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Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

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

#221

Post by djoldman »

sjy wrote: post #211
djoldman wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?…

> Are we really saying that people cannot stop using social media? Are we saying that people don't think it's bad for them? Yes, that’s part of the definition of ‘addictive.’ Internet and social media addiction is well documented, even though not all users are addicted. Like gambling.

Should we force casinos to change in order to be less addictive?

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

#222

Post by djoldman »

vineyardmike wrote: post #206
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.

I think this is the correct interpretation. Market forces at work.

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

#223

Post by pessimizer »

koheripbal wrote: post #48
bpodgursky wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will just ensure that all news is transmitted via memes, screenshots, and unsourced copy-pasted quotes. It won't be an improvement.

... or worse - government approved news only.

The licensing of journalists is coming.

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

#224

Post by MarkMc »

worik wrote: post #58

Can anybody explain to me what the problem is with Facebook et el driving traffic to news sites? Most of the times I visit newspapers websites I was sent there from social media.

According to the Australian government, the problem is that it benefits Facebook too much and doesn't benefit the news websites enough.

An analogy might be to minimum wage laws: a laissez-faire market would result in an unfair distribution of benefits, so the government steps in.

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

#225

Post by JauntyHatAngle »

DavidSJ wrote: post #215
gkmcd wrote: post #60

A key part of this legislation is the requirements for tech companies to provide selected news organisations with advance notice about changes to ranking algorithms. This has been generally overlooked in the reporting and discussion but I believe it is the actually the most important part of the legislation. It will give the selected news organisations an enormous advantage over other companies not included and prote…

> a particular media company that currently dominates the media landscape here What is this company, out of curiosity? My guess is ABC, but I don't know.

No, it's newscorp. They have a 55%ish(?) readership share for print media in Australia and are very cosy with the incumbent government. Afaik it's one of the most concentrated markets in the world. (Behind Egypt and China I believe).

I'm not sure the exact online share.

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

#226

Post by Barrin92 »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #139
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also believe any algorithm that isn't human-readable should be banned. If it can't be understood, nobody can validate that it isn't racist, sexist, or slanted towards encouraging violence and harm. The fact that technology companies have been grossly negligent and irresponsible isn't a reason to not regulate them: It's proof regulation needs to be much, much stronger.

> I also believe any algorithm that isn't human-readable should be banned. If it can't be understood, nobody can validate that it isn't racist, sexist, or slanted towards encouraging violence and harm. I'm not sure a human-readable algorithm exists for ranking all the web pages in the world based on natural language input. In fact, I'm pretty sure such an algorithm does not, and potentially cannot, exist given the ab…

you don't need any NLP to rank webpages (in fact the entire innovation of Google was that they figured out a way to rank pages completely ignoring that fact). Pagerank works fundamentally by treating the web as a graph and prioritising results based on their connections, that is to say it ranks based on popularity and is agnostic about the content of the actual page.

This generally has worked well. On the other hand, actually attempting to manipulate search results based on automated handling of content is what has given us countless of censorship debates or simply failure where even uncontroversial content is removed or downranked because it violated some sort of strange rule because it had a 'bad word' in it. On Facebook recently clothing ads for the disabled people were banned[1], because turns out the ML system only cared about the wheelchair, not the person in it.

It's actually fairly straight-forward to build recommender systems on transparent, graph-based algorithms and it gives you the added advantage of not discriminating in strange ways.

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/style/disabled-fashion-fa...

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

#227

Post by pedalpete »

I live in Australia, so have a dog in this fight.

I'm kinda excited to see how this pans out. I don't use FB for news, that's not what a "social network" is for. It's for keeping in touch with friends, sharing photos, etc etc.

Because I don't interact with news on FB, I already see very little of it, but I'm hoping this change makes FB the place for sharing our lives again, as opposed to just sharing links to media that I can find through other sources.

I somewhat wonder if FB is looking at this as a test subject of what happens if they were to block links to external content? What if FB only shared stuff from FB. Would that be so bad?

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

#228

Post by ocdtrekkie »

wholinator2 wrote: post #209
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

At best, you may be able to justify black boxes providing secondary indicators: Maybe using AI to study cancer detection might lead you to a new solid discovery, but "we use AI to determine if you have cancer" should never be the mission, as it fails to generate useful information about how it is detected.

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

#229

Post by jbob2000 »

pedalpete wrote: post #227

I live in Australia, so have a dog in this fight. I'm kinda excited to see how this pans out. I don't use FB for news, that's not what a "social network" is for. It's for keeping in touch with friends, sharing photos, etc etc. Because I don't interact with news on FB, I already see very little of it, but I'm hoping this change makes FB the place for sharing our lives again, as opposed to just sharing links to media t…

Facebook would finally be valuable again if all of the content farm news garbage was kicked off.

Unfortunately, the people who like that stuff also buy stuff from online ads. It’s the same reason why TLC and The History Channel now only show reality TV; because people who watch those shows buy the things they see advertised.

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

#230

Post by enneff »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #189
flukus wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this was a hip "tech savvy" PM who was CxO at an ISP, the rest of them are worse.

The same Prime Minister who promoted an innovation economy at the same time as switching out fiber-backboned network upgrade plans for the existing rotting copper network.

At greater expense than the original plan! And now we are shortly going to have to roll out fiber anyway. It makes me so angry.
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