Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia • Hacker News Board

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#201

Post by xemoka » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 9:26 PM UTC

vaidhy wrote: post #197

xemoka wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, like I said, credibility is a different problem. But at this point, we don't even get a lie from them, we get nothing. At least a lie can be checked and examined. There's nothing available at all currently.

We actually have a reasonable way to test for human biases in AI - perturb the input a bit and see how the AI responds - For e.g., change the name, change the gender etc. and we use them to measure if AI is fair. It is different question whether all AI can be subject to such tests. For e.g., how will you detect a human bias in a page ranking algorithm? but for where it matters, you can test them and we do test them.

Yes. True and fair. But how can we test the page rank algorithm “ourselves"? Who is "we" in the "we do test them"? Is the public even asking for 3rd party examinations by transparent/public organizations (or at least, publicly funded)? Seems like we only get to "test" against the live system, and third party examination seems relatively impossible. It seems like something with such far reaching and invasive results should be more accessible, at the very least.

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#202

Post by clouddrover » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 9:26 PM UTC

pantsforbirds wrote: post #28

clouddrover wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It was of no value to them anyway. That's what the legislation is about: preventing platforms with market dominance capturing most of the advertising revenue with no real return to the organizations producing the content.

Facebook showed in their release the monetary value of they provided the news companies. I can't see how you could possible argue they do not provide value to the classic media companies by allowing them to be linked and discussed freely on their feeds.

I can't see how you could possibly take Facebook's self-serving claims at face value. How does it compare to the revenue that has shifted away from news organizations to Facebook? How can you verify Facebook's claims when Facebook controls the platform and the data?

The market dominance of a couple platforms is exactly the problem here. No organization is in a good bargaining position against them and so soon there will be regulation.

It's already working. Google is busy making deals. Facebook will do the same eventually.

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#203

Post by cabalamat » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 9:28 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #187

Jonanin wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an incredibly naive perspective. I guess you want to ban search engines, self driving cars, automated filtering of lewd and abusive content (why do you think FB isn’t full of porn? It’s not a hand engineered algorithm), automatic speech recognition for the hearing impaired, and a vast swath of important technology I didn’t list. I don’t think you really understand the implications of what you’re asking for. S…

I absolutely want to ban self-driving cars that behave in ways no human can explain or understand! The mere idea that anyone would think that should be legal is borderline insane . All you are doing here is convincing me that tech companies are just runaway trains with nobody at the controls!

> I absolutely want to ban self-driving cars that behave in ways no human can explain or understand!

Can you explain or understand the algorithms humans use to drive cars?

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#204

Post by aliceryhl » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 9:28 PM UTC

djoldman wrote: post #181

srcreigh wrote: post #129

I haven't read the bill, but this looks like a huge win. FB has abused our brain chemistry with addictive content. Their platform makes discussions more impulsive, passionate and careless not unlike any other addictive substance. People crave "the goods" ie browsing their bite sized feeds, and neglect the responsibility of actually learning about the news. Not unlike how if you're addicted to sugar/unhealthy foods yo…

>FB has abused our brain chemistry with addictive content. Their platform makes discussions more impulsive, passionate and careless not unlike any other addictive substance. People crave "the goods" ie browsing their bite sized feeds, and neglect the responsibility of actually learning about the news. Not unlike how if you're addicted to sugar/unhealthy foods you don't want your veggies. Is Facebook the bad guy here?…

Do you also think that it should be optional to wear a seatbelt?

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#205

Post by zmmmmm » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 9:29 PM UTC

teruakohatu wrote: post #170

zmmmmm wrote: post #165

This is a fairly important stand Facebook is taking - I'm glad they are doing it. The precedent set here is uncomfortably close to creating a liability simply for linking to content - something that would quite literally destroy the very fabric of the internet if it was applied generally. In Facebook's case it is even worse because they are not the ones creating the links - their users are. If internet services have…

> In Facebook's case it is even worse because they are not the ones creating the links - their users are. It is much worse than that. The publishers themselves often share the links on Facebook themselves.

Yes, it is particularly egregious that someone can go to Facebook, create a link to their own content, and then claim monetary compensation for use of their content from Facebook.

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#206

Post by vineyardmike » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 9:32 PM UTC

djoldman wrote: post #156

The messaging on this tech vs news publishers in Australia is pretty intense. Any site that doesn't want google to index a page can add: to the page and it will not be listed when someone searches Google (as far as I know), thereby preventing all the alleged stealing/siphoning/etc of revenue/profits from news sites. Am I wrong here? If the above is true, what's really going on here is that content producers got toget…

> Any site that doesn't want google to index a page...

They want to be indexed, they just also want to get paid.

The root issue is that media companies no longer make $$$ from ads, instead google does and they want that money back. This is "silly" law to accomplish that goal.

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#207

Post by dang » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 9:32 PM UTC

jabberwcky wrote: post #150

dang wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't take HN threads further into nationalistic or ideological flamewar. It makes discussion less curious, more tedious, and nastier. Instead, please make your substantive points thoughtfully and without that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Substantively, this is a battle between a US media powerhouse and a sovereign nation over control of its local media. This isn't "ideological flamewar", it is an inescapable reality underpinning the case.

There's the underlying issue and then there's the separate question of whether you posted a thoughtful comment or a flamewar comment about it. You posted a flamewar comment. We don't want those here.

Any substantive point you have to make can be made thoughtfully, and will have a better impact in favor of your argument. It's actually not in your interest to make a point like this snarkily and provocatively. People do that for a little temporary venting relief, but it harms their own view in other people's eyes, in addition to harming the commons. So please don't do that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#208

Post by 16bytes » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 9:32 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #194

16bytes wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You underestimate the complexity here by orders of magnitudes. You also overestimate the usefulness to news companies. You underestimate the harm that bad actors can take. The search algorithm tells you the order of search results for a particular set of terms. Except that as input you need to feed it a graph of the entire indexed internet, which is re-indexed periodically as the content on the index changes. How doe…

You might want to note some very important parts of your first-listed source: > Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A bet…

Instead of relying on ignorance to push your agenda, you could frame that paragraph against what search engines were doing at the time, how Google was doing something different, and what Google still is transparent about today [1][2].

Publishing "the algorithm" doesn't have value for most of the internet, it is impractical to use even if it was, and bad actors would use it to destroy search quality to the detriment of e-commerce everywhere.

[1] https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks

[2] https://research.google/pubs/

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#209

Post by wholinator2 » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 9:35 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #187

Jonanin wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an incredibly naive perspective. I guess you want to ban search engines, self driving cars, automated filtering of lewd and abusive content (why do you think FB isn’t full of porn? It’s not a hand engineered algorithm), automatic speech recognition for the hearing impaired, and a vast swath of important technology I didn’t list. I don’t think you really understand the implications of what you’re asking for. S…

I absolutely want to ban self-driving cars that behave in ways no human can explain or understand! The mere idea that anyone would think that should be legal is borderline insane . All you are doing here is convincing me that tech companies are just runaway trains with nobody at the controls!

What about all the other examples he listed. What about cancer detection? Or viral spread prediction? Drug discovery or medical imaging diagnosis? Physics research?

Machine learning is very widely used in the sciences and extremely beneficial to humanity in uncountably many ways and assuredly countless more to come. Of course technologies can be used for evil but so can nearly everything that exists. I believe your proposal comes from a desire to help or better the world, but to ban all non-human-readable algorithms is frankly ridiculous and demonstrates a naive understanding of the issue. It sounds a lot like the calls by the U.S. Congress to ban encryption.

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#210

Post by pitay » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 9:36 PM UTC

How is this for an idea - companies that provide links to a website that also can generate a preview, charge the linked site for the privilege of having a preview of the content shown. This shows that such things are valuable for the recipient. If Google had done that, then this proposed law wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Perhaps they should do this for other news sites now, that way it protects them from future laws like this being proposed in other countries. Being linked like this is clearly worth it to the publishers, as the law they support prohibits the delisting of the sites that the law applies to.

Second, how about having a way to add meta-information to web pages/articles saying what is okay to use as preview and what is not. This looks to me like the long term solution to all sites and services on the current web. As long as there is a single, non-specialized way for browsers to ignore attributes/tags/other info they do not use then it does not add complexity to browsers.