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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

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I live in Australia and while I'm excited to see less Facebook use, I see a lot of comments saying things like, "good, Facebook monetized an addiction model and this curbs that". While true, the proposed law that has pushed them to do this is incredibly dangerous." You're absolutely right and I'm also horrified by the implications, and I would be even more so if the circumstances were more normal. The trouble is tha…

Respectfully, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Since about 1995, eyeballs have been shifting from all forms of media to the web. Newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, books, etc. have all been disrupted by the web. Rupert Murdoch has been particularly salty about this and has worked with the coalition government for years to undermine the internet in Australia. News Ltd, with the help of the coalition, fucked th…

"Respectfully, you don’t know what you’re talking about."

Update: OK, now read my latest posts (to this thread).

P.S. I'm not siding with the OZ Govt, read my words more carefully

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

#372
post #230

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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.

How Labor haven't turned that into a win is beyond me. The Libs are lying sacks of burning, corrupt garbage, and Labor are, seemingly, totally politically inept.

Australia's two choices.

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

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are held responsible if they cause harm to others. If a driver hits a pedestrian on purpose he is charged with murder. Who do you charge if a self-driving car behaves in this way?

Who do you charge when the brakes don't work on your car? When the airbags don't activate? When your rain sensor doesn't work? Believe it or not, your car is not that primitive when compared to a self-driving one in terms of the number of things it does autonomously.

Isn't it the case that car manufacturers will have to issue a recall on defective models ?

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

#374
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…

I actually suspect that new news carousel product they launched might be related. If they push news articles onto the carousel, they can apply a different algorithm to the carousel.

Honestly, I think that makes sense and it doesn't immediately strike me as a negative for either side. These are articles coming from trusted sources. There's no need to apply the anti-spam parts of the algorithm. News agencies get a more stable algorithm, Google gets to keep their secret sauce.

There is still an advantage to the incumbents. Those carousels are usually in prime real estate. Google would hold the keys to who is in the carousel though, so they could expand it without legislative changes. I like the flexibility, though I don't love handing Google the keys to more kingdoms.

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

#375
post #205

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> 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.

No, no, you have to cross a certain revenue / profit threshold before you can claim money. We can't have any Tom, Dick, or Harry eating into News Corps profits.

The original legislation proposal didn't even include the SBS and the ABC news services. They got added in to make it look less like News Corp wrote the legislation (which they pretty much did).

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

#376

It's not just news they blocked today. The DFES (Department of Fire and Emergency Services) page is down - i.e. no bushfire or flood alerts showing up. Their entire page is gutted. There's some government run domestic violence and community service pages that are wiped. Though hilariously, the local LNP candidate's page is gone, which in the midst of a state election campaign is probably pretty hard for them. I get t…

To be honest, good. I don't want the government to use Facebook as the primary/only mechanism to communicate with the public...

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

#377

The Bureau of Meteorology, a government department that provides forecasts has just tweeted that their Facebook page has been impacted by this change which is odd as this is not a media company and provides arguably vitally important information to mariners and other transport modes. It looks like the blast radius from this decision is impacting organizations that is out of scope of this legislation. https://twitter.…

The primary way for the government to communicate with the public should never have been allowed to be a foreign, private third party

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

#378

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…

Here is what I think:

- In medical: your doctor should be responsible for your diagnosis and drug company is responsible for defective drugs, except when they get away with lobbying and hiring good lawyers.

- In physics: I'm not sure if it's as big of a problem as in social networks. But consider this case: If you cannot reproduce the result of an experiment due to a ML model being cryptic, that would lead to huge credibility issue in science.

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

#379
post #90

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> I’m sure each of you will be shocked to hear that Google & FB each have been hostile to the process form the start and have missed meetings A powerful company resisting a process from which they have nothing to gain. Shocking! If you want people to come together, you need to give both sides something to gain (or put a (metaphorical) gun to one sides head). Of course fb is going to resist a process where they only s…

No, if you're the guy who writes the laws, you're allowed to just tell people what to do. That's the deal with laws.

You're allowed to tell people what to do, but you can't make them do it, they can always choose not to. Worst case you get millions of people starving rather than doing what you try to make them do, like in communist Russia/China.

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

#380
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If linking to Australian news content is not in the financial interests of the company, why would they continue to do it? It shouldn’t be surprising that they choose not to.

Yes, it’s in their immediate interest in the same way as working for $5/day is preferable to not working.

And so the law just pushes the service out of existence, like a high minimum wage just leaves the people who couldn't generate more than $5/day jobless (otherwise Africa could just set the minimum wage to $20/hour and eliminate proverty. The world doesn't work that way.).
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