401–410 of 478 posts
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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.
I'm going to side with FB on this. This law is so bizarre.
Good on Facebook for actually calling the Government’s bluff, with a straightforward explanation of the economics, instead of pretending to and posting strange and confusing things like Google. I tend to believe them that the impact will be minimal, but will be huge to publishers (which is why the law was so ridiculous in the first place).
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> 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.
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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.
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Does Australia have businesses in similar model like Facebook? Or are you talking about completely different models?
I don't believe we do, but I think the government may be thinking that now would be an excellent opportunity for someone to give it a go (our prime minister has a funny saying "if you have a go, you will get a go")
I suppose it has worked in Russia and China though.
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…
I'm not familiar with news media consumption in Australia, but I wonder would this push users to news aggregators like "News Break" or "Apple News"?
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These algorithms are not human readable code. They are massively complex interconnected systems of many black box ML models. I don't understand what clarity people think releasing the "algorithms" will bring. In fact, describing ranking as a single algorithm is pretty misleading.
As you say, explaining the intracicies of the algorithm is a fools errand. I guess it is more reasonable if you turn it around: these changes have drastic impact on businesses, so there is a duty to behave responsibly in administering them. If Google really has no idea what the impact of a change will be then it is fairly irresponsible to make that change given the real world harm it can cause. But I suspect in gener…
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These algorithms are not human readable code. They are massively complex interconnected systems of many black box ML models. I don't understand what clarity people think releasing the "algorithms" will bring. In fact, describing ranking as a single algorithm is pretty misleading.
If it’s ML that is doing all the work to display articles. Then ML has a long way to go.
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These algorithms are not human readable code. They are massively complex interconnected systems of many black box ML models. I don't understand what clarity people think releasing the "algorithms" will bring. In fact, describing ranking as a single algorithm is pretty misleading.
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.