Facebook says it will pay news industry $1B over 3 years

Guess they've finally figured out how to do this anticompetitively

So Facebook's revenues are approx $80b, and they're going to pay $1b over 3 years, for all of the real news content they rely on to drive traffic on their platform.

0.4% of revenue sounds way too cheap for that. If FB lost legitimate content, they'd have to make do with just their bubble-fuelling crackpot user-generated fake news, and that would surely drive away many of the less rabid FB users. They need legitimate news, badly.

... and mainstream news will never publish anything negative about Facebook ever again. In fact, they will encourage readers to catch their news "on Facebook posts."

So much for free press and the final check on power [1]. Let's have an eulogy, the Fourth Estate is now officially dead.

[1] https://law.yale.edu/mfia/case-disclosed/fourth-estate-final...

$1 billion doesn't sound like a lot, considering the way Facebook user doom scroll. How much is that per headline+summary viewed? Maybe $0.00001?

RIP Fourth Estate