" it's clear that you're not intending to be taken seriously.
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Which is hilarious because imagine a news site not being able to publish on google or Facebook. Short-sighted at best. Goodbye news site.
Short-sighted at best. Goodbye news site. The news sites already tried it Google's way for more than a decade, and it isn't working for them. It only works for Google. As someone clearly entrenched in the tech echo chamber, it will come as a surprise for you to learn that there are many news organizations that do not give their content away for free on the internet. Some have paywalls. Some require paid apps. Some ar…