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An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

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Re: An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

#2
As I've mentioned before you only need to look at the fact that public and smaller news organisations e.g. ABC, SBS are not compensated to get an idea of the intention of this policy.

It's purely to prop up News Corp which is struggling (16% loss in 2020 revenue) because of weak newspaper sales and Foxtel bleeding customers to Netflix, Disney etc.

And unfortunately just like in UK and US whenever Rupert Murdoch says jump you better say how high or else your government will go down in the next election.

Re: An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

#4
Australian government and more specifically Rod sims, the chair of ACCC should get some counselling. Really good counselling. They clearly don't understand how publishing works and have a biased understanding of who is benefitting from this relationship.

However, the entire Australian media has been nothing but puppets controlled by murdoch. The one true less biased source is ABC which has been muddied by constant federal government censorship and budget cuts almost to a point where independent journalism and Australia cannot be spoken in one sentence.

I hope they move forward with this code and I hope that both Google and FB remove news from their site so that newscorp can die quickly. It a shame they are doing this. Come next election I am voting against both SCOMO and the likes.

Re: An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

#6

As I've mentioned before you only need to look at the fact that public and smaller news organisations e.g. ABC, SBS are not compensated to get an idea of the intention of this policy. It's purely to prop up News Corp which is struggling (16% loss in 2020 revenue) because of weak newspaper sales and Foxtel bleeding customers to Netflix, Disney etc. And unfortunately just like in UK and US whenever Rupert Murdoch says…

The fact that it's _years_ too late to save Fairfax reinforces this IMHO.

Re: An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

#9
I haven't followed this debate too closely but this seems pretty disingenuous.

>The ACCC presumes that Facebook benefits most in its relationship with publishers, when in fact the reverse is true. News represents a fraction of what people see in their News Feed and is not a significant source of revenue for us

News may not directly contribute much ad revenue but it surely is a huge driver of engagement on the website, which in turn indirectly keeps people engaged with the facebook ecosystem at large. Political commentary involving news pieces certainly seems to be a feature on Facebook's most popular pages.

Also I haven't figured out yet what part of the law actually would imply that Facebook needs to blackout news wholesale. As I read it the law merely requires that Facebook negotiate with each publisher.

Re: An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

#10
I don’t like FB as a company. However I have to admit, they are correct that news organizations benefit the most from this relationship. Why doesn’t google do the same thing? Don’t index news sites. Googles response seemed less effective than FB’s.
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