431–440 of 478 posts
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Who is deciding what laws are just? Hopefully not Google or Facebook, as they are amoral profit-motivated behemoths who will annex your home and life if they're allowed.
Most people would agree that paying for the obligation to drive traffic to someone else's business without a choice in the matter is unjust.
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> 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.
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Monitoring search engine and social network ranking and filtering updates should be more efficient than complaining about biased parrots (language models). This is a tip to certain ethics researchers who are raising scandals about search bias, but not in the right place - go in the field, check the fucking feeds, leave your abstract ethical tower and measure the reality.
I'm sorry, but this post sounds pretty abstract itself. What exactly do you propose they should do?
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>It was of no value to them anyway. We have something of a natural experiment here on how much FB traffic is worth to news sites. We'll learn the results in a year if Australia repeals or maintains the law.
It’s generous of you to assume that laws are passed and repealed based on benefit. We already had a natural experiment, in which Australian publishers were free not to share their content on fb.
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> 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.
Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull are examples of what happens when you try and dictate terms with NewCorp and they turn on you with negative press.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/nov/18/kevin-rudd-and...
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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.
>> They've not only blocked news pages but gov pages as well. Couldn't this be a viewed as a criminal act by the Australian government? Could they arrest FB employees in Australia for FB HQ blocking their pages, especially with the vital COVID-19 information?
What criminal act do you think applies here?
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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.
Then publish the broad criteria behind the ranking and have the technical details be audited by the government behind closed doors.
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As others have started, when looking at events in Australia, you can consider the currently-governing Liberal party (economically liberal, socially conservative) and News Corp as effectively the same organisation. On the other hand, the Liberal party is very hostile to the public service in general and the ABC in particular.
They should be hostile to the ABC, because their journalistic standards are terrible. I've reported 3 factual inaccuracies to them and all of them took more than a month to retract. In one case, the inaccuracy affected the entire premise of the article. ABC's standards are that it's okay to lie as long as you retract it a month later in a tiny 10pt foot note. On the other hand, I've personally reported a similar arti…
What are these supposed inaccuracies??
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Google has been busy making major deals with news organisations. Facebook has chosen the opposite track. The problem Facebook has is government in Australia is wildly popular because of the pandemic. They can do what they want right now it won't lose them any votes. Ministers are already telling Facebook to leave the country completely!
I would not call the federal government “wildly popular”. Most people are (rightly, IMO) laying our pandemic success at the feet of state politicians and realising that the federal level had been ineffective at best.
Australia does have competitive federalism, and so many of the localised decisions have been from the states, but the major decisions for seeding - closing borders, acquiring vaccines, etc, along with fiscal backstopping - are federal.
The federal government (under ScoMo) has never polled so well as it has during covid, and for good reason.
(NB: I am no blind Coalition supporter, but they have made decisions which are very popular, and no amount of directing attention to the states would absolve them from blame if we had a situation more like Europe or the US.)