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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

#391
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these less informed people numerous enough to cause a problem to others, perhaps by voting badly? How would you know? Are you one of them? How would you know? If you are, then aren't any opinions you share on the internet just making things worse? I ask these questions because I keep seeing the news exaggerating some bogeyman and people believing that it's more significant than it really is. For example, you expr…

>Are these less informed people numerous enough to cause a problem to others, perhaps by voting badly? Yes. >How would you know? By the simple fact the Federal government is ignoring their constitutional responsibility to enact a quarantine for international travelers and letting the states deal with it (poorly). So far the virus has escaped a dozen times through badly run quarantines and none of the lessons are shar…

> the Federal government is ignoring their constitutional responsibility to enact a quarantine for international travelers

I assume your claim is true even though a quick Google doesn't show how. So doesn't Australia have any process to compel the government to comply with the constitution? It's entirely up to the whim of voters? Then it's fair enough that they don't comply since it's optional. Democracy is the general population choosing the government, not a self-declared group of "right" people.

So far, your claim about less informed people is essentially just "other people voted for a government I don't like so they must have been less informed than me".

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

#392
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 mean, if not tied to particular news organisations, this could actually be a sensible requirement.

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

#393

I can't believe I'm about to say this, but I think I'm going to side with FB on this. The Australian government is once again showing absolute disregard when it comes to understanding technology, and its signature heavy handed approach to regulation.

I'm with you. You'd really have to push me to ever sympathize with facebook at this point but here we are.

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

#394
post #392
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 mean, if not tied to particular news organisations, this could actually be a sensible requirement.

No, I've lived in the SEO world my entire life and I guarantee you that if the ranking changes were published spam would be so bad is to make search engines or social media totally unusable.

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

#395
post #232

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. The law doesn't just apply to Facebook, it applies to whoever the Treasurer of Australia[0] says it applies to - it isn't metrics/rules based: https://i.im…

Fb may have overshot. They've not only blocked news pages but gov pages as well. Most people I know in aus have been getting covid updates purely through government body social media posts. These are now blocked.

Worth noting that at least major ones like BOM, Queensland Health, Queensland Police and Betoota Advocate were blocked but that has been reverted now.

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

#396
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Are these less informed people numerous enough to cause a problem to others, perhaps by voting badly? Yes. >How would you know? By the simple fact the Federal government is ignoring their constitutional responsibility to enact a quarantine for international travelers and letting the states deal with it (poorly). So far the virus has escaped a dozen times through badly run quarantines and none of the lessons are shar…

> the Federal government is ignoring their constitutional responsibility to enact a quarantine for international travelers I assume your claim is true even though a quick Google doesn't show how. So doesn't Australia have any process to compel the government to comply with the constitution? It's entirely up to the whim of voters? Then it's fair enough that they don't comply since it's optional. Democracy is the gener…

> So doesn't Australia have any process to compel the government to comply with the constitution?

Australia has the most volatile politics of any English speaking country. The two ways for a government to be forced to follow the constitution is for the Queen to fire them, or for a military coup.

Both were considered during the last time the government was in deadlock: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitutional...

>So far, your claim about less informed people is essentially just "other people voted for a government I don't like so they must have been less informed than me".

My claim is that an Australian government is acting outside the constitution and responsible for the deaths of thousands. Not sure what you're trying to do with your strawman argument.

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

#397

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.

> 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.

The problem is that Media companies didn't lose their revenue to Google. They lost it to other more specalised websites i.e. Seek, Craiglists, Gumtree and so on.

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

#398
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome summary. It seems to me that this is a bit of a failure of the fair use doctrine. Making one preview of an image or article does not impact the author's monetisation ability. Making a business out of systematically producing previews (and adding your own ads around them) should no longer quality as fair use. We have a joke: A: How much is a drop of gas? B: A drop of gas? Well, zero! A: One million drops of ga…

The stated rationale for the law is not copyright infringement, so fair use is not relevant. It’s an attempt by Australia’s competition (antitrust) regulator to address an alleged market failure: “The proposed bargaining code is intended to address bargaining power imbalances between Australian news media businesses and digital platforms in order to ensure that commercial arrangements between these parties do not und…

I'm reading between the lines, but my understanding of the (fixed) new law is that "plain linking" would still be okay, "previewing" would require sitting at the table. What's the difference between the two?

Plain linking does not keep people on FB. Automated previewing does. Can't this be interpreted as raising the bar for fair use?

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

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google & Fb know they are very powerful with limited obligations to Australians and so they are acting arrogantly and oppressively in their approach. I don't see what's arrogant about Facebook's approach here. They say they do not derive much value from this content, and the government is proposing to charge them much more than the value they do derive. So they are left with the only rational choice: to not have th…

If they don't derive much value from the content, then it shouldn't be terribly awful they have blocked the content. But I suspect that's not the truth. Not by a long shot.

In the link they said it’s only 4% of their content but on the radio this morning (national Australian station Triple J), they stated that it’s a big deal as “many people rely on Facebook as their source of news”.

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

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly is that? Giving you a link to the news media web site does extract money from them?

Link previews (headline, image, blurb) are a substitute good. Many would-be eyeballs never click through. Big tech profits, news media dwindles.

Yet the code targets all links, not previews, just links. This is a cash-grab.
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