Facebook Bans Australian News
February 17, 2021 2:19 PM Subscribe
Australians woke up this morning to find that Facebook has commenced restricting publishers and people in Australia from sharing or viewing Australian and international news content. The announcement comes in response to proposed new laws in Australia that would force tech companies to negotiate with media companies over how much to pay them for news content. The ban hammer appears to have inflicted a lot of collateral damage, including blocking government agencies, unions and satirical sites.
In totally related news:
Google Is Suddenly Paying for News in Australia. What About Everywhere Else?
Good on ya, Australia! Cheers!
posted by pjsky at 2:35 PM on February 17, 2021 [13 favorites]
Google Is Suddenly Paying for News in Australia. What About Everywhere Else?
Good on ya, Australia! Cheers!
posted by pjsky at 2:35 PM on February 17, 2021 [13 favorites]
For those who can't get past NYTimes paywall, here's the first few paragraphs:
By Damien Cave Feb. 17, 2021
SYDNEY, Australia — Just a few weeks after Google threatened to leave Australia if the government forced tech platforms to pay for news, the search giant is suddenly showering money on its most demanding critics.
With groundbreaking legislation expected to pass this week or next, Google has sought to blunt the impact by striking deals of its own with media companies, including two in recent days worth tens of millions of dollars a year. Another, with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, was announced on Wednesday in a three-year arrangement that includes content from The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch and The New York Post.
Media companies have complained for years that they are not fairly compensated for articles and other content that generate ad revenue for platforms like Google and Facebook, complaints that tech companies have largely ignored. Google’s rush to pay up in Australia shows how regulation in a relatively small country — or just the threat of it — can sharply alter the behavior of a global tech behemoth that grew with impunity back home in the United States.
posted by pjsky at 2:38 PM on February 17, 2021 [8 favorites]
By Damien Cave Feb. 17, 2021
SYDNEY, Australia — Just a few weeks after Google threatened to leave Australia if the government forced tech platforms to pay for news, the search giant is suddenly showering money on its most demanding critics.
With groundbreaking legislation expected to pass this week or next, Google has sought to blunt the impact by striking deals of its own with media companies, including two in recent days worth tens of millions of dollars a year. Another, with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, was announced on Wednesday in a three-year arrangement that includes content from The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch and The New York Post.
Media companies have complained for years that they are not fairly compensated for articles and other content that generate ad revenue for platforms like Google and Facebook, complaints that tech companies have largely ignored. Google’s rush to pay up in Australia shows how regulation in a relatively small country — or just the threat of it — can sharply alter the behavior of a global tech behemoth that grew with impunity back home in the United States.
posted by pjsky at 2:38 PM on February 17, 2021 [8 favorites]
Would be genuinely curious to know if Facebook is still republishing profit-generating content from anti-vaxxers, extremist right-wingers, and other state-based information warfare entities. If anything, these events will accumulate to help change the inaccurate, if popular perception of Facebook as a technology company, to seeing it as the media/advertising entity that it really is.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:47 PM on February 17, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:47 PM on February 17, 2021 [1 favorite]
I’ve got a bad feeling that this will mean more money for Murdoch, while smaller outlets will get to watch their traffic evaporate.
Of course, knowing Murdoch that was very likely the entire point.
posted by aramaic at 2:48 PM on February 17, 2021 [32 favorites]
Of course, knowing Murdoch that was very likely the entire point.
posted by aramaic at 2:48 PM on February 17, 2021 [32 favorites]
Media companies have complained for years that they are not fairly compensated for articles and other content that generate ad revenue for platforms like Google and Facebook, complaints that tech companies have largely ignored.
Because those complaints are asinine. Google and Facebook don't republish entire news articles. They help users find the articles, which users then click through to and read, generating ad revenue for the news outlet.
Google and Facebook are not the reason news outlets are not as profitable as they once were. The total failure of those legacy businesses to evolve their business model is why they are failing. If people would rather read social media than go to a news site, whose fault is that? News outlets are not owed reader attention.
It does not make policy sense to require Google and Facebook to pay media companies for the privilege of driving users to news content. If doesn't make sense, especially for a 'free market' worshiping neo-conservative government to force one industry to pay another.
The only way that this makes sense is when you consider that NewsCorp are basically the paid media partner of the Liberal Party (and are massive party donors) and they will make millions from this.
Of course, if Australian news is not sharable at all, the financial hit from the loss of traffic is going to hurt far more than Google's table scraps in the long term. And those table scraps are only available to the big players.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 2:52 PM on February 17, 2021 [30 favorites]
Because those complaints are asinine. Google and Facebook don't republish entire news articles. They help users find the articles, which users then click through to and read, generating ad revenue for the news outlet.
Google and Facebook are not the reason news outlets are not as profitable as they once were. The total failure of those legacy businesses to evolve their business model is why they are failing. If people would rather read social media than go to a news site, whose fault is that? News outlets are not owed reader attention.
It does not make policy sense to require Google and Facebook to pay media companies for the privilege of driving users to news content. If doesn't make sense, especially for a 'free market' worshiping neo-conservative government to force one industry to pay another.
The only way that this makes sense is when you consider that NewsCorp are basically the paid media partner of the Liberal Party (and are massive party donors) and they will make millions from this.
Of course, if Australian news is not sharable at all, the financial hit from the loss of traffic is going to hurt far more than Google's table scraps in the long term. And those table scraps are only available to the big players.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 2:52 PM on February 17, 2021 [30 favorites]
An alternative to the 'plucky small country defies tech giants' interpretation that the NYT seems to have, is that the Australian government launched a very idiosyncratic campaign on behalf of a duopoly of media monopolists (Murdoch-News and Nine-Fairfax), in the interests of revenue and preventing new market entrants, and had their bluff called. It was about regulation, and fair payment, but it was typically Australian for the form of that regulation to take special payments to specific companies. It's hard to express to non-Australians just how firm a power a small number of media institutions have had in this country, going back decades. I'm going with 'everyone loses, everyone wins'!
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 2:54 PM on February 17, 2021 [37 favorites]
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 2:54 PM on February 17, 2021 [37 favorites]
And because FB are hamhanded idiots, they've gone and blocked content from Australian government agencies.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 2:55 PM on February 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 2:55 PM on February 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
I bet they're doing something bonkers like comparing the text of recently-identified "news" pages with all proposed post/link text, so if your website has press releases or other information that frequently gets quoted verbatim by a news outlet you get tarred with the "it's news!1!" brush and banned.
posted by aramaic at 3:07 PM on February 17, 2021
posted by aramaic at 3:07 PM on February 17, 2021
I disagree with this and Facebook is certainly doing it for all the wrong reasons. But I wish news was banned on Facebook in the US. So many people have had their minds rotted by some OANN or Newsmax link that ended up in their feed.
posted by downtohisturtles at 3:08 PM on February 17, 2021 [8 favorites]
posted by downtohisturtles at 3:08 PM on February 17, 2021 [8 favorites]
- Bureau of Meteorology's Catalogue of RSS Feeds: http://www.bom.gov.au/rss/?ref=ftr
- Pre-built packages (VMs, containers, et al) for TTRSS: https://bitnami.com/stack/tiny-tiny-rss
posted by krisjohn at 3:08 PM on February 17, 2021 [4 favorites]
Facebook appears to have banned itself.
posted by jjderooy at 3:08 PM on February 17, 2021 [6 favorites]
posted by jjderooy at 3:08 PM on February 17, 2021 [6 favorites]
I disagree with this and Facebook is certainly doing it for all the wrong reasons. But I wish news was banned on Facebook in the US. So many people have had their minds rotted by some OANN or Newsmax link that ended up in their feed.
But in Australia, the anti-vax disinfo fools are still operating on FB with impunity. Banning news only leaves the fake news.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 3:09 PM on February 17, 2021 [18 favorites]
But in Australia, the anti-vax disinfo fools are still operating on FB with impunity. Banning news only leaves the fake news.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 3:09 PM on February 17, 2021 [18 favorites]
I kind of get what they were driving at with Google - news is pretty deeply embedded within search results, along with quite detailed snippets at times. It's a decision that's been made by Google on how their product works.
Facebook though? It's people sharing links to websites on a platform without Facebook's intent for them to link to ABC, Sydney Morning Herald or whatever. That instinctively feels to me like the conflicts over deep linking in the 90s/00s. It's people linking to specific stories on the websites. Doesn't make sense to bundle that with a news search engine like Google to me.
Australian government told them they legally had to pay to allow news links on Facebook, or they had to stop allowing them. I don't think that they really thought the second option was one Facebook would consider.
posted by MattWPBS at 3:16 PM on February 17, 2021 [3 favorites]
Facebook though? It's people sharing links to websites on a platform without Facebook's intent for them to link to ABC, Sydney Morning Herald or whatever. That instinctively feels to me like the conflicts over deep linking in the 90s/00s. It's people linking to specific stories on the websites. Doesn't make sense to bundle that with a news search engine like Google to me.
Australian government told them they legally had to pay to allow news links on Facebook, or they had to stop allowing them. I don't think that they really thought the second option was one Facebook would consider.
posted by MattWPBS at 3:16 PM on February 17, 2021 [3 favorites]
Also, would be interesting to see what impact this has on traffic for Australian news sites.
posted by MattWPBS at 3:17 PM on February 17, 2021
posted by MattWPBS at 3:17 PM on February 17, 2021
From what I heard, the Australian law was gerrymandered to specifically drive money to the conservative/Murdoch press and freeze out challengers. The Guardian, for example, is excluded from receiving payments for links because they're a foreign company, while News Corp is a true-blue dinky-di Australian outfit.
posted by acb at 3:20 PM on February 17, 2021 [16 favorites]
posted by acb at 3:20 PM on February 17, 2021 [16 favorites]
I don't think that they really thought the second option was one Facebook would consider.
That's because the Australian government are a collection of the most stupid, venal people in the country.
Case in point, (disgraced) Liberal senator Matt Canavan, who wants Australians to drink gas and eat coal, is on Sky News telling Australians to go to Parler.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 3:24 PM on February 17, 2021 [10 favorites]
That's because the Australian government are a collection of the most stupid, venal people in the country.
Case in point, (disgraced) Liberal senator Matt Canavan, who wants Australians to drink gas and eat coal, is on Sky News telling Australians to go to Parler.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 3:24 PM on February 17, 2021 [10 favorites]
The NY Times headline is misleading - Google isn't (afaik) "paying for news" - they've signed a content licensing agreement with News Corp. Google has licensing agreements in a variety of countries - they recently signed a deal with French publishers. But ultimately this is a private agreement between two companies. If you are an Australian news startup, you get zero. If you are not News Corp, you get zero. I think the proposed Australian law was terrible but this agreement is also bad - it further entrenches News corp as a monopoly provider of "news" across a wider range of digital endpoints.
posted by GuyZero at 3:25 PM on February 17, 2021 [15 favorites]
posted by GuyZero at 3:25 PM on February 17, 2021 [15 favorites]
And because FB are hamhanded idiots
If you think that accidentally blocking Australians from posting anything at all is accidental... it's not.
posted by GuyZero at 3:26 PM on February 17, 2021 [1 favorite]
If you think that accidentally blocking Australians from posting anything at all is accidental... it's not.
posted by GuyZero at 3:26 PM on February 17, 2021 [1 favorite]
If you think that accidentally blocking Australians from posting anything at all is accidental... it's not.
We're on the same page here. I said they were hamhanded idiots. I didn't claim it was accidental.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 3:30 PM on February 17, 2021 [3 favorites]
We're on the same page here. I said they were hamhanded idiots. I didn't claim it was accidental.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 3:30 PM on February 17, 2021 [3 favorites]
"But complaining that Google and Facebook are somehow taking money that ‘should’ go to newspapers makes about as much sense as arguing that airlines stole money from the ocean liners." - a good twitter thread from Benedict Evans
posted by GuyZero at 3:41 PM on February 17, 2021 [10 favorites]
posted by GuyZero at 3:41 PM on February 17, 2021 [10 favorites]
If the Australian government wanted Mefi to pay Murdoch every time there's a post with a link to an Australian news source, would that be appropriate?
posted by jenkinsEar at 3:49 PM on February 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by jenkinsEar at 3:49 PM on February 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
If the Australian government wanted Mefi to pay Murdoch every time there's a post with a link to an Australian news source, would that be appropriate?
this reminds me of the joke about the man looking for his lost wallet under a streetlamp at night.
posted by GuyZero at 4:08 PM on February 17, 2021 [5 favorites]
this reminds me of the joke about the man looking for his lost wallet under a streetlamp at night.
posted by GuyZero at 4:08 PM on February 17, 2021 [5 favorites]
I generally do not see a discussion from the people saying that news organisations got out-competed that the world we have arrived in is an improvement. Journalism is suffering basically everywhere, and there is no viable business model. It has become a popular remark to lament how real news is paywalled and fake news is free and abundant. Local news and local government reporting is effectively dead and nothing has replaced it. There actually is a crisis here that would require government response; some kind of tax on large internet companies would be an appropriate starting strategy. Facebook broke the open web years ago to little more than hand-wringing, and Google is a monopoly that should have been restrained by regulators long before now, so restricting it to those two companies seems reasonable. Of course, the question is how you then distribute those funds in an equitable way, so you'd probably need to... track how many people read a story. So, links.
I'm not convinced that the remedy the ACCC came up with is the appropriate one; it very much feels like the Politician's Fallacy to me. I also am not thrilled about a single red cent going into News Corp's coffers. But I'm also extremely wary of American internet thinkers on this issue, given that their biases - the California Ideology - are a large reason why the internet broke the world.
posted by Merus at 4:29 PM on February 17, 2021 [25 favorites]
I'm not convinced that the remedy the ACCC came up with is the appropriate one; it very much feels like the Politician's Fallacy to me. I also am not thrilled about a single red cent going into News Corp's coffers. But I'm also extremely wary of American internet thinkers on this issue, given that their biases - the California Ideology - are a large reason why the internet broke the world.
posted by Merus at 4:29 PM on February 17, 2021 [25 favorites]
This morning I posted a comment on a friend's post (pro Vax) to a Coronacast episode- I'm thinking of spinning up a fpp actually- should you try and convince your (unsure) friends to get vaccinated? and after 9am it was gone.
The collateral damage to emergency services is pretty damning- Facebook could legitimately have blood on their hands if there is another major disaster- there have been fires in WA already this year. Not to mention cyclones and flooding.
Australians also can't share news links from other countries either. So in the midst of a global pandemic, Facebook cut off all the reliable news.
Whilst it's a relief that my relatives can't post Sky News drivel, the really out there sites like "Rebel News" are still there. (I did report that page as news media to Facebook. Although would that legitimise them? Dunno. ) (Clarify: as a bug report, fb hasn't got a "report that it's media" link)
Living regionally (not in a capital city) the local paper's Facebook page was a good way to keep tabs on what is going on- a proposed healthcare merger, what's the situation for cross-border communities at the moment with border closures.
Personally I'm gutted about the community work that the ABC does- each region had a Facebook page, where they'd post stuff like "wallaby visits emergency department", mental health resources for farmers, community events, or my favourite, beautiful sunsets and regular "happy wrensday" posts (beautiful blue fairy wrens) - these were a real bright spot in my week, I loved sharing these. I hope they are backed up somewhere and FB is just holding them hostage, not deleted permanently.
It just feels like another kick in the guts for the ABC that it just doesn't need.
further coverage.
posted by freethefeet at 4:37 PM on February 17, 2021 [12 favorites]
The collateral damage to emergency services is pretty damning- Facebook could legitimately have blood on their hands if there is another major disaster- there have been fires in WA already this year. Not to mention cyclones and flooding.
Australians also can't share news links from other countries either. So in the midst of a global pandemic, Facebook cut off all the reliable news.
Whilst it's a relief that my relatives can't post Sky News drivel, the really out there sites like "Rebel News" are still there. (I did report that page as news media to Facebook. Although would that legitimise them? Dunno. ) (Clarify: as a bug report, fb hasn't got a "report that it's media" link)
Living regionally (not in a capital city) the local paper's Facebook page was a good way to keep tabs on what is going on- a proposed healthcare merger, what's the situation for cross-border communities at the moment with border closures.
Personally I'm gutted about the community work that the ABC does- each region had a Facebook page, where they'd post stuff like "wallaby visits emergency department", mental health resources for farmers, community events, or my favourite, beautiful sunsets and regular "happy wrensday" posts (beautiful blue fairy wrens) - these were a real bright spot in my week, I loved sharing these. I hope they are backed up somewhere and FB is just holding them hostage, not deleted permanently.
It just feels like another kick in the guts for the ABC that it just doesn't need.
further coverage.
posted by freethefeet at 4:37 PM on February 17, 2021 [12 favorites]
If the Australian government wanted Mefi to pay Murdoch every time there's a post with a link to an Australian news source, would that be appropriate?
Does Mefi run ads?
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 4:47 PM on February 17, 2021
Does Mefi run ads?
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 4:47 PM on February 17, 2021
Because those complaints are asinine.
No, they're not.
Google and Facebook don't republish entire news articles. They help users find the articles, which users then click through to and read, generating ad revenue for the news outlet.
They scrape content and often extract information that their algorithms think the user is looking for to produce that summary.
I thought the Australian law was silly until I heard Ann Reardon of How to Cook That explain it. The problem is how much Google summarizes the content of links it's finding for you, and oftentimes that summary is so complete it makes actually visiting that link unnecessary, depriving the actual authors of the content of any pageviews (and hence advertising revenue)
Imagine if Google summarized the contents of every single AskMeFi post along with the answers that got the most favorites. No one would ever have to actually visit Metafilter because Google is just giving away the bits that everyone's looking for. That's what the spirit of this law is about--regulating Google's hostile syndication of content as part of it's search.
Now the actual implementation of the law might be a a dumpster fire that exists only as an excuse for Murdoch to rent-seek, but that shouldn't divert our attention away from the actual problem.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 4:48 PM on February 17, 2021 [33 favorites]
No, they're not.
Google and Facebook don't republish entire news articles. They help users find the articles, which users then click through to and read, generating ad revenue for the news outlet.
They scrape content and often extract information that their algorithms think the user is looking for to produce that summary.
I thought the Australian law was silly until I heard Ann Reardon of How to Cook That explain it. The problem is how much Google summarizes the content of links it's finding for you, and oftentimes that summary is so complete it makes actually visiting that link unnecessary, depriving the actual authors of the content of any pageviews (and hence advertising revenue)
Imagine if Google summarized the contents of every single AskMeFi post along with the answers that got the most favorites. No one would ever have to actually visit Metafilter because Google is just giving away the bits that everyone's looking for. That's what the spirit of this law is about--regulating Google's hostile syndication of content as part of it's search.
Now the actual implementation of the law might be a a dumpster fire that exists only as an excuse for Murdoch to rent-seek, but that shouldn't divert our attention away from the actual problem.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 4:48 PM on February 17, 2021 [33 favorites]
Doesn't everyone have blood on their hands by now? Including responsible persons whose emergency plans include "rely on facebook?"
Honestly this law sounds like a mess to me. However, I'm tentatively optimistic about anything that damages facebook. Does your society NEED facebook to function? Then pass something even bigger. Nationalize it, socialize it, create the "digital commons" we've been beefing about for so long. I don't really see a path forward to that though. I don't see a lot of light at the end of the tunnel, except for the meager hope of less FB, less monopoly, more options. Not some legislative grooming of FB into the digital commons.
posted by Wood at 4:58 PM on February 17, 2021 [4 favorites]
Honestly this law sounds like a mess to me. However, I'm tentatively optimistic about anything that damages facebook. Does your society NEED facebook to function? Then pass something even bigger. Nationalize it, socialize it, create the "digital commons" we've been beefing about for so long. I don't really see a path forward to that though. I don't see a lot of light at the end of the tunnel, except for the meager hope of less FB, less monopoly, more options. Not some legislative grooming of FB into the digital commons.
posted by Wood at 4:58 PM on February 17, 2021 [4 favorites]
Google and Facebook don't republish entire news articles.
I can't talk about Facebook because I haven't had an account for years, but my Android phone has that feature whereby if you swipe from the main screen you get Google's algorithm-generated news feed.
While it's not exactly republishing entire news articles, it's presenting users with an automatically curated set of newsy articles, probably replacing for many people the old concept of buying a newspaper or visiting a news site of choice.
posted by UbuRoivas at 5:02 PM on February 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
I can't talk about Facebook because I haven't had an account for years, but my Android phone has that feature whereby if you swipe from the main screen you get Google's algorithm-generated news feed.
While it's not exactly republishing entire news articles, it's presenting users with an automatically curated set of newsy articles, probably replacing for many people the old concept of buying a newspaper or visiting a news site of choice.
posted by UbuRoivas at 5:02 PM on February 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
They scrape content and often extract information that their algorithms think the user is looking for to produce that summary.
Newspapers can stop Google's crawlers with 5 minutes work of updating their robots.txt files.
Newspapers want to be crawled, they just want search engines to be forced to pay.
Google is empirically willing to pay - see all the agreements they've signed worldwide - but that's different from being legally mandated to pay for merely showing a link.
Part of the issue IMO is who gets to define who a "news organization" is. Like could every site that gets crawled by Google start demanding payments for displaying links? Clearly Google is going to fight that tooth and nail.
posted by GuyZero at 5:07 PM on February 17, 2021 [4 favorites]
Newspapers can stop Google's crawlers with 5 minutes work of updating their robots.txt files.
Newspapers want to be crawled, they just want search engines to be forced to pay.
Google is empirically willing to pay - see all the agreements they've signed worldwide - but that's different from being legally mandated to pay for merely showing a link.
Part of the issue IMO is who gets to define who a "news organization" is. Like could every site that gets crawled by Google start demanding payments for displaying links? Clearly Google is going to fight that tooth and nail.
posted by GuyZero at 5:07 PM on February 17, 2021 [4 favorites]
Hm, just checked my phone's newsfeed and it's entirely The Guardian, ABC, Sydney Morning Herald and NRL.
This is a distinct improvement. Just needs a bit more NRL but the season isn't under way yet so that should improve over time.
posted by UbuRoivas at 5:16 PM on February 17, 2021 [3 favorites]
This is a distinct improvement. Just needs a bit more NRL but the season isn't under way yet so that should improve over time.
posted by UbuRoivas at 5:16 PM on February 17, 2021 [3 favorites]
I thought the Australian law was silly until I heard Ann Reardon of How to Cook That explain it . The problem is how much Google summarizes the content of links it's finding for you, and oftentimes that summary is so complete it makes actually visiting that link unnecessary, depriving the actual authors of the content of any pageviews (and hence advertising revenue)
You don't have to take the word of a cooking podcast for this. Go and look. Google serves up the headline and the first sentence. In many cases, not even the whole sentence.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 5:22 PM on February 17, 2021 [4 favorites]
You don't have to take the word of a cooking podcast for this. Go and look. Google serves up the headline and the first sentence. In many cases, not even the whole sentence.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 5:22 PM on February 17, 2021 [4 favorites]
I won't be satisfied until Facebook bans all content from everyone in any country.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 5:25 PM on February 17, 2021 [21 favorites]
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 5:25 PM on February 17, 2021 [21 favorites]
Doesn't everyone have blood on their hands by now? Including responsible persons whose emergency plans include "rely on facebook?"
We can get formal notification of the status of nearby fires. It is much quicker and clearer than relying on the 'fires near me' app.
I'm a responsible person who lives, like everyone else in my region, in a bushfire prone area. We rely on numerous sources but in my experience, the notifications on facebook provided the best location-specific clear information on what to do (i.e. if we're at watch and act or already at 'too late to leave' which can happen in a moment). Back in the day you had to watch the smoke yourself, piece it together with news reports or if you were really, really lucky, someone might knock on your door.
posted by kitten magic at 5:26 PM on February 17, 2021 [9 favorites]
We can get formal notification of the status of nearby fires. It is much quicker and clearer than relying on the 'fires near me' app.
I'm a responsible person who lives, like everyone else in my region, in a bushfire prone area. We rely on numerous sources but in my experience, the notifications on facebook provided the best location-specific clear information on what to do (i.e. if we're at watch and act or already at 'too late to leave' which can happen in a moment). Back in the day you had to watch the smoke yourself, piece it together with news reports or if you were really, really lucky, someone might knock on your door.
posted by kitten magic at 5:26 PM on February 17, 2021 [9 favorites]
If anyone here can reach Rupert Murdoch, please tell him to send his developers a link to Google's documentation on how to remove or limit the length of search-result snippets while still allowing indexing. It's actually quite easy, one simple HTTP header or HTML tag. For Facebook, News Corp developers would need to add Open Graph metadata which is more complex but offers more control over how the link appears. Anyway, once that's cleared up (surely everyone involved was simply unaware that these options exist) I'm sure we can be done with that silly law.
posted by skymt at 5:27 PM on February 17, 2021 [6 favorites]
posted by skymt at 5:27 PM on February 17, 2021 [6 favorites]
And I'm not a defender of fb generally, I only use it as compilation of cats I now feel I know, and to comment on the antics of my friends' cats. But last summer this was interspersed with bushfire warnings.
posted by kitten magic at 5:28 PM on February 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by kitten magic at 5:28 PM on February 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
Seriously, what’s the problem? Facebook becomes useless? That’s great in my opinion. I can’t count the number of businesses and government departments with previously functional websites which have now devolved to simple landing pages which direct you to their Facebook page. I look forward to the resurrection of these sites.
And news? I can get mine directly from sites I curate myself, thank you. The sooner Facebook is consigned to the dumpster of history, the better.
posted by sudogeek at 5:29 PM on February 17, 2021 [9 favorites]
And news? I can get mine directly from sites I curate myself, thank you. The sooner Facebook is consigned to the dumpster of history, the better.
posted by sudogeek at 5:29 PM on February 17, 2021 [9 favorites]
The problem sudogeek, is that for many people, Facebook, for better or worse, is the internet.
Sure, we all hate Facebook, but it's a useful tool as mentioned above for things like emergency warnings, and community building, especially in these lockdown pandemic times.
Telling people "you're doing the internet wrong" is along the lines of "your favourite band sucks".
The stuff I really miss doesn't exist off Facebook- the community building stuff.
I'm feeling quite glum about it all today- even close to tears. SBS and the ABC make up a big part of my social media feed, and I'm feeling a bit adrift, to be honest. Something pleasant and nice just cut off in the crossfire.
list of non news media caught up in this mess
posted by freethefeet at 5:38 PM on February 17, 2021 [11 favorites]
Sure, we all hate Facebook, but it's a useful tool as mentioned above for things like emergency warnings, and community building, especially in these lockdown pandemic times.
Telling people "you're doing the internet wrong" is along the lines of "your favourite band sucks".
The stuff I really miss doesn't exist off Facebook- the community building stuff.
I'm feeling quite glum about it all today- even close to tears. SBS and the ABC make up a big part of my social media feed, and I'm feeling a bit adrift, to be honest. Something pleasant and nice just cut off in the crossfire.
list of non news media caught up in this mess
posted by freethefeet at 5:38 PM on February 17, 2021 [11 favorites]
Like sudogeek just jumped in to say, delegation of literally anything seriously important to FB has always been problematic. I don't wish to come across as antagonistic to you, kitten magic. It's there, it's popular, and it's being used in all kinds of positive and important ways. Problematic doesn't mean bad, just means it has problems. We're a bit on the horns of a dilemma and trying to figure out where to go from here.
We've had this discussion on metafilter before, where people point out problems with twitter (e.g., mostly) and then people point out the great importance it has to them. (And I see freethefeet has followed up sudogeek.) Generally as is the wont on metafilter it gets extremely harsh. I hope we can avoid that here.
posted by Wood at 5:42 PM on February 17, 2021 [5 favorites]
We've had this discussion on metafilter before, where people point out problems with twitter (e.g., mostly) and then people point out the great importance it has to them. (And I see freethefeet has followed up sudogeek.) Generally as is the wont on metafilter it gets extremely harsh. I hope we can avoid that here.
posted by Wood at 5:42 PM on February 17, 2021 [5 favorites]
Interestingly it seems all the content is still available if you aren't logged in to FB.
posted by awfurby at 5:55 PM on February 17, 2021
posted by awfurby at 5:55 PM on February 17, 2021
Newspapers can stop Google's crawlers with 5 minutes work of updating their robots.txt files.
That's not a solution. That's extortion. Either sites let Google do whatever it wants with the content they've crawled, or they don't get any traffic from Google period.
Newspapers want to be crawled, they just want search engines to be forced to pay.
Sites want to be crawled. Sites don't want their content held hostage by Google. I think the AskMeFi example is appropriate: What if when somewhat searches "Can I eat a plate of beans that's been left out overnight" Google returns the answer with the most favorites in a call-out box but stripped of any Metafilter branding save for a tiny source attribution? Would Metafilter get the same click-through compared to Google just serving up a link to the Metafilter page with a short summary?
Part of the issue IMO is who gets to define who a "news organization" is. Like could every site that gets crawled by Google start demanding payments for displaying links? Clearly Google is going to fight that tooth and nail.
Displaying links is the straw man that Google and FB keep propagating. It's not about paying to display links or even to summarize links. It's not even about news organizations, becuase they're not the only ones affected. Google is abusing the permission they have to crawl sites in order to profit off redistributing the content that they cache. They're intercepting clicks by serving up the content people are actually looking for.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:56 PM on February 17, 2021 [23 favorites]
That's not a solution. That's extortion. Either sites let Google do whatever it wants with the content they've crawled, or they don't get any traffic from Google period.
Newspapers want to be crawled, they just want search engines to be forced to pay.
Sites want to be crawled. Sites don't want their content held hostage by Google. I think the AskMeFi example is appropriate: What if when somewhat searches "Can I eat a plate of beans that's been left out overnight" Google returns the answer with the most favorites in a call-out box but stripped of any Metafilter branding save for a tiny source attribution? Would Metafilter get the same click-through compared to Google just serving up a link to the Metafilter page with a short summary?
Part of the issue IMO is who gets to define who a "news organization" is. Like could every site that gets crawled by Google start demanding payments for displaying links? Clearly Google is going to fight that tooth and nail.
Displaying links is the straw man that Google and FB keep propagating. It's not about paying to display links or even to summarize links. It's not even about news organizations, becuase they're not the only ones affected. Google is abusing the permission they have to crawl sites in order to profit off redistributing the content that they cache. They're intercepting clicks by serving up the content people are actually looking for.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:56 PM on February 17, 2021 [23 favorites]
In response to @freethe feet, I understand your concerns but I also am viewing this through what I believe, namely that FB is acting in bad faith.
First, this “disruption” can be laid at FB’s feet. I have no doubt that the over-broad blockage of government agencies and a swath of other groups is a feature, not a bug, from the point-of-view of Zuckerberg et al. They are hoping to generate a backlash which will force the government to backtrack.
Secondly, I’m old enough to remember the days when AOL was “the internet” to many users. Well, AOL is (mostly) gone and yet, we and the internet survived. As far as government government warnings, I’m a bit surprised that an agency would depend on a private company for this (that is, there should be an official website and other channels for such alerts) for the very reason that said corporation can basically pull stunts like with little recourse. This should be a wakeup call for those agencies. As for organizing, particularly political (which may not be your application), I would also be skeptical of basing that on FB or any other company which can arbitrarily (as is demonstrated here) pull the plug on your communication channel based on the political or financial imperatives of the company.
posted by sudogeek at 5:59 PM on February 17, 2021 [6 favorites]
First, this “disruption” can be laid at FB’s feet. I have no doubt that the over-broad blockage of government agencies and a swath of other groups is a feature, not a bug, from the point-of-view of Zuckerberg et al. They are hoping to generate a backlash which will force the government to backtrack.
Secondly, I’m old enough to remember the days when AOL was “the internet” to many users. Well, AOL is (mostly) gone and yet, we and the internet survived. As far as government government warnings, I’m a bit surprised that an agency would depend on a private company for this (that is, there should be an official website and other channels for such alerts) for the very reason that said corporation can basically pull stunts like with little recourse. This should be a wakeup call for those agencies. As for organizing, particularly political (which may not be your application), I would also be skeptical of basing that on FB or any other company which can arbitrarily (as is demonstrated here) pull the plug on your communication channel based on the political or financial imperatives of the company.
posted by sudogeek at 5:59 PM on February 17, 2021 [6 favorites]
What if when somewhat searches "Can I eat a plate of beans that's been left out overnight" Google returns the answer with the most favorites in a call-out box but stripped of any Metafilter branding save for a tiny source attribution?
When I searched that query on Google just now, at the top of the results page was an automated summary of an article from a website called LEAFtv. Below the summary was a link that reads "about featured snippets". On the documentation page that link leads to is a link to technical documentation for webmasters on how to opt out of search snippets or limit their maximum length.
posted by skymt at 6:05 PM on February 17, 2021 [4 favorites]
When I searched that query on Google just now, at the top of the results page was an automated summary of an article from a website called LEAFtv. Below the summary was a link that reads "about featured snippets". On the documentation page that link leads to is a link to technical documentation for webmasters on how to opt out of search snippets or limit their maximum length.
posted by skymt at 6:05 PM on February 17, 2021 [4 favorites]
the Australian government are a collection of the most stupid, venal people in the country.
Can confirm. But at least they make honest ads.
posted by flabdablet at 6:07 PM on February 17, 2021 [6 favorites]
Can confirm. But at least they make honest ads.
posted by flabdablet at 6:07 PM on February 17, 2021 [6 favorites]
Displaying links is the straw man that Google and FB keep propagating. It's not about paying to display links or even to summarize links. It's not even about news organizations, becuase they're not the only ones affected. Google is abusing the permission they have to crawl sites in order to profit off redistributing the content that they cache. They're intercepting clicks by serving up the content people are actually looking for.
OK but the law, as I understand it, is literally "pay to display links." It's not a good law. Plus the notion that search steals revenue from the content creators isn't necessarily true - lots of people think (and possibly have data) that people click the links and the newspapers generate plenty of revenue:
"This really isn't correct. 1: links produce more revenue for the newspapers than Google - news searches don't have high ad value. 2: the proposal is that a link generates revenue, regardless of monetisation. You show up in search, you get paid. No content is involved at all."
And per Benedict's middle point - news searches don't make Google or FB any money to speak of. Product searches are where the money is. If news search was so valuable why aren't there more companies doing it?
posted by GuyZero at 6:08 PM on February 17, 2021 [3 favorites]
OK but the law, as I understand it, is literally "pay to display links." It's not a good law. Plus the notion that search steals revenue from the content creators isn't necessarily true - lots of people think (and possibly have data) that people click the links and the newspapers generate plenty of revenue:
"This really isn't correct. 1: links produce more revenue for the newspapers than Google - news searches don't have high ad value. 2: the proposal is that a link generates revenue, regardless of monetisation. You show up in search, you get paid. No content is involved at all."
And per Benedict's middle point - news searches don't make Google or FB any money to speak of. Product searches are where the money is. If news search was so valuable why aren't there more companies doing it?
posted by GuyZero at 6:08 PM on February 17, 2021 [3 favorites]
Sites don't want their content held hostage by Google.
...but it isn't? I mean, how is it being "held hostage"? The closest thing I can think of is AMP, which is definitely a weird thing but the website has to specifically engineer their own systems to use AMP; nobody gets opted-in without doing that work themselves.
If I go to, for example, Google News I'm only seeing headlines which are themselves active links -- are we talking about the headlines as "content"? Or is there a setting somewhere that I've tweaked without knowing it?
posted by aramaic at 6:11 PM on February 17, 2021 [3 favorites]
...but it isn't? I mean, how is it being "held hostage"? The closest thing I can think of is AMP, which is definitely a weird thing but the website has to specifically engineer their own systems to use AMP; nobody gets opted-in without doing that work themselves.
If I go to, for example, Google News I'm only seeing headlines which are themselves active links -- are we talking about the headlines as "content"? Or is there a setting somewhere that I've tweaked without knowing it?
posted by aramaic at 6:11 PM on February 17, 2021 [3 favorites]
In response to @freethe feet, I understand your concerns but I also am viewing this through what I believe, namely that FB is acting in bad faith.
It's Facebook. Acting in bad faith is a given.
The reason this has gone off the rails is that the Government is also acting in bad faith.
And so are the major news outlets.
None of them have clothed themselves in glory.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 6:11 PM on February 17, 2021 [21 favorites]
It's Facebook. Acting in bad faith is a given.
The reason this has gone off the rails is that the Government is also acting in bad faith.
And so are the major news outlets.
None of them have clothed themselves in glory.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 6:11 PM on February 17, 2021 [21 favorites]
On the documentation page that link leads to is a link to technical documentation for webmasters on how to opt out of search snippets or limit their maximum length.
But wouldn't opting out of featured snippets put you at a disadvantage with other sites that don't opt out? So the choice is: let Google syndicate some of my content, or have worse search placement.
It's not a good law.
It probably isn't. See above re: Murdoch.
Or is there a setting somewhere that I've tweaked without knowing it?
I didn't know the technical term for it, but skymt has filled me in. I'm referring to 'featured snippets'.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:16 PM on February 17, 2021
But wouldn't opting out of featured snippets put you at a disadvantage with other sites that don't opt out? So the choice is: let Google syndicate some of my content, or have worse search placement.
It's not a good law.
It probably isn't. See above re: Murdoch.
Or is there a setting somewhere that I've tweaked without knowing it?
I didn't know the technical term for it, but skymt has filled me in. I'm referring to 'featured snippets'.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:16 PM on February 17, 2021
I'm gutted about the community work that the ABC does- each region had a Facebook page, where they'd post stuff like "wallaby visits emergency department", mental health resources for farmers, community events, or my favourite, beautiful sunsets and regular "happy wrensday" posts (beautiful blue fairy wrens) - these were a real bright spot in my week, I loved sharing these.
Probably worth finding out how much of what you used to get via Facebook is still available via the ABC App.
posted by flabdablet at 6:17 PM on February 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
Probably worth finding out how much of what you used to get via Facebook is still available via the ABC App.
posted by flabdablet at 6:17 PM on February 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
news searches don't make Google or FB any money to speak of. Product searches are where the money is.
Also if anyone doesn't believe me here search google for "college admission scandal" or "texas power failure" or "clinton elected president" and compare the number of ads (zero for me) to what you see for "flowers" "digital camera" or "emergency supplies".
posted by GuyZero at 6:18 PM on February 17, 2021 [1 favorite]
Also if anyone doesn't believe me here search google for "college admission scandal" or "texas power failure" or "clinton elected president" and compare the number of ads (zero for me) to what you see for "flowers" "digital camera" or "emergency supplies".
posted by GuyZero at 6:18 PM on February 17, 2021 [1 favorite]
Leaving google aside to focus on Facebook, one key issue I haven’t seen mentioned is the way that posting and also reading (!) posted articles keeps you in the fb app. That’s purely to keep people in the fb ecosystem AND capture any associated ad revenue the news site might otherwise host. That’s way worse of a value capture problem compared to google and indeed, maybe that’s exactly why they went for the heavy handed ban.
So I deleted my Facebook app in solidarity, because it is perfectly clear to me that this kind of value capture is almost certainly damaging the profits of the original news provider. Facebook didn’t create the content, so why do they get all the profits?
Social media is new but academic content aggregators like EBSCO have had to work out mutually agreeable means of compensating the content originators (book, journal publishers) while also allowing useful searches. Unfortunately the platforms are powerful, so it has taken government mandate to make that happen, but it seems like it was about time...
As an interesting aside, although we often discuss the need to post open access sources rather than paywalled little the NYT and The Economist, the paywall is part of what is keeping those companies profitable against the (advertising/subscription) value capture of the platforms. Which is a bit of a pickle...
Maybe Facebook or other platforms can think about products that make access more convenient, like a monthly subscription where I pay them and they pay all the per-article fees so I don’t have to become a full subscriber.
posted by ec2y at 6:25 PM on February 17, 2021 [3 favorites]
So I deleted my Facebook app in solidarity, because it is perfectly clear to me that this kind of value capture is almost certainly damaging the profits of the original news provider. Facebook didn’t create the content, so why do they get all the profits?
Social media is new but academic content aggregators like EBSCO have had to work out mutually agreeable means of compensating the content originators (book, journal publishers) while also allowing useful searches. Unfortunately the platforms are powerful, so it has taken government mandate to make that happen, but it seems like it was about time...
As an interesting aside, although we often discuss the need to post open access sources rather than paywalled little the NYT and The Economist, the paywall is part of what is keeping those companies profitable against the (advertising/subscription) value capture of the platforms. Which is a bit of a pickle...
Maybe Facebook or other platforms can think about products that make access more convenient, like a monthly subscription where I pay them and they pay all the per-article fees so I don’t have to become a full subscriber.
posted by ec2y at 6:25 PM on February 17, 2021 [3 favorites]
Facebook didn’t create the content, so why do they get all the profits?
I challenge the assertion that newspapers do not get any revenue when a user clicks a news site link in FB.
That said, newspaper sites do indeed generate stunningly little revenue. I'll continue to blame craigslist for that rather than FB. Arguably news never generated any revenue for newspapers.
posted by GuyZero at 6:41 PM on February 17, 2021 [3 favorites]
I challenge the assertion that newspapers do not get any revenue when a user clicks a news site link in FB.
That said, newspaper sites do indeed generate stunningly little revenue. I'll continue to blame craigslist for that rather than FB. Arguably news never generated any revenue for newspapers.
posted by GuyZero at 6:41 PM on February 17, 2021 [3 favorites]
The other crucial Australian context is the centralisation of news and the decline of regional/local papers and radio stations. Right into the 2000s there was an ecosystem of small town and suburban local papers that subsisted on hyper-local news, pictures of kids with trophies and notable animals (the kind of thing freethefeet is talking about) but which survived on real estate advertising and paying their journos next to nothing; these either went bankrupt with real estate's move to the internet or got centralised (mostly into newscorp subsidiaries). It's not a coincidence that the only profitable arm of the Fairfax organisation is Domain.
Those local papers/stations enjoyed some of the highest levels of trust, and why wouldn't they, since their subject matter was usually things you were already familiar with or people you vaguely knew; by contrast the national media has earned its low level of trust through being just not very good for decades, and as for 'news' in the form of forwarded-on-FB, we all know about that. ABC local radio and the few remaining regional papers are the last vestiges of that trusted media environment.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 6:45 PM on February 17, 2021 [6 favorites]
Those local papers/stations enjoyed some of the highest levels of trust, and why wouldn't they, since their subject matter was usually things you were already familiar with or people you vaguely knew; by contrast the national media has earned its low level of trust through being just not very good for decades, and as for 'news' in the form of forwarded-on-FB, we all know about that. ABC local radio and the few remaining regional papers are the last vestiges of that trusted media environment.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 6:45 PM on February 17, 2021 [6 favorites]
Arguably news never generated any revenue for newspapers.
That's roughly what I've heard: traditionally the revenue came mostly from classified ads, only slightly topped up by the cover price of papers and ads within the news content.
Murdoch's Australian papers & news sites supposedly bleed money, but are propped up by realestate.com.au which takes the place of the classified ads.
posted by UbuRoivas at 6:50 PM on February 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
That's roughly what I've heard: traditionally the revenue came mostly from classified ads, only slightly topped up by the cover price of papers and ads within the news content.
Murdoch's Australian papers & news sites supposedly bleed money, but are propped up by realestate.com.au which takes the place of the classified ads.
posted by UbuRoivas at 6:50 PM on February 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
This just feels like a way for the traditional media to claw back some of the ad revenue that's gone from them to Google and Facebook. 20 years ago they were making enough off of classifieds and print ads or tv commercials to fund everything. Now all the ad money is online and they're getting a fraction of what they did before and are trying to find some pretext to get some of it back.
It's kind of a free hit for governments isn't it? I don't think that Google or Facebook are paying much in the way of taxes anywhere. Domestic media is an important priority and if it needs funds why give it out of the government's own revenue when they can just take it from a tech giant instead? Some tiny violins are going to start playing if a FAANG company complains about paying taxes.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 6:50 PM on February 17, 2021 [1 favorite]
It's kind of a free hit for governments isn't it? I don't think that Google or Facebook are paying much in the way of taxes anywhere. Domestic media is an important priority and if it needs funds why give it out of the government's own revenue when they can just take it from a tech giant instead? Some tiny violins are going to start playing if a FAANG company complains about paying taxes.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 6:50 PM on February 17, 2021 [1 favorite]
I challenge the assertion that newspapers do not get any revenue when a user clicks a news site link in FB
Hm, like I said, I deleted my app (plus not an engineer), but I do know that when you’re in the app it’s not like a normal google click through, it’s into a new screen within the Facebook app. For all I know they just pull down the article body and images.
In fact, it usually takes a lot of extra effort to open separately in a normal web browser. (Which I know since I sometimes open separately to read later.)
Perhaps someone who has worked on these types of systems can weigh in?
posted by ec2y at 6:53 PM on February 17, 2021
Hm, like I said, I deleted my app (plus not an engineer), but I do know that when you’re in the app it’s not like a normal google click through, it’s into a new screen within the Facebook app. For all I know they just pull down the article body and images.
In fact, it usually takes a lot of extra effort to open separately in a normal web browser. (Which I know since I sometimes open separately to read later.)
Perhaps someone who has worked on these types of systems can weigh in?
posted by ec2y at 6:53 PM on February 17, 2021
Google and Facebook don't republish entire news articles. They help users find the articles, which users then click through to and read, generating ad revenue for the news outlet.
Doesn’t AMP replace the ads with Google’s ad links? AMP reposts the full content, not a snippet, but the page feels neutered, getting a link to the original article is hard, and if I could globally disable it on my devices I’d do it.
(Yes I know I can change my search engine. I still get the best results by searching with Google. It’s a two-edged sword.)
posted by caution live frogs at 7:08 PM on February 17, 2021
Doesn’t AMP replace the ads with Google’s ad links? AMP reposts the full content, not a snippet, but the page feels neutered, getting a link to the original article is hard, and if I could globally disable it on my devices I’d do it.
(Yes I know I can change my search engine. I still get the best results by searching with Google. It’s a two-edged sword.)
posted by caution live frogs at 7:08 PM on February 17, 2021
I’m not sure people understand why Google and Facebook got all the ad revenue. It’s not because they get to serve the ad first before someone clicks through (although that kind of followed.) it’s because they:
A) drove the revenue down per ad unit and bidding algorithms due to massive volume and
B) they offer way, way more audience information, especially Facebook although they had to pull back some. But on Facebook I can target ads to “people in this geographic region with this level of education with kids 0-5” or whatever (at one point you could do income). News companies didn’t have people logging in supplying all that demographic information exactly - there was a database on readers that came up with similar via survey research but it wasn’t the same, nor could you aggregate, like “all parents in the east end of this city whether they read Cosmo or Southern Living or watch Netflix.” And that’s before they interpret your *own posts* or searches to deliver semantic advertisements. A logged-in newspaper reader may provide postal code and credit card and that they read yoga articles but they are unlikely to be able to do the Internet equivalent of Target’s reveal of teen pregnancy.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:10 PM on February 17, 2021 [4 favorites]
A) drove the revenue down per ad unit and bidding algorithms due to massive volume and
B) they offer way, way more audience information, especially Facebook although they had to pull back some. But on Facebook I can target ads to “people in this geographic region with this level of education with kids 0-5” or whatever (at one point you could do income). News companies didn’t have people logging in supplying all that demographic information exactly - there was a database on readers that came up with similar via survey research but it wasn’t the same, nor could you aggregate, like “all parents in the east end of this city whether they read Cosmo or Southern Living or watch Netflix.” And that’s before they interpret your *own posts* or searches to deliver semantic advertisements. A logged-in newspaper reader may provide postal code and credit card and that they read yoga articles but they are unlikely to be able to do the Internet equivalent of Target’s reveal of teen pregnancy.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:10 PM on February 17, 2021 [4 favorites]
Also - remember that if using the Facebook app, links to outside articles open in a built-in browser so that Facebook can better track everything you do. It may not technically be reposting the content but it’s sleazy in the same way AMP is. You have no idea whether they are rewriting ad links on the fly.
Perhaps Australians will rediscover that they can text or email links to friends. Links to anything. Without involving Facebook at all. Wouldn’t that be something? It won’t hurt Australians but it sure won’t be good for Zuck.
posted by caution live frogs at 7:12 PM on February 17, 2021 [3 favorites]
Perhaps Australians will rediscover that they can text or email links to friends. Links to anything. Without involving Facebook at all. Wouldn’t that be something? It won’t hurt Australians but it sure won’t be good for Zuck.
posted by caution live frogs at 7:12 PM on February 17, 2021 [3 favorites]
Facebook delanda est.
posted by sourcequench at 7:16 PM on February 17, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by sourcequench at 7:16 PM on February 17, 2021 [1 favorite]
Perhaps Australians will rediscover that they can text or email links to friendsAlas, this wildly overestimates the internet literacy and access of many Australian relatives on facebook...
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 7:19 PM on February 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
Flabdablet- some good stuff on the app but no wrens unfortunately.
posted by freethefeet at 7:21 PM on February 17, 2021
posted by freethefeet at 7:21 PM on February 17, 2021
Every day brings even bigger, better reasons to quit Facebook/never join in the first place. Boycott fascist monopoly "social networks" today.
posted by neon909 at 8:13 PM on February 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by neon909 at 8:13 PM on February 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
From Casey Newton: Australia's bad bargain with platforms and Facebook calls Australia's bluff
from the latter:
"Easton says that in the past year, Facebook sent more than 5 billion clicks to Australian publishers, whose value he estimated at AU$ 407 million. If the current situation holds, Facebook will send those same publishers zero clicks — a move that, I imagine, may force publishers to recalibrate in their minds the relative value that Facebook and publishers provide one another."
and
"It’s worth mentioning that any Australian publisher aggrieved by an unfair exchange of value with Google here could opt out of search results at any time by adding one line of HTML to their website. But almost none of them do, because traffic from Google drives significant advertising and subscription revenue to them."
Facebook and Google no more steal revenue from newspapers than airlines steal revenue from ocean liners, to rephrase the quote above from Benedict Evans. The issue is that newspapers, as a business, totally suck at making money and FB and Google are convenient targets that are flush with cash.
But on Facebook I can target ads to “people in this geographic region with this level of education with kids 0-5” or whatever (at one point you could do income). News companies didn’t have people logging in supplying all that demographic information exactly
This is exactly true: from an advertiser's perspective FB ads is a much better product than newspaper ads. So it's not surprising where the money has gone. But in most cases governments don't step in to make a better product subsidize a worse product.
There is a legitimate question to ask about the value of impartial news gathering to society and how we're going to pay for that. Classified ads got killed decades ago. Display ads on newspapers don't really cover the bills. People have more competition for their attention than ever before and ads will continue to decline in value. So how to pay for news? I don't have an answer but mandating payments is just the government picking winners, which generally doesn't go well. Canada is just straight up giving government money to news orgs, which is in some ways fairer, but again suffers from the problem of picking winners. There's a real problem here and no one has found a great answer so far.
posted by GuyZero at 8:46 PM on February 17, 2021 [6 favorites]
from the latter:
"Easton says that in the past year, Facebook sent more than 5 billion clicks to Australian publishers, whose value he estimated at AU$ 407 million. If the current situation holds, Facebook will send those same publishers zero clicks — a move that, I imagine, may force publishers to recalibrate in their minds the relative value that Facebook and publishers provide one another."
and
"It’s worth mentioning that any Australian publisher aggrieved by an unfair exchange of value with Google here could opt out of search results at any time by adding one line of HTML to their website. But almost none of them do, because traffic from Google drives significant advertising and subscription revenue to them."
Facebook and Google no more steal revenue from newspapers than airlines steal revenue from ocean liners, to rephrase the quote above from Benedict Evans. The issue is that newspapers, as a business, totally suck at making money and FB and Google are convenient targets that are flush with cash.
But on Facebook I can target ads to “people in this geographic region with this level of education with kids 0-5” or whatever (at one point you could do income). News companies didn’t have people logging in supplying all that demographic information exactly
This is exactly true: from an advertiser's perspective FB ads is a much better product than newspaper ads. So it's not surprising where the money has gone. But in most cases governments don't step in to make a better product subsidize a worse product.
There is a legitimate question to ask about the value of impartial news gathering to society and how we're going to pay for that. Classified ads got killed decades ago. Display ads on newspapers don't really cover the bills. People have more competition for their attention than ever before and ads will continue to decline in value. So how to pay for news? I don't have an answer but mandating payments is just the government picking winners, which generally doesn't go well. Canada is just straight up giving government money to news orgs, which is in some ways fairer, but again suffers from the problem of picking winners. There's a real problem here and no one has found a great answer so far.
posted by GuyZero at 8:46 PM on February 17, 2021 [6 favorites]
Beetoota delivers (and is back on Facebook)
posted by freethefeet at 8:51 PM on February 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by freethefeet at 8:51 PM on February 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
I "deleted" my Facebook account a few years ago, and personally will not be affected by this. I do like the idea of Facebook and Zuckerberg not getting their own way about everything - however, I also like the idea of the Libs, Murdoch and 9/Fairfax not getting their own way about everything.
Solution: Facebook, just stop Australians from sharing News Corp and 9/Fairfax articles. Smaller publishers who arguably need the signal boost, government organisations, the ABC, the Guardian and so forth can still be shared and accessed on Facebook. Just not the moguls.
posted by Athanassiel at 9:34 PM on February 17, 2021 [5 favorites]
Solution: Facebook, just stop Australians from sharing News Corp and 9/Fairfax articles. Smaller publishers who arguably need the signal boost, government organisations, the ABC, the Guardian and so forth can still be shared and accessed on Facebook. Just not the moguls.
posted by Athanassiel at 9:34 PM on February 17, 2021 [5 favorites]
Facebook vs Newscorp? How do we make them both lose?
posted by pompomtom at 9:50 PM on February 17, 2021 [6 favorites]
posted by pompomtom at 9:50 PM on February 17, 2021 [6 favorites]
On a personal level, quit & delete Facebook, install ByeRupert into your browser.
Also, put the Coalition last because that's where they put you.
posted by UbuRoivas at 9:56 PM on February 17, 2021 [4 favorites]
Also, put the Coalition last because that's where they put you.
posted by UbuRoivas at 9:56 PM on February 17, 2021 [4 favorites]
Facebook blocks Indigenous health groups, regional media as COVID vaccine rollout nears
posted by freethefeet at 10:13 PM on February 17, 2021
posted by freethefeet at 10:13 PM on February 17, 2021
"It’s worth mentioning that any Australian publisher aggrieved by an unfair exchange of value with Google here could opt out of search results at any time by adding one line of HTML to their website. But almost none of them do, because traffic from Google drives significant advertising and subscription revenue to them."
Ah, yes - any newspaper who is upset with the deal they have with Google has the option to cut their own throat and functionally vanish from the internet in response. Given that we are literally posting on a website that was on the receiving end of how Google can wipe one off the face of the internet, I would hope that there would be a better understanding of the nature of that traffic flow from Google - and what it actually means for news sites.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:29 PM on February 17, 2021 [9 favorites]
Ah, yes - any newspaper who is upset with the deal they have with Google has the option to cut their own throat and functionally vanish from the internet in response. Given that we are literally posting on a website that was on the receiving end of how Google can wipe one off the face of the internet, I would hope that there would be a better understanding of the nature of that traffic flow from Google - and what it actually means for news sites.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:29 PM on February 17, 2021 [9 favorites]
Given that we are literally posting on a website that was on the receiving end of how Google can wipe one off the face of the internet
Metafilter has been responding equally well to my web browser to for 15+ years, regardless of how Google has ranked it. I sincerely don't understand what you mean.
posted by GuyZero at 10:40 PM on February 17, 2021 [1 favorite]
Metafilter has been responding equally well to my web browser to for 15+ years, regardless of how Google has ranked it. I sincerely don't understand what you mean.
posted by GuyZero at 10:40 PM on February 17, 2021 [1 favorite]
GuyZero, a few years ago Google tweaked something and all of a sudden ask plunged down the ratings and so too ad related revenue (metafilter displays ads to non-logged-in visitors.)
posted by freethefeet at 11:05 PM on February 17, 2021 [16 favorites]
posted by freethefeet at 11:05 PM on February 17, 2021 [16 favorites]
Metafilter has been responding equally well to my web browser to for 15+ years, regardless of how Google has ranked it. I sincerely don't understand what you mean.
Given that you have the Metafilter funder badge on your profile, I would think that you would remember why that process was brought about, in response to Google wiping out a significant amount of incoming ad revenue unilaterally by altering Metafilter's PageRank. cortex has also talked about how Google has used PageRank as a stick in forcing sites onto AMP. The simple reality is that websites today live and die on PageRank, and saying that news outlets have the option to opt out of the system that generates the visibility they need to stay viable if they don't like the deal is omitting a lot of underlying context.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:08 PM on February 17, 2021 [14 favorites]
Given that you have the Metafilter funder badge on your profile, I would think that you would remember why that process was brought about, in response to Google wiping out a significant amount of incoming ad revenue unilaterally by altering Metafilter's PageRank. cortex has also talked about how Google has used PageRank as a stick in forcing sites onto AMP. The simple reality is that websites today live and die on PageRank, and saying that news outlets have the option to opt out of the system that generates the visibility they need to stay viable if they don't like the deal is omitting a lot of underlying context.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:08 PM on February 17, 2021 [14 favorites]
>> If the Australian government wanted Mefi to pay Murdoch every time there's a post with a link to an Australian news source, would that be appropriate?
> Does Mefi run ads?
Yes! mefi runs ads if you haven't paid your dues, or if you forget to log in. i've never bothered to log in to mefi from my phone, so if i phone-scroll this mefi thread, i get ads for some house that's for sale nearby (oh, australia, never change).
But do the pages that are linked for this post -- aunty, twitter, and the guardian -- do they get their fair cut of mefi's advertising spoils?
posted by are-coral-made at 11:27 PM on February 17, 2021 [3 favorites]
> Does Mefi run ads?
Yes! mefi runs ads if you haven't paid your dues, or if you forget to log in. i've never bothered to log in to mefi from my phone, so if i phone-scroll this mefi thread, i get ads for some house that's for sale nearby (oh, australia, never change).
But do the pages that are linked for this post -- aunty, twitter, and the guardian -- do they get their fair cut of mefi's advertising spoils?
posted by are-coral-made at 11:27 PM on February 17, 2021 [3 favorites]
Facebook vs Newscorp? How do we make them both lose?
The more I read about this in any great depth the more, in the parlance of reddit, Everyone is the Arsehole here.
posted by Jilder at 11:49 PM on February 17, 2021
The more I read about this in any great depth the more, in the parlance of reddit, Everyone is the Arsehole here.
posted by Jilder at 11:49 PM on February 17, 2021
To be less glib, a functioning news industry with functional, well paid journalism is a full-on public good. It's on par with roads and sewerage, as far as I'm concerned. But the media in Australia is a toxic duopoly intent on running government, not keeping it to account, and this sort of legislation is a shovel to fling more slop at Murdoch and the Packers.
Meanwhile Facebook externalises the costs associated with their content creation to everyone from me, typing a quip about what I had for lunch, to QAnon and worse bad actors, making everyone else produce the content that keeps they eyes to sell to advertisers, without which they have no eyeballs and no business. It really wouldn't kill them to throw a fucking bone to sustain part of what people use to keep their platform ticking along. They've also demonstrated quite handily that they've always had the power to deplatform all the white supremacists, antivaxxers, literal facists and worse that have been "too hard" to deal with for years.
Everyone's the Arsehole.
posted by Jilder at 11:55 PM on February 17, 2021 [11 favorites]
Meanwhile Facebook externalises the costs associated with their content creation to everyone from me, typing a quip about what I had for lunch, to QAnon and worse bad actors, making everyone else produce the content that keeps they eyes to sell to advertisers, without which they have no eyeballs and no business. It really wouldn't kill them to throw a fucking bone to sustain part of what people use to keep their platform ticking along. They've also demonstrated quite handily that they've always had the power to deplatform all the white supremacists, antivaxxers, literal facists and worse that have been "too hard" to deal with for years.
Everyone's the Arsehole.
posted by Jilder at 11:55 PM on February 17, 2021 [11 favorites]
they've always had the power to deplatform all the white supremacists, antivaxxers, literal facists and worse that have been "too hard" to deal with for years.
I've seen this sentiment quite a bit today. Blocking a particular website and a fixed known list of accounts is trivial (if the will to do so is there). *Generating* that list when it's continually updating is not, which is why they ended up removing some sites that shouldn't have been on there, but looked 'newslike'. (The law is also very broad as to what counts as news, which doesn't help avoid false positives)
Blocking random users, posts, videos etc on otherwise legitimate websites (including your own) is *really* hard. Computers are really bad at understanding meaning, context, intent, and truth. A photo, or a video of someone talking to camera - we can intepret the words, the expressions etc, but a computer has a much harder time working out what they're about, if it can at all. You can block on keywords in text posts, but again - context really matters, with keywords like vaccine or covid being used by legitimate and anti-vax posters. And that's not even considering sarcasm.
Is a clip video of an ISIS beheading, a horror film, or a kid pulling off the head of a barbie? WE can tell the difference (usually), but computers are really, really bad at this.
So the answer is human moderation. Which is slow, and the scale of facebook is simply, HUGE. Plus the impact on moderator mental health when they see vast reams of the worst humanity can do every day that machine learning thought might be iffy. Should Facebook hire a vast lot more moderators, and enforce their own terms a lot more, and look after those mods better? Yes, absolutely. Is it at all equivalent to blocking a few thousand URLs that don't significantly change? Not even in the same ballpark.
For the record, I really hate defending Facebook in anything. As someone who runs a commercial filtering server to try and block the worst of the porn sites and other nasties that can pop up in random innocent searches for a school though - it IS fucking hard to catch, and doing it without blocking legit content too sometimes is basically impossible.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 12:29 AM on February 18, 2021 [6 favorites]
I've seen this sentiment quite a bit today. Blocking a particular website and a fixed known list of accounts is trivial (if the will to do so is there). *Generating* that list when it's continually updating is not, which is why they ended up removing some sites that shouldn't have been on there, but looked 'newslike'. (The law is also very broad as to what counts as news, which doesn't help avoid false positives)
Blocking random users, posts, videos etc on otherwise legitimate websites (including your own) is *really* hard. Computers are really bad at understanding meaning, context, intent, and truth. A photo, or a video of someone talking to camera - we can intepret the words, the expressions etc, but a computer has a much harder time working out what they're about, if it can at all. You can block on keywords in text posts, but again - context really matters, with keywords like vaccine or covid being used by legitimate and anti-vax posters. And that's not even considering sarcasm.
Is a clip video of an ISIS beheading, a horror film, or a kid pulling off the head of a barbie? WE can tell the difference (usually), but computers are really, really bad at this.
So the answer is human moderation. Which is slow, and the scale of facebook is simply, HUGE. Plus the impact on moderator mental health when they see vast reams of the worst humanity can do every day that machine learning thought might be iffy. Should Facebook hire a vast lot more moderators, and enforce their own terms a lot more, and look after those mods better? Yes, absolutely. Is it at all equivalent to blocking a few thousand URLs that don't significantly change? Not even in the same ballpark.
For the record, I really hate defending Facebook in anything. As someone who runs a commercial filtering server to try and block the worst of the porn sites and other nasties that can pop up in random innocent searches for a school though - it IS fucking hard to catch, and doing it without blocking legit content too sometimes is basically impossible.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 12:29 AM on February 18, 2021 [6 favorites]
To be less glib, a functioning news industry with functional, well paid journalism is a full-on public good. It's on par with roads and sewerage, as far as I'm concerned.
If I can only have one or the other, I'd vastly prefer a functioning publicly funded statutorially independent news service to a functioning news industry.
Fuck privatizing the ABC. Nationalize News Corp and guarantee adequate ABC funding with a Constitutional amendment.
posted by flabdablet at 12:48 AM on February 18, 2021 [15 favorites]
If I can only have one or the other, I'd vastly prefer a functioning publicly funded statutorially independent news service to a functioning news industry.
Fuck privatizing the ABC. Nationalize News Corp and guarantee adequate ABC funding with a Constitutional amendment.
posted by flabdablet at 12:48 AM on February 18, 2021 [15 favorites]
Ah, yes - any newspaper who is upset with the deal they have with Google has the option to cut their own throat and functionally vanish from the internet in response.
Or you could phrase it as a business that is not happy with the deal they get with their advertiser/referrer can stop using them.
If I live in a town with one newspaper that everyone reads, it's not up to the law to force that newspaper to run ads for me. I den choose whether or not to deal with them. You could argue that it'd be functionally disappearing from town to not, but that is fundamentally my problem to solve.
posted by Dysk at 1:03 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
Or you could phrase it as a business that is not happy with the deal they get with their advertiser/referrer can stop using them.
If I live in a town with one newspaper that everyone reads, it's not up to the law to force that newspaper to run ads for me. I den choose whether or not to deal with them. You could argue that it'd be functionally disappearing from town to not, but that is fundamentally my problem to solve.
posted by Dysk at 1:03 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
If you build you business entirely around one supplier (whether that's of construction widgets, transport, or links) you give that supplier a lot of power over your business. To suggest that that should give your supplier a legal responsibility to look after your business, or even pay to be allowed to continue to supply you, is ludicrous. But it's what this law is.
posted by Dysk at 1:08 AM on February 18, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by Dysk at 1:08 AM on February 18, 2021 [2 favorites]
The analysis is complicated somewhat by the fact that Facebook is a monopoly supplier of Facebook user attention, and that it's not so much Facebook's business practices that help it capture user attention as network effects, that network effects are more than capable of counteracting any attempt to address Facebook's monopoly with regulation. The attention economy is inherently anticompetitive.
As is the case with any natural monopoly, the only way to prevent the whole thing sliding into a complete morass of rent-seeking is to transfer it into public ownership and give it a strong and enforceable charter.
Nationalize Facebook.
posted by flabdablet at 1:26 AM on February 18, 2021 [3 favorites]
As is the case with any natural monopoly, the only way to prevent the whole thing sliding into a complete morass of rent-seeking is to transfer it into public ownership and give it a strong and enforceable charter.
Nationalize Facebook.
posted by flabdablet at 1:26 AM on February 18, 2021 [3 favorites]
If you build you business entirely around one supplier (whether that's of construction widgets, transport, or links) you give that supplier a lot of power over your business. To suggest that that should give your supplier a legal responsibility to look after your business, or even pay to be allowed to continue to supply you, is ludicrous. But it's what this law is.
If you only have one supplier because of how the environment is configured, we refer to that as a natural monopoly, and as it turns out, one function of government is to regulate natural monopolies because of how they can be abused. The reality is that because of how the internet works, Google currently holds a natural monopoly in search, and is not afraid to use it to benefit itself. Which is why having the government coming in to make sure it doesn't is legitimate government power. Now, the government may do so in a bad way, and that should be criticized, but the idea that the government should have no place in regulating online natural monopolies is the sort of argument from the tech industry that got us to the place we're at today, where Google can literally tell websites "do as we say, or face oblivion."
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:03 AM on February 18, 2021 [8 favorites]
If you only have one supplier because of how the environment is configured, we refer to that as a natural monopoly, and as it turns out, one function of government is to regulate natural monopolies because of how they can be abused. The reality is that because of how the internet works, Google currently holds a natural monopoly in search, and is not afraid to use it to benefit itself. Which is why having the government coming in to make sure it doesn't is legitimate government power. Now, the government may do so in a bad way, and that should be criticized, but the idea that the government should have no place in regulating online natural monopolies is the sort of argument from the tech industry that got us to the place we're at today, where Google can literally tell websites "do as we say, or face oblivion."
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:03 AM on February 18, 2021 [8 favorites]
In the midst of an "information vacuum" caused by Facebook's news ban in Australia, fringe self-described news websites, some already known for spreading misinformation, are freely posting vaccine scare stories.
"Omg you guys are the only news left for Australians … all have gone," read one comment today on an Australian Facebook page with over 200,000 followers.
The self-described "news and media website" is run by far-right figure Avi Yemini, who has previously been banned from Facebook for hate speech and played a leading role in Melbourne's anti-lockdown movement.
The page has called for vaccines to be first tested on Bill Gates, feeding long-standing conspiracy theories about Microsoft's co-founder.
Another comment reads: "How am I able to see this post? Weren't all news and media posts banned?"
On a second page of more than 20,000 members, also with a history of posting anti-vaccine misinformation, a post celebrates that the government "won't be able to distribute their COVID-19 fear-mongering and propaganda to the Australian public."
ABC News article
Just.. sigh.
posted by freethefeet at 2:24 AM on February 18, 2021
"Omg you guys are the only news left for Australians … all have gone," read one comment today on an Australian Facebook page with over 200,000 followers.
The self-described "news and media website" is run by far-right figure Avi Yemini, who has previously been banned from Facebook for hate speech and played a leading role in Melbourne's anti-lockdown movement.
The page has called for vaccines to be first tested on Bill Gates, feeding long-standing conspiracy theories about Microsoft's co-founder.
Another comment reads: "How am I able to see this post? Weren't all news and media posts banned?"
On a second page of more than 20,000 members, also with a history of posting anti-vaccine misinformation, a post celebrates that the government "won't be able to distribute their COVID-19 fear-mongering and propaganda to the Australian public."
ABC News article
Just.. sigh.
posted by freethefeet at 2:24 AM on February 18, 2021
Thing is, monopolist or no, Facebook and Google aren't asking for payment to continue to supply attention - they're just not willing to pay for the privilege.
This isn't like mandating that electricity or water suppliers must supply everyone and not overcharge (they aren't charging at all! linking to things is the basic model for the Web!), this is asking them to pay (a select few of) the people they're supplying.
posted by Dysk at 3:45 AM on February 18, 2021 [3 favorites]
This isn't like mandating that electricity or water suppliers must supply everyone and not overcharge (they aren't charging at all! linking to things is the basic model for the Web!), this is asking them to pay (a select few of) the people they're supplying.
posted by Dysk at 3:45 AM on February 18, 2021 [3 favorites]
A logged-in newspaper reader may provide postal code and credit card and that they read yoga articles but they are unlikely to be able to do the Internet equivalent of Target’s reveal of teen pregnancy.
OTOH, if you've ever verified your phone number with any site, a hash of it is sent to the ad targeting networks to anonymously* identify you. The hash is the same for all sites, so your Twitter mentions can be aggregated with your Facebook likes, your Google searches/Gmail subjects, your Tinder swipes and such, into a permanent record that deeply profiles you and follows you around and can be lucratively monetised.
* not anonymously.
posted by acb at 4:13 AM on February 18, 2021
OTOH, if you've ever verified your phone number with any site, a hash of it is sent to the ad targeting networks to anonymously* identify you. The hash is the same for all sites, so your Twitter mentions can be aggregated with your Facebook likes, your Google searches/Gmail subjects, your Tinder swipes and such, into a permanent record that deeply profiles you and follows you around and can be lucratively monetised.
* not anonymously.
posted by acb at 4:13 AM on February 18, 2021
Boycott fascist monopoly "social networks" today.
The alternative is things like Mastodon, i.e., dozens of angry people in basements around the world fantasising about the revolution.
posted by acb at 4:14 AM on February 18, 2021 [2 favorites]
The alternative is things like Mastodon, i.e., dozens of angry people in basements around the world fantasising about the revolution.
posted by acb at 4:14 AM on February 18, 2021 [2 favorites]
Newspapers can stop Google's crawlers with 5 minutes work of updating their robots.txt files.
If you build you business entirely around one supplier (whether that's of construction widgets, transport, or links) you give that supplier a lot of power over your business.
It is essentially impossible for someone to create an index of the web comparable to what google has. Basically, a ton of sites block or throttle non-google crawlers via robots.txt. Google always likes to say that competition is just a click away for users, but it isn't really true. Indexing is not the only reason, but to me, it is one of the clearest.
Arguing that hundred year old newspapers built their business around google seems like a stretch to me. But they did adapt to google, and they had to, because google is a monopoly.
Now, what if Google wasn't considered a public utility, but their index of the web was considered a public resource?Then other companies could build on that for some fee, the way MVNOs operate. In that world, maybe a startup or a partnership of news sites could offer a news-focused search engine that uses their ad revenue to pay news sites, (and maybe a subscription model that pays out to participating sites). Then, maybe instead of being forced to pay by governments, google decides to pay. But as long as google is a monopoly, there's nothing the market can do to make them change.
Current laws and deals about this may suck, but until governments deal with the google monopoly, the entire web is held hostage.
posted by snofoam at 4:52 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
If you build you business entirely around one supplier (whether that's of construction widgets, transport, or links) you give that supplier a lot of power over your business.
It is essentially impossible for someone to create an index of the web comparable to what google has. Basically, a ton of sites block or throttle non-google crawlers via robots.txt. Google always likes to say that competition is just a click away for users, but it isn't really true. Indexing is not the only reason, but to me, it is one of the clearest.
Arguing that hundred year old newspapers built their business around google seems like a stretch to me. But they did adapt to google, and they had to, because google is a monopoly.
Now, what if Google wasn't considered a public utility, but their index of the web was considered a public resource?Then other companies could build on that for some fee, the way MVNOs operate. In that world, maybe a startup or a partnership of news sites could offer a news-focused search engine that uses their ad revenue to pay news sites, (and maybe a subscription model that pays out to participating sites). Then, maybe instead of being forced to pay by governments, google decides to pay. But as long as google is a monopoly, there's nothing the market can do to make them change.
Current laws and deals about this may suck, but until governments deal with the google monopoly, the entire web is held hostage.
posted by snofoam at 4:52 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
We're getting slightly into news search results, crawling, indexing, featured snippets and similar. Those are relevant for Google, Bing and other search engines, but I really do not see how they apply to Facebook.
Just scrolled to the first link shared on Facebook from one of my friends. It's an NYT article, and I get this much on Facebook, along with the image:
I don't particularly want to defend Facebook, but the idea that a site should have an obligation to pay another simply because their users link to it? That sounds batshit to me. I don't think MetaFilter should have to pay the Sydney Morning Herald to link to articles any more than Facebook should have to.
posted by MattWPBS at 5:00 AM on February 18, 2021 [3 favorites]
Just scrolled to the first link shared on Facebook from one of my friends. It's an NYT article, and I get this much on Facebook, along with the image:
Store in Oregon That Threw Out Food Is Confronted by Angry ActivistsThese are the OpenGraph snippets that the NYT has set for the article, not something which Facebook has selected. It's there because a friend has posted a link to the article, not because Facebook has gone to the NYT site and put it on Facebook.
The police responded to a Fred Meyer grocery store in Portland that had tossed its refrige...
I don't particularly want to defend Facebook, but the idea that a site should have an obligation to pay another simply because their users link to it? That sounds batshit to me. I don't think MetaFilter should have to pay the Sydney Morning Herald to link to articles any more than Facebook should have to.
posted by MattWPBS at 5:00 AM on February 18, 2021 [3 favorites]
(I assume it wouldn't be easy, but if google's web index was available to other companies/groups, then there could be a lot of search engines. Like maybe ones optimized for finding the best information rather than optimized for advertising, or a subscription search engine that doesn't do tracking or advertising, etc. I feel like the relevance issues that plagued so many search engines back in the day are probably better understood and easier to handle today. With everyone sharing the best index, I feel like it would be possible to have multiple good search engines optimized in different ways.)
posted by snofoam at 5:01 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by snofoam at 5:01 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
The Web, the whole premise of the Web, completely breaks down if you have to pay to link to things. Why is "news" the scope of this? If a news organisation is ruled to add value to a search engine or social media operator's business and must be paid, where is the line? Does entertainment news count? What about periodicals? Would an Aussie Time Magazine get a payout? Elle? Local papers? Small-time bloggers doing investigative journalism?
In practice, this will either be giving money to Murdoch, further entrenching monopoly positions on news through asymmetric funding, or it will devolve into pay-to-link (but only for search engines and social media? Now we're into what counts as social media? Mefi? Instagram? Soundcloud? Etc, etc). I think we all know it'll be the former.
posted by Dysk at 5:03 AM on February 18, 2021 [3 favorites]
In practice, this will either be giving money to Murdoch, further entrenching monopoly positions on news through asymmetric funding, or it will devolve into pay-to-link (but only for search engines and social media? Now we're into what counts as social media? Mefi? Instagram? Soundcloud? Etc, etc). I think we all know it'll be the former.
posted by Dysk at 5:03 AM on February 18, 2021 [3 favorites]
I don't particularly want to defend Facebook, but the idea that a site should have an obligation to pay another simply because their users link to it? That sounds batshit to me.
The Web, the whole premise of the Web, completely breaks down if you have to pay to link to things.
This makes sense to me. I know Facebook is awful and I know it is anti-competitive, but aside from breaking it up because it has been buying competitors to stifle competition, I don't know what can be done about it. I do think Facebook, if prevented from buying up competitors, is more vulnerable than something like google or amazon.
posted by snofoam at 5:09 AM on February 18, 2021
The Web, the whole premise of the Web, completely breaks down if you have to pay to link to things.
This makes sense to me. I know Facebook is awful and I know it is anti-competitive, but aside from breaking it up because it has been buying competitors to stifle competition, I don't know what can be done about it. I do think Facebook, if prevented from buying up competitors, is more vulnerable than something like google or amazon.
posted by snofoam at 5:09 AM on February 18, 2021
And separately, because a few people have posted about Facebook forcing you to use the in app Chrome/Safari webview rather than rerouting to the browser itself, you can change this (took me long enough to realise this, despite it driving me mad).
This are the steps in the Facebook Android app, but I'm assuming it's similar on iOS.
Go to Setting and Privacy in the menu, then Settings, scroll down and there's a section called Media And Contacts right at the bottom. Click that, and there's a toggle in there for "Links open externally".
Switch that, and links will open up in your browser, the YouTube app, etc, etc.
posted by MattWPBS at 5:11 AM on February 18, 2021
This are the steps in the Facebook Android app, but I'm assuming it's similar on iOS.
Go to Setting and Privacy in the menu, then Settings, scroll down and there's a section called Media And Contacts right at the bottom. Click that, and there's a toggle in there for "Links open externally".
Switch that, and links will open up in your browser, the YouTube app, etc, etc.
posted by MattWPBS at 5:11 AM on February 18, 2021
The Web, the whole premise of the Web, completely breaks down if you have to pay to link to things.
That died the minute traffic became currency. My presence on Facebook makes them money. You want to go back to the glory days, I'll be right there with you, but until my actual eyeball on the page is not a source of revenue, willing or not, we have a responsibility that the people involved in making the content that keeps me on a page get their slice.
You gotta pay the photographer to display their work in your book, or the musician for the right to have a half minute of their song in your movie. This is exactly the same, as far as I can see it.
posted by Jilder at 5:29 AM on February 18, 2021 [6 favorites]
That died the minute traffic became currency. My presence on Facebook makes them money. You want to go back to the glory days, I'll be right there with you, but until my actual eyeball on the page is not a source of revenue, willing or not, we have a responsibility that the people involved in making the content that keeps me on a page get their slice.
You gotta pay the photographer to display their work in your book, or the musician for the right to have a half minute of their song in your movie. This is exactly the same, as far as I can see it.
posted by Jilder at 5:29 AM on February 18, 2021 [6 favorites]
A fight between Murdoch and Facebook is one of those where you wish both sides could lose. And I think just maybe, this time they’ve actually pulled it off.
posted by Phanx at 6:05 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by Phanx at 6:05 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
The Web, the whole premise of the Web, completely breaks down if you have to pay to link to things.
The existence of HTTP status code 402 belies that argument. But beyond that, there's the point that Jilder makes, which has always been a tension for companies like Google and Facebook - they need content creators to bring in eyeballs, but have never been happy about sharing the revenue with them. (Or as I've said in copyright threads, there is a reason that Google, a company that relies on media creators to provide the content that fuels the traffic that generates revenue, would want to weaken laws that force them to have to actually pay those creators.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:14 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
The existence of HTTP status code 402 belies that argument. But beyond that, there's the point that Jilder makes, which has always been a tension for companies like Google and Facebook - they need content creators to bring in eyeballs, but have never been happy about sharing the revenue with them. (Or as I've said in copyright threads, there is a reason that Google, a company that relies on media creators to provide the content that fuels the traffic that generates revenue, would want to weaken laws that force them to have to actually pay those creators.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:14 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
You gotta pay the photographer to display their work in your book, or the musician for the right to have a half minute of their song in your movie. This is exactly the same, as far as I can see it.
Except Facebook aren't putting anyone else's work into theirs. They're letting their users direct people to the cinemas, galleries, concerts and recordings that those musicians, photographers, etc have made. It's more akin to expecting newspapers to pay restaurants, galleries, film studios, etc to be allowed to publish reviews of food, exhibitions, and films.
posted by Dysk at 6:16 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
Except Facebook aren't putting anyone else's work into theirs. They're letting their users direct people to the cinemas, galleries, concerts and recordings that those musicians, photographers, etc have made. It's more akin to expecting newspapers to pay restaurants, galleries, film studios, etc to be allowed to publish reviews of food, exhibitions, and films.
posted by Dysk at 6:16 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
The existence of HTTP status code 402 belies that argument.
There is a long way from "you must pay if you want to access this content" and "you must pay merely to link to this content".
Again, a nightclub charging an entrance fee is pretty different to forcing a newspaper to run adverts for them, and then making them pay for using their name.
posted by Dysk at 6:18 AM on February 18, 2021 [6 favorites]
There is a long way from "you must pay if you want to access this content" and "you must pay merely to link to this content".
Again, a nightclub charging an entrance fee is pretty different to forcing a newspaper to run adverts for them, and then making them pay for using their name.
posted by Dysk at 6:18 AM on February 18, 2021 [6 favorites]
Blocking a particular website and a fixed known list of accounts is trivial (if the will to do so is there). *Generating* that list when it's continually updating is not, which is why they ended up removing some sites that shouldn't have been on there, but looked 'newslike'.It’s not an easy problem but Facebook is immensely profitable and has some of the deepest technical resources in the world, including a huge number of top AI practitioners. They also do a remarkably better job in countries where there are legal penalties (for example, blocking Nazi content in Germany) so while perfection is unrealistic I’m skeptical that they couldn’t do considerably better at a cost measured in single-digit centi-Zuckerbergs. Remember how many leaks there have been about top executives stepping in to prevent action against right-wing groups? Simply applying their policies fairly would be a major win.
posted by adamsc at 6:21 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
Mefi relies on linking to external content ("other people's work") to derive its value at least as much as Facebook does - should mefi have to pay the NYT, Guardian, BBC, etc, etc, every time someone links them in an FPP (while legally not having any option to prevent those cost-incurring links)? And why only those names, why not Joe Blow when his blog is linked?
If not, then what is so categorically different about Facebook? It gives hosts of linked services much more control over how they're presented - whether to show a preview and how that preview should look, etc, etc - than mefi does.
I'm not a fan of Facebook, and I think they should be more constrained by regulation, particularly with regard to their acquisitions, but this is not the solution.
posted by Dysk at 6:24 AM on February 18, 2021 [2 favorites]
If not, then what is so categorically different about Facebook? It gives hosts of linked services much more control over how they're presented - whether to show a preview and how that preview should look, etc, etc - than mefi does.
I'm not a fan of Facebook, and I think they should be more constrained by regulation, particularly with regard to their acquisitions, but this is not the solution.
posted by Dysk at 6:24 AM on February 18, 2021 [2 favorites]
That died the minute traffic became currency. My presence on Facebook makes them money. You want to go back to the glory days, I'll be right there with you, but until my actual eyeball on the page is not a source of revenue, willing or not, we have a responsibility that the people involved in making the content that keeps me on a page get their slice.
You gotta pay the photographer to display their work in your book, or the musician for the right to have a half minute of their song in your movie. This is exactly the same, as far as I can see it.
A link on Facebook doesn't keep you on the page, it takes you to the publisher's website. The benefit to Facebook is that it learns what to show in people's feeds, so that people find Facebook useful (there's an entire sidebar here about algorithmic radicalisation, but still).
If you want to make the argument that traffic is currency, then the payments would go in the other direction. We're talking about a platform which is designed to spread links to sites to anyone who's likely to click on them. I end up on the NYT, Sydney Morning Herald or a dozen others because a friend shares a link. Same as I do when someone posts an article on here.
Perhaps we should be looking at news sites providing referrer links, like Amazon do, so that they can pay MeFi and Facebook a fair rate for this free advertising?
A user posts a link to Facebook, the publisher has control over what they want to appear there as image and headline, and other users have to visit the publisher's site to view the content. This is nothing like using a photographer's image in your book, or a musician's song in your film.
posted by MattWPBS at 6:41 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
You gotta pay the photographer to display their work in your book, or the musician for the right to have a half minute of their song in your movie. This is exactly the same, as far as I can see it.
A link on Facebook doesn't keep you on the page, it takes you to the publisher's website. The benefit to Facebook is that it learns what to show in people's feeds, so that people find Facebook useful (there's an entire sidebar here about algorithmic radicalisation, but still).
If you want to make the argument that traffic is currency, then the payments would go in the other direction. We're talking about a platform which is designed to spread links to sites to anyone who's likely to click on them. I end up on the NYT, Sydney Morning Herald or a dozen others because a friend shares a link. Same as I do when someone posts an article on here.
Perhaps we should be looking at news sites providing referrer links, like Amazon do, so that they can pay MeFi and Facebook a fair rate for this free advertising?
A user posts a link to Facebook, the publisher has control over what they want to appear there as image and headline, and other users have to visit the publisher's site to view the content. This is nothing like using a photographer's image in your book, or a musician's song in your film.
posted by MattWPBS at 6:41 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
I'm not convinced the Australian solution is the right one at all, but just keep in mind that Facebook and Google didn't really steal readers, they stole advertisers. Of course advertisers want readers.
But when I was in media both at my most beloved brand and my biggest brand, we had no trouble at the first delivering subscribers or readers -- both our subscribers (in the first case) and our visitors to the website (at both) were way, way beyond projections. We just couldn't make any money, and subscribers really only ever covered their postage and a bit of the dead trees. Lots of arguments about what publishers should do or have done to be had for sure (paywalls, apps, etc.), but on a monetary level, it's really, really, about who pays what for advertising.
On a cultural level - again not sure about Australia - it gets weird.
Canadian content rules for broadcast and for dead trees (US brands used to have to add Canadian pages to get particular subsidies/access, so like, we would have extra pages in the middle of Time) aren't designed so much to create revenue as to create room for local cultural industry. Netflix and Spotify may be getting regulated, which may have driven Netflix's urge to open a Canadian office, dunno, maybe it's all based on Schitt's Creek, a CBC production which means Canadians paid for that Canadian content to be developed. (It's complicated, but let's just say CBC can probably take risks other organizations can't.)
(Also things are not great where American ownership is involved, looking at you, TorStar.)
I think what I'm trying to say is that analysing this situation from an American context will be incomplete.
It's not always about fairness or eyeballs, it's about the dominance of American discourse. So it may not be about paying Australian news sites but about paying Australian news sites. I'm not sure. Just providing that context.
posted by warriorqueen at 6:57 AM on February 18, 2021 [5 favorites]
But when I was in media both at my most beloved brand and my biggest brand, we had no trouble at the first delivering subscribers or readers -- both our subscribers (in the first case) and our visitors to the website (at both) were way, way beyond projections. We just couldn't make any money, and subscribers really only ever covered their postage and a bit of the dead trees. Lots of arguments about what publishers should do or have done to be had for sure (paywalls, apps, etc.), but on a monetary level, it's really, really, about who pays what for advertising.
On a cultural level - again not sure about Australia - it gets weird.
Canadian content rules for broadcast and for dead trees (US brands used to have to add Canadian pages to get particular subsidies/access, so like, we would have extra pages in the middle of Time) aren't designed so much to create revenue as to create room for local cultural industry. Netflix and Spotify may be getting regulated, which may have driven Netflix's urge to open a Canadian office, dunno, maybe it's all based on Schitt's Creek, a CBC production which means Canadians paid for that Canadian content to be developed. (It's complicated, but let's just say CBC can probably take risks other organizations can't.)
(Also things are not great where American ownership is involved, looking at you, TorStar.)
I think what I'm trying to say is that analysing this situation from an American context will be incomplete.
It's not always about fairness or eyeballs, it's about the dominance of American discourse. So it may not be about paying Australian news sites but about paying Australian news sites. I'm not sure. Just providing that context.
posted by warriorqueen at 6:57 AM on February 18, 2021 [5 favorites]
A link on Facebook doesn't keep you on the page, it takes you to the publisher's website.
Except that's not what Google and Facebook do. They don't just grab a link, but also a snippet from the piece, big enough to get across enough that in the case of news the reader doesn't need to click through. (And that's not getting into things like how Google has been pressuring sites to use AMP with PageRank.) The whole issue is that they have created a system where content is used, but the advertising money stays with Google and Facebook.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:01 AM on February 18, 2021 [2 favorites]
Except that's not what Google and Facebook do. They don't just grab a link, but also a snippet from the piece, big enough to get across enough that in the case of news the reader doesn't need to click through. (And that's not getting into things like how Google has been pressuring sites to use AMP with PageRank.) The whole issue is that they have created a system where content is used, but the advertising money stays with Google and Facebook.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:01 AM on February 18, 2021 [2 favorites]
Except that's not what Google and Facebook do. They don't just grab a link, but also a snippet from the piece, big enough to get across enough that in the case of news the reader doesn't need to click through.
That may be true for Google (I don't know) but website can literally control exactly what and how much is previewed on Facebook shares with a few markup tags. Facebook takes exactly what the publishers willingly agree to give them.
posted by Dysk at 7:13 AM on February 18, 2021 [2 favorites]
That may be true for Google (I don't know) but website can literally control exactly what and how much is previewed on Facebook shares with a few markup tags. Facebook takes exactly what the publishers willingly agree to give them.
posted by Dysk at 7:13 AM on February 18, 2021 [2 favorites]
Facebook takes exactly what the publishers willingly agree to give them
The whole issue is that "willingly" is up for debate.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:16 AM on February 18, 2021 [6 favorites]
The whole issue is that "willingly" is up for debate.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:16 AM on February 18, 2021 [6 favorites]
Facebook and Google together and have a near monopoly on online advertising, and so I am very sympathetic to the idea that some intervention that levels the playing field for essentially all of the “providers” of website targets for Google and Facebook is necessary. Take it or leave it has always been an option, but as others have pointed out this would essentially be death for most websites. Search is unfortunately a near natural monopoly, and Google search provides an extremely valuable service to consumers, so it is unlikely to be naturally displaced, especially considering its resources to stay current. For example, Bing may be where Google was five years ago. It is really difficult to imagine having to keep up with the exploded amount of information that I have to find in my jobs With the search engines available circa 2000.
Google does have a point, as others have pointed out, that the value proposition news providers and Google search have is really one-sided. Only the largest news providers give meaningful value to the search engine for consumers. Behind the scenes Google has been doing some experiments to show that web users and advertisers really do not care if new sites are not available. This is especially true because most new sites are incredibly redundant To one another and to international alternatives. The mechanism proposed in the Australian legislation is very unpredictable, and I see where Google is coming from that it is not easily tolerated. I think any mechanism that tried to fairly ascertain the marginal value of an isolated Australian news provider would conclude that it was very low, and this is just not the answer that the public are looking for. I see this as similar to the Google books fracas, in which negotiating with individual authors and publishers Of little used books who’s copyright registration was not even maintained was a logistically impossible task, and society is much poor as a result.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 7:20 AM on February 18, 2021
Google does have a point, as others have pointed out, that the value proposition news providers and Google search have is really one-sided. Only the largest news providers give meaningful value to the search engine for consumers. Behind the scenes Google has been doing some experiments to show that web users and advertisers really do not care if new sites are not available. This is especially true because most new sites are incredibly redundant To one another and to international alternatives. The mechanism proposed in the Australian legislation is very unpredictable, and I see where Google is coming from that it is not easily tolerated. I think any mechanism that tried to fairly ascertain the marginal value of an isolated Australian news provider would conclude that it was very low, and this is just not the answer that the public are looking for. I see this as similar to the Google books fracas, in which negotiating with individual authors and publishers Of little used books who’s copyright registration was not even maintained was a logistically impossible task, and society is much poor as a result.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 7:20 AM on February 18, 2021
Behind the scenes Google has been doing some experiments to show that web users and advertisers really do not care if new sites are not available.
Why yes, internal Google experiment supports Google's position. This neatly encapsulates the problem!
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:23 AM on February 18, 2021 [6 favorites]
Why yes, internal Google experiment supports Google's position. This neatly encapsulates the problem!
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:23 AM on February 18, 2021 [6 favorites]
Why yes, internal Google experiment supports Google's position. This neatly encapsulates the problem!
Winner takes all is a huge cultural export.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:26 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
Winner takes all is a huge cultural export.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:26 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
This sort of debate has been going on since Google and Facebook first came into being. News media has been arguing that whole time that Google and Facebook need to pay. It's not about how they're putting up snippets or articles or whatever comes next. It is simply that Google and Facebook engage with the news somehow so of course they should pay. In my opinion it was bullshit at the start and it will be bullshit when they're still angry 10 years from now.
However, the other points are valid. The Google search index has created a monopoly. They're very good at giving us what we want. Facebook too. People in power recognize that a problem exists but only see it through the lens of business interests and so only see solutions that way too.
If one abstracts the problems and considers how to best serve the public, thinking changes. Google isn't a problem, lack of competition is a problem. How do we fix that? Facebook isn't a problem, lack of alternatives to facebook is a problem. Seen that way, what we really need is government efforts to create viable competitors in these spaces and a watchful eye to make sure that monopolies don't do what they naturally do and crush said competitors. That might require an "unfair" restriction of Google and Facebook for a while, but OK, no system is perfect...
posted by BeReasonable at 7:41 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
However, the other points are valid. The Google search index has created a monopoly. They're very good at giving us what we want. Facebook too. People in power recognize that a problem exists but only see it through the lens of business interests and so only see solutions that way too.
If one abstracts the problems and considers how to best serve the public, thinking changes. Google isn't a problem, lack of competition is a problem. How do we fix that? Facebook isn't a problem, lack of alternatives to facebook is a problem. Seen that way, what we really need is government efforts to create viable competitors in these spaces and a watchful eye to make sure that monopolies don't do what they naturally do and crush said competitors. That might require an "unfair" restriction of Google and Facebook for a while, but OK, no system is perfect...
posted by BeReasonable at 7:41 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
The whole issue is that "willingly" is up for debate
If the preview is so comprehensive that nobody clicks through, make the preview smaller, or provide an empty one. Nobody is being forced into giving up more of their content to Facebook than they themselves decide to.
The issue here isn't Facebook "taking" someone else's work any more than mefi does, the issue is that lots of people look at the headline and don't RTFA and newspapers think this is unfair.
Maybe it is, but then you should be charging shops for having sandwich boards with front pages or headlines on display too. And making it illegal for them to just stop having those displays. This is similarly ridiculous.
posted by Dysk at 7:45 AM on February 18, 2021 [2 favorites]
If the preview is so comprehensive that nobody clicks through, make the preview smaller, or provide an empty one. Nobody is being forced into giving up more of their content to Facebook than they themselves decide to.
The issue here isn't Facebook "taking" someone else's work any more than mefi does, the issue is that lots of people look at the headline and don't RTFA and newspapers think this is unfair.
Maybe it is, but then you should be charging shops for having sandwich boards with front pages or headlines on display too. And making it illegal for them to just stop having those displays. This is similarly ridiculous.
posted by Dysk at 7:45 AM on February 18, 2021 [2 favorites]
If the preview is so comprehensive that nobody clicks through, make the preview smaller, or provide an empty one. Nobody is being forced into giving up more of their content to Facebook than they themselves decide to.
And then Facebook instead gives preference to the outlets who do provide the previews that they want, and you're just as fucked. Nobody is being directly forced into giving up their content - because there's no need to. Not when you have a system where they're obliged to play by Facebook's rules because they created a system where a large number of their users live within the Facebook ecosystem thanks to deals and configurations they set up - for many people, Facebook is "the internet". And thus Facebook can set up a system where suppliers do as they want because it's either that or be left out.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:13 AM on February 18, 2021 [3 favorites]
And then Facebook instead gives preference to the outlets who do provide the previews that they want, and you're just as fucked. Nobody is being directly forced into giving up their content - because there's no need to. Not when you have a system where they're obliged to play by Facebook's rules because they created a system where a large number of their users live within the Facebook ecosystem thanks to deals and configurations they set up - for many people, Facebook is "the internet". And thus Facebook can set up a system where suppliers do as they want because it's either that or be left out.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:13 AM on February 18, 2021 [3 favorites]
The whole issue is that "willingly" is up for debate.
Really? Go to the ABC link in the post, and view source. The below are the Open Graph (OG) attributes which allow ABC to control exactly what appears in the preview on Facebook before someone clicks through to their site. You can set it to whatever you like. Remove the image, change the description to "visit abc.net.au to read this story", display "abc.net.au article" rather than the headline. Whatever you want.
Considering that degree of control, how would you suggest that the ABC aren't willingly displaying the thumbnail, headline, and lead quote?
If they were to remove everything, and leave purely the link as the text string https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-18/facebook-to-restrict-sharing-or-viewing-news-in-australia/13166208, I suspect the traffic to ABC would dramatically decrease.
Really? Go to the ABC link in the post, and view source. The below are the Open Graph (OG) attributes which allow ABC to control exactly what appears in the preview on Facebook before someone clicks through to their site. You can set it to whatever you like. Remove the image, change the description to "visit abc.net.au to read this story", display "abc.net.au article" rather than the headline. Whatever you want.
Considering that degree of control, how would you suggest that the ABC aren't willingly displaying the thumbnail, headline, and lead quote?
If they were to remove everything, and leave purely the link as the text string https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-18/facebook-to-restrict-sharing-or-viewing-news-in-australia/13166208, I suspect the traffic to ABC would dramatically decrease.
<meta data-react-helmet="true" property="og:url" content="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-18/facebook-to-restrict-sharing-or-viewing-news-in-australia/13166208"/>
<meta data-react-helmet="true" property="og:description" content="Australians are being blocked from accessing news in their Facebook feeds, in a dramatic escalation of the social media giantx27;s stand-off with the federal government."/>
<meta data-react-helmet="true" property="og:title" content="Facebook restricts Australiansx27; access to news"/>
<meta data-react-helmet="true" property="og:type" content="article"/>
<meta data-react-helmet="true" property="og:image" content="https://www.abc.net.au/cm/rimage/11103290-16x9-large.jpg?v=4"/></code>
Considering that degree of control, how would you suggest that the ABC aren't willingly displaying the thumbnail, headline, and lead quote?
I explained it in the comment above yours - when Facebook makes the options "give us what we want or be left out in the cold", the choice can hardly be considered to be willingly.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:27 AM on February 18, 2021 [4 favorites]
I explained it in the comment above yours - when Facebook makes the options "give us what we want or be left out in the cold", the choice can hardly be considered to be willingly.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:27 AM on February 18, 2021 [4 favorites]
I have to ask - am I the only one who remembers the "pivot to video" fiasco, where Facebook gutted quite a few websites by lying about video attach rates?
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:30 AM on February 18, 2021 [11 favorites]
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:30 AM on February 18, 2021 [11 favorites]
If they were to remove everything, and leave purely the link as the text string, I suspect the traffic to ABC would dramatically decrease.
There is a certain tragedy of the commons in this, if every media company chose the plain text option, then traffic would almost certainly increase, but when people have a choice of a blind text link to media property A or a fancy preview containing most of media property B, they will all choose to read the latter.
posted by Lanark at 8:37 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
There is a certain tragedy of the commons in this, if every media company chose the plain text option, then traffic would almost certainly increase, but when people have a choice of a blind text link to media property A or a fancy preview containing most of media property B, they will all choose to read the latter.
posted by Lanark at 8:37 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
That's not the tragedy of the commons, but the prisoners' dilemma - the outlets give Facebook what they want, because they're afraid that Facebook will just tell them to pound sand if they don't.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:41 AM on February 18, 2021 [5 favorites]
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:41 AM on February 18, 2021 [5 favorites]
I explained it in the comment above yours - when Facebook makes the options "give us what we want or be left out in the cold", the choice can hardly be considered to be willingly.
Facebook prioritises stuff people engage with (write up on current ranking algorithm, and Facebook engineering post), so yes, if you don't have metadata that encourages people to click the link, it probably won't get that much traction. Is that a bad thing though? "Give us what we want or be left out in the cold" could be phrased as "make your link interesting to users, otherwise we'll show them other ones". Using that ABC article again, it's three pages long, and what ABC is displaying through the Open Graph tags is a title, a sentence and a thumbnail. This is not "giving up your content", it's advertising.
I've had a quick scroll through Facebook on my phone and on the website, and there's literally nothing I can see where the preview would make somebody less likely to click the link. This is just my experience though, and I fully accept that it isn't universal.
Can you give me an example link where the snippet on Facebook is big enough that a reader wouldn't feel the need to click through? We know that what shows is controlled by the HTML, so I'll be able to put that in a private post for myself on Facebook, and see exactly what you mean.
posted by MattWPBS at 9:42 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
Facebook prioritises stuff people engage with (write up on current ranking algorithm, and Facebook engineering post), so yes, if you don't have metadata that encourages people to click the link, it probably won't get that much traction. Is that a bad thing though? "Give us what we want or be left out in the cold" could be phrased as "make your link interesting to users, otherwise we'll show them other ones". Using that ABC article again, it's three pages long, and what ABC is displaying through the Open Graph tags is a title, a sentence and a thumbnail. This is not "giving up your content", it's advertising.
I've had a quick scroll through Facebook on my phone and on the website, and there's literally nothing I can see where the preview would make somebody less likely to click the link. This is just my experience though, and I fully accept that it isn't universal.
Can you give me an example link where the snippet on Facebook is big enough that a reader wouldn't feel the need to click through? We know that what shows is controlled by the HTML, so I'll be able to put that in a private post for myself on Facebook, and see exactly what you mean.
posted by MattWPBS at 9:42 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
"make your link interesting to users, otherwise we'll show them other ones"
Ha ha ha ha ha ha. No.
It's "make your link ENGAGING to users," which means an article that says "which is better, butter tarts with raisins or without raisins?" or "share this cute dog story to cheer your family up!" will get way more prominence on a user's feed than "here's a really important news item about winterizing your wind turbines."
Note the positivity score metrics from the article you linked:
Comments
Replies
Likes
Shares
NONE of these relate to clicks which is people going to the news site to read and engage there.
posted by warriorqueen at 9:52 AM on February 18, 2021 [10 favorites]
Ha ha ha ha ha ha. No.
It's "make your link ENGAGING to users," which means an article that says "which is better, butter tarts with raisins or without raisins?" or "share this cute dog story to cheer your family up!" will get way more prominence on a user's feed than "here's a really important news item about winterizing your wind turbines."
Note the positivity score metrics from the article you linked:
Comments
Replies
Likes
Shares
NONE of these relate to clicks which is people going to the news site to read and engage there.
posted by warriorqueen at 9:52 AM on February 18, 2021 [10 favorites]
I 100% in fact promise you that an article that has a yes/no fun question in the headline will pop up first because people will share and comment and reply and like it without ever clicking.
posted by warriorqueen at 9:55 AM on February 18, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by warriorqueen at 9:55 AM on February 18, 2021 [4 favorites]
"Give us what we want or be left out in the cold" could be phrased as "make your link interesting to users, otherwise we'll show them other ones".
You're right - I could phrase it that way. But after Facebook's long history of malfeasance to benefit themselves, where they have done things like lie about video attach rates to provoke a shift to video production that benefitted Facebook at the expense of quite a few outlets who found themselves overleveraged when the expected traffic and revenue never appeared because of Facebook outright lying - why would I? Your argument is that I should accord Facebook the benefit of the doubt, to which I point to their long history of malfeasance and say "what in their behavior indicates that they merit it?"
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:59 AM on February 18, 2021 [6 favorites]
You're right - I could phrase it that way. But after Facebook's long history of malfeasance to benefit themselves, where they have done things like lie about video attach rates to provoke a shift to video production that benefitted Facebook at the expense of quite a few outlets who found themselves overleveraged when the expected traffic and revenue never appeared because of Facebook outright lying - why would I? Your argument is that I should accord Facebook the benefit of the doubt, to which I point to their long history of malfeasance and say "what in their behavior indicates that they merit it?"
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:59 AM on February 18, 2021 [6 favorites]
As a non-'social' media person I am trying to see the real issue/s here. Most of it sounds like a wild wailing and gnashing of teeth with alarming potential consequences for people like you and me. The Internet is supposed to be 'free' but greed and self-interest of human/corporate kind is muddying the pool. The ability of the individual to control what they see is replaced by 'recommended for you' or 'Likes'. Obfuscation with the lack of true transparency of what an algorithm/s is determining what is best for you.
Newspapers exist/ed for the dissemination of NEWS to their readership. Typically of relevance to those within a specific geographical area - either locally (village/town), regionally (north/south, mid-lands, 'The Valley'), or nationally. They branched out from being simple purveyors of news to the providers of items of interest or information - think recipes and in-depth articles on a specific topic. For specific niche markets journals, magazines, and periodicals arose - the 'entertainment' aspect. Along the way, the thirst for print media led to a decline in standards (poor editing, no citations, lack of fact checking etc) and true journalism-as-a-profession faded away in a market where quantity overrode quality overrode profit. Print media as a means of making profit continues to suffer. High costs in production and distribution in a competitive marketplace.
The Interwebs as a means to disseminate news, information, and entertainment originally did just that, it distributed all of these things in an unfettered avalanche. Non- corporate distribution of information with blog sites (Blogger being one), MySpace (sort of), and other such means of distribution meant it was often nigh impossible to find things of relevance. Page ranking and search engines brought a level of control/organization to this and once a means of generating revenue arose there were the affiliated links and pay-for-clicks models arising.
Now we have a few core groups who put forward their 'social' credentials in order to capture market and make huge profits where the user or reader is simply a marketable commodity.
While the above is a truly simplistic model, it is important to realize that the level of reach into individuals lives is extensive. So much so that the level of social control able to be exercised at a CORPORATE level exceeds many a governments policy department or reach. It is why certain countries ban specific websites and news/information sources and have implemented oversight policies 'for the common good' - facial recognition, IP tracking etc.
There are a couple of alarming items of note. The reliance of individuals on single sources of 'social' interaction and handing over the keys to their lives so glibly is one - "What have I got to hide?". The ability of a commercial enterprise to control the dissemination and access of information with the flick of a switch is another. The general failure of most news organizations to come up with a workable business model being a final one - paywalls / subscriptions / ad-revenue / donations... what will work? being another. They have had around twenty years to come up with an answer and most have failed abysmally with a few exceptions. Pop-up pages, "click next link in the 'list' to continue", hugely complex methodologies to increase page ranking are but a few examples.
Me? I continue to use RSS and News Aggregators which I control (or at least feel I do) and avoid most 'recommended for you' click-throughs.
posted by IndelibleUnderpants at 10:03 AM on February 18, 2021 [2 favorites]
Newspapers exist/ed for the dissemination of NEWS to their readership. Typically of relevance to those within a specific geographical area - either locally (village/town), regionally (north/south, mid-lands, 'The Valley'), or nationally. They branched out from being simple purveyors of news to the providers of items of interest or information - think recipes and in-depth articles on a specific topic. For specific niche markets journals, magazines, and periodicals arose - the 'entertainment' aspect. Along the way, the thirst for print media led to a decline in standards (poor editing, no citations, lack of fact checking etc) and true journalism-as-a-profession faded away in a market where quantity overrode quality overrode profit. Print media as a means of making profit continues to suffer. High costs in production and distribution in a competitive marketplace.
The Interwebs as a means to disseminate news, information, and entertainment originally did just that, it distributed all of these things in an unfettered avalanche. Non- corporate distribution of information with blog sites (Blogger being one), MySpace (sort of), and other such means of distribution meant it was often nigh impossible to find things of relevance. Page ranking and search engines brought a level of control/organization to this and once a means of generating revenue arose there were the affiliated links and pay-for-clicks models arising.
Now we have a few core groups who put forward their 'social' credentials in order to capture market and make huge profits where the user or reader is simply a marketable commodity.
While the above is a truly simplistic model, it is important to realize that the level of reach into individuals lives is extensive. So much so that the level of social control able to be exercised at a CORPORATE level exceeds many a governments policy department or reach. It is why certain countries ban specific websites and news/information sources and have implemented oversight policies 'for the common good' - facial recognition, IP tracking etc.
There are a couple of alarming items of note. The reliance of individuals on single sources of 'social' interaction and handing over the keys to their lives so glibly is one - "What have I got to hide?". The ability of a commercial enterprise to control the dissemination and access of information with the flick of a switch is another. The general failure of most news organizations to come up with a workable business model being a final one - paywalls / subscriptions / ad-revenue / donations... what will work? being another. They have had around twenty years to come up with an answer and most have failed abysmally with a few exceptions. Pop-up pages, "click next link in the 'list' to continue", hugely complex methodologies to increase page ranking are but a few examples.
Me? I continue to use RSS and News Aggregators which I control (or at least feel I do) and avoid most 'recommended for you' click-throughs.
posted by IndelibleUnderpants at 10:03 AM on February 18, 2021 [2 favorites]
Here, this was the moment - 2018: RIP Newsfeed for Publishers.
2019 - How much have Facebook's changes impacted publishers?
2020 - Facebook rolls back 'nicer' newsfeed for publishers (temporarily changed for the election)
posted by warriorqueen at 10:04 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
2019 - How much have Facebook's changes impacted publishers?
2020 - Facebook rolls back 'nicer' newsfeed for publishers (temporarily changed for the election)
posted by warriorqueen at 10:04 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
Yeah, "make your link ENGAGING to users" is another way to put it. Engaging, interesting, whatever - it's up to you for any web page. It's your choice.
This isn't about "does the Facebook algorithm reward clickbait too much?" though (answer: yes). It's about whether Facebook is using news providers' content, and if they should be paying them for that.
posted by MattWPBS at 10:04 AM on February 18, 2021
This isn't about "does the Facebook algorithm reward clickbait too much?" though (answer: yes). It's about whether Facebook is using news providers' content, and if they should be paying them for that.
posted by MattWPBS at 10:04 AM on February 18, 2021
I'm just challenging your statement that all news organizations have to do is have good content.
posted by warriorqueen at 10:05 AM on February 18, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by warriorqueen at 10:05 AM on February 18, 2021 [4 favorites]
You're right - I could phrase it that way. But after Facebook's long history of malfeasance to benefit themselves, where they have done things like lie about video attach rates to provoke a shift to video production that benefitted Facebook at the expense of quite a few outlets who found themselves overleveraged when the expected traffic and revenue never appeared because of Facebook outright lying - why would I? Your argument is that I should accord Facebook the benefit of the doubt, to which I point to their long history of malfeasance and say "what in their behavior indicates that they merit it?"
Erm. No.
My argument is that the Open Graph previews which news websites can put on their links, to make them more interesting/attractive/engaging/etc, do not constitute a content transfer when they are shown on Facebook or anywhere else, and neither Facebook or any other platform should be forced to pay for displaying that.
You said Facebook "don't just grab a link, but also a snippet from the piece, big enough to get across enough that in the case of news the reader doesn't need to click through. [...] The whole issue is that they have created a system where content is used, but the advertising money stays with [...] Facebook.".
I don't recognise this from what I see on Facebook. It's why I'm asking you for an example link where this is the case, because I want to see what you're talking about.
posted by MattWPBS at 10:14 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
Erm. No.
My argument is that the Open Graph previews which news websites can put on their links, to make them more interesting/attractive/engaging/etc, do not constitute a content transfer when they are shown on Facebook or anywhere else, and neither Facebook or any other platform should be forced to pay for displaying that.
You said Facebook "don't just grab a link, but also a snippet from the piece, big enough to get across enough that in the case of news the reader doesn't need to click through. [...] The whole issue is that they have created a system where content is used, but the advertising money stays with [...] Facebook.".
I don't recognise this from what I see on Facebook. It's why I'm asking you for an example link where this is the case, because I want to see what you're talking about.
posted by MattWPBS at 10:14 AM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
I'm just challenging your statement that all news organizations have to do is have good content.
Oh god no, that's not all news organisations need by a long shot when you start talking about memes, listicles and everything else in the news feed. It was originally a response to NoxAeternum's comment that if a news organisation doesn't have the Open Graph tags in the webpage, then Facebook "gives preference to the outlets who do provide the previews that they want, and you're just as fucked".
Not providing any kind of rich metadata on the webpage is a choice by the news organisation, and that that is always going to get less click throughs than one from another outlet who does (everything else being equal). Because, well, a news link with a headline and a thumbnail image is more interesting to people than a web address with no context.
Both of them will probably be outperformed by a YouTube compilation of D&D TikTok memes though.
posted by MattWPBS at 10:34 AM on February 18, 2021 [2 favorites]
Oh god no, that's not all news organisations need by a long shot when you start talking about memes, listicles and everything else in the news feed. It was originally a response to NoxAeternum's comment that if a news organisation doesn't have the Open Graph tags in the webpage, then Facebook "gives preference to the outlets who do provide the previews that they want, and you're just as fucked".
Not providing any kind of rich metadata on the webpage is a choice by the news organisation, and that that is always going to get less click throughs than one from another outlet who does (everything else being equal). Because, well, a news link with a headline and a thumbnail image is more interesting to people than a web address with no context.
Both of them will probably be outperformed by a YouTube compilation of D&D TikTok memes though.
posted by MattWPBS at 10:34 AM on February 18, 2021 [2 favorites]
Why yes, internal Google experiment supports Google's position. This neatly encapsulates the problem!
I haven't seen the results to even know exactly what they say and don't mean to endorse them as the right way to do the calculation. They certainly have an incentive to figure out how much they should be willing to pay and where to walk away. Who else could do the experiment? With clear methodology and reporting mandated in the legal process, even that biased source of information would be more valuable than completely made up valuations, which seems to be the news industry alternative.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 10:40 AM on February 18, 2021
I haven't seen the results to even know exactly what they say and don't mean to endorse them as the right way to do the calculation. They certainly have an incentive to figure out how much they should be willing to pay and where to walk away. Who else could do the experiment? With clear methodology and reporting mandated in the legal process, even that biased source of information would be more valuable than completely made up valuations, which seems to be the news industry alternative.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 10:40 AM on February 18, 2021
This whole concept of it being illegal to link to something you don't "have the right to link to" is going to destroy the internet if it gets out of hand.
posted by signsofrain at 11:03 AM on February 18, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by signsofrain at 11:03 AM on February 18, 2021 [2 favorites]
Top-performing Facebook links in the U.S:
1. Franklin Graham
2. Fox News
3. Dan Bongino
4. Ben Shapiro
5. Breitbart
6. ForAmerica
7. The Dodo
8. Newsmax
9. Bill Maher
10. Laura Ingraham
The U.S. could be so lucky as Australia.
posted by JackFlash at 12:07 PM on February 18, 2021 [3 favorites]
1. Franklin Graham
2. Fox News
3. Dan Bongino
4. Ben Shapiro
5. Breitbart
6. ForAmerica
7. The Dodo
8. Newsmax
9. Bill Maher
10. Laura Ingraham
The U.S. could be so lucky as Australia.
posted by JackFlash at 12:07 PM on February 18, 2021 [3 favorites]
Facebook have walked back some of the changes:
By 1pm, the Bureau of Meteorology, 1800 Respect, and a number of other government and community pages were back online.
News sites were not.
It did not take Australians long to discover a workaround. News links via third-party aggregators still worked, as did links to tweets containing links to news articles. Links to news articles could also be shared in Facebook messenger, including via chatbots.
posted by Lanark at 12:26 PM on February 18, 2021
By 1pm, the Bureau of Meteorology, 1800 Respect, and a number of other government and community pages were back online.
News sites were not.
It did not take Australians long to discover a workaround. News links via third-party aggregators still worked, as did links to tweets containing links to news articles. Links to news articles could also be shared in Facebook messenger, including via chatbots.
posted by Lanark at 12:26 PM on February 18, 2021
This is exactly the same, as far as I can see it.
The trouble with the Cambrian radiation of the media ecology over the last few decades is that nothing is exactly the same as anything that came before. People who assume that it is will frequently find themselves disagreeing over exactly what the object of discussion is the same as. This is how we end up with unhelpful blind-men-and-the-elephant policy wars like this one between the US tech giants and the Australian government.
If one abstracts the problems and considers how to best serve the public, thinking changes. Google isn't a problem, lack of competition is a problem. How do we fix that? Facebook isn't a problem, lack of alternatives to facebook is a problem. Seen that way, what we really need is government efforts to create viable competitors in these spaces and a watchful eye to make sure that monopolies don't do what they naturally do and crush said competitors.
I strongly encourage anybody who finds themselves thinking along this line to take a second step back and contemplate the idea of competition as an absolute good. It isn't. Some things just are natural monopolies and introducing competition into their provision will only ever make them more complicated and therefore more expensive, not better.
Electricity grids are a familiar case in point. Australia used to have state-run grids in each State, but many of those got sold off in the Nineties as the neoliberal Public Ownership Bad, Competition Good, Privatise Everything monster grew from egg to larval stage. Since privatisation there has of course been no attempt made to duplicate the cable, pole, tower, trench and substation networks that form the grid in order to give electricity customers a genuine choice of grid suppliers to deal with, because that would just be insane. Instead, the grids got carved up by geographical area, transforming a state monopoly into a handful of regional monopolies that do not compete with each other in any meaningful way. "Competition" in electricity "suppliers" was achieved by splitting off the function of billing customers from that of distributing electricity to them; customers don't get a choice of suppliers, just a confusopoly of retailers.
Because each of the regional monopolies is first and foremost in it for the money, the first thing that happened was massive layoffs of maintenance personnel, and imposition of new work practices involving working on cables while they're still live. And of course people died as a direct result, and of course the networks went through a few more decades of union-busting and totally inadequate maintenance. Which of course led to overhead wires falling off towers and sparking bushfires. And of course State budgets worsened because the modest but consistent surplus generated by the former State monopoly electricity suppliers wasn't contributing to the coffers any more. And of course customer bills massively increased because there is no way for competition to lower the price of service delivery if competition doesn't actually exist.
Also worth thinking about are our mobile phone networks, all of which have grown up after publicly owned monopolies became policy poison. Australia has three mobile infrastructure suppliers - Telstra, Optus and Vodafone - that do compete for provision of network services, at least in locations where demand is high. But only one of them - Telstra, the one that used to be government-run - is bound by a Universal Service Obligation that forces it to put up towers in places where it can't make enough return off them to cover their cost.
The result is that in urban centres we have at least twice as many ugly phone towers as we'd need with a single supplier, and in rural areas you use Telstra or go without. And again, there's this overlay of "competitive" retailers on each of the supplier networks, but it's not as if I can choose e.g. Amaysim as my retailer and have my phone work anywhere. Instead, the retailers act as resellers for network operators. So my Amaysim phone cannot connect to a Telstra tower if that one happens to be closer than my nearest Optus tower; I'm stuck on Optus's infrastructure and that's that.
Competition is not a panacea, is my point, any more than any other overarching policy principle other than Horses For Courses could ever be.
The reason why monopoly suppliers generally yield worse outcomes than competitive suppliers is that there's no economic incentive for a commercial monopoly supplier to reduce prices, nor to increase quality; in fact the incentives all push the other way, toward endless gouging for ever-shoddier mediocrity. But it seems to me that in cases where natural monopolies apply - which is pretty much all of public infrastructure - then the correct approach is not to introduce a cargo-cult simulacrum of competition, but to make the supplier publicly owned and give it a charter that makes it accountable to the public.
Public ownership and a strong charter can deliver low cost, high quality, constantly innovative services at least as effectively as competitive commercial pressure even in market segments that are not natural monopolies, as the example of the ABC makes perfectly clear. In segments where network effects dominate to the extent that they create natural monopolies, both the ABC example and my decades-old memories of the SECV and the PMG give me no reason to doubt that the same would apply.
And if we need to invent a new class of transnational publicly owned corporation to make this work for social network operators, I can think of no good reason why that shouldn't be the path we pursue instead of letting the Zuckerborg dictate terms. Facebook is only as powerful as the public allows it to be, and it's time the public understood that.
posted by flabdablet at 12:51 PM on February 18, 2021 [12 favorites]
The trouble with the Cambrian radiation of the media ecology over the last few decades is that nothing is exactly the same as anything that came before. People who assume that it is will frequently find themselves disagreeing over exactly what the object of discussion is the same as. This is how we end up with unhelpful blind-men-and-the-elephant policy wars like this one between the US tech giants and the Australian government.
If one abstracts the problems and considers how to best serve the public, thinking changes. Google isn't a problem, lack of competition is a problem. How do we fix that? Facebook isn't a problem, lack of alternatives to facebook is a problem. Seen that way, what we really need is government efforts to create viable competitors in these spaces and a watchful eye to make sure that monopolies don't do what they naturally do and crush said competitors.
I strongly encourage anybody who finds themselves thinking along this line to take a second step back and contemplate the idea of competition as an absolute good. It isn't. Some things just are natural monopolies and introducing competition into their provision will only ever make them more complicated and therefore more expensive, not better.
Electricity grids are a familiar case in point. Australia used to have state-run grids in each State, but many of those got sold off in the Nineties as the neoliberal Public Ownership Bad, Competition Good, Privatise Everything monster grew from egg to larval stage. Since privatisation there has of course been no attempt made to duplicate the cable, pole, tower, trench and substation networks that form the grid in order to give electricity customers a genuine choice of grid suppliers to deal with, because that would just be insane. Instead, the grids got carved up by geographical area, transforming a state monopoly into a handful of regional monopolies that do not compete with each other in any meaningful way. "Competition" in electricity "suppliers" was achieved by splitting off the function of billing customers from that of distributing electricity to them; customers don't get a choice of suppliers, just a confusopoly of retailers.
Because each of the regional monopolies is first and foremost in it for the money, the first thing that happened was massive layoffs of maintenance personnel, and imposition of new work practices involving working on cables while they're still live. And of course people died as a direct result, and of course the networks went through a few more decades of union-busting and totally inadequate maintenance. Which of course led to overhead wires falling off towers and sparking bushfires. And of course State budgets worsened because the modest but consistent surplus generated by the former State monopoly electricity suppliers wasn't contributing to the coffers any more. And of course customer bills massively increased because there is no way for competition to lower the price of service delivery if competition doesn't actually exist.
Also worth thinking about are our mobile phone networks, all of which have grown up after publicly owned monopolies became policy poison. Australia has three mobile infrastructure suppliers - Telstra, Optus and Vodafone - that do compete for provision of network services, at least in locations where demand is high. But only one of them - Telstra, the one that used to be government-run - is bound by a Universal Service Obligation that forces it to put up towers in places where it can't make enough return off them to cover their cost.
The result is that in urban centres we have at least twice as many ugly phone towers as we'd need with a single supplier, and in rural areas you use Telstra or go without. And again, there's this overlay of "competitive" retailers on each of the supplier networks, but it's not as if I can choose e.g. Amaysim as my retailer and have my phone work anywhere. Instead, the retailers act as resellers for network operators. So my Amaysim phone cannot connect to a Telstra tower if that one happens to be closer than my nearest Optus tower; I'm stuck on Optus's infrastructure and that's that.
Competition is not a panacea, is my point, any more than any other overarching policy principle other than Horses For Courses could ever be.
The reason why monopoly suppliers generally yield worse outcomes than competitive suppliers is that there's no economic incentive for a commercial monopoly supplier to reduce prices, nor to increase quality; in fact the incentives all push the other way, toward endless gouging for ever-shoddier mediocrity. But it seems to me that in cases where natural monopolies apply - which is pretty much all of public infrastructure - then the correct approach is not to introduce a cargo-cult simulacrum of competition, but to make the supplier publicly owned and give it a charter that makes it accountable to the public.
Public ownership and a strong charter can deliver low cost, high quality, constantly innovative services at least as effectively as competitive commercial pressure even in market segments that are not natural monopolies, as the example of the ABC makes perfectly clear. In segments where network effects dominate to the extent that they create natural monopolies, both the ABC example and my decades-old memories of the SECV and the PMG give me no reason to doubt that the same would apply.
And if we need to invent a new class of transnational publicly owned corporation to make this work for social network operators, I can think of no good reason why that shouldn't be the path we pursue instead of letting the Zuckerborg dictate terms. Facebook is only as powerful as the public allows it to be, and it's time the public understood that.
posted by flabdablet at 12:51 PM on February 18, 2021 [12 favorites]
There are dumb ideas on both sides. The legislation was devised as a rort to benefit Murdoch and other LNP mates, giving (as this government loves to do) the appearance of doing something while ensuring that any real change is a) absent; b) actually handled by someone else; and c) to the direct detriment of anyone who isn't a party hack or partisan - the months-long twisting to try write the ABC out of any benefit under the legislation proves that.
The problem is that Facebook has thought out their response to the legislation with as little consideration as the idiots who drafted that legislation in the first place. ScoMo and his deluded cavalcade of clowns escape scrutiny again! Facebook proves that the only thing they give a shit about is engagement and eyeballs!
In Australia we have had a sequence of governments who don't understand - and often don't care to understand - technology, and most particularly the social web. Add to this the fact that - largely in order to deliver super profits to miners, Murdoch, and other mates (the idea of 'mates' having a specific nuance in AU politics which implies at-best-marginally corrupt practices) - the issue of corporate tax avoidance and offshoring of profit is a no-go zone. For fuck's sake, the economic stimulus meant to keep people in work during the pandemic has been trousered by executives as bonuses. This thing is a giant idiot soufflé.
It's further hampered by the fact that Australia has a media landscape that has been systematically handed to News Limited over decades, battering the national broadcaster into cowed submission. Australia is a massive country, large parts of it are inhospitable if not uninhabitable, and our population is vanishingly small. Delivering relevant news - and covering local issues - will never be profitable in regional Australia. It's barely scraping by in the capital cities. The ABC has a mandate to provide service to our sparsely-populated regions, but the current government, prompted by Murdoch mates, hates the ABC a fervent passion, and has spent years utterly shredding its budget and reputation. This government has largely created the problem we now find our nation deeply mired within. It's definitely not so simple as tweaking website cookies or changing the social media habits of 25 million people.
posted by prismatic7 at 1:38 PM on February 18, 2021 [11 favorites]
The problem is that Facebook has thought out their response to the legislation with as little consideration as the idiots who drafted that legislation in the first place. ScoMo and his deluded cavalcade of clowns escape scrutiny again! Facebook proves that the only thing they give a shit about is engagement and eyeballs!
In Australia we have had a sequence of governments who don't understand - and often don't care to understand - technology, and most particularly the social web. Add to this the fact that - largely in order to deliver super profits to miners, Murdoch, and other mates (the idea of 'mates' having a specific nuance in AU politics which implies at-best-marginally corrupt practices) - the issue of corporate tax avoidance and offshoring of profit is a no-go zone. For fuck's sake, the economic stimulus meant to keep people in work during the pandemic has been trousered by executives as bonuses. This thing is a giant idiot soufflé.
It's further hampered by the fact that Australia has a media landscape that has been systematically handed to News Limited over decades, battering the national broadcaster into cowed submission. Australia is a massive country, large parts of it are inhospitable if not uninhabitable, and our population is vanishingly small. Delivering relevant news - and covering local issues - will never be profitable in regional Australia. It's barely scraping by in the capital cities. The ABC has a mandate to provide service to our sparsely-populated regions, but the current government, prompted by Murdoch mates, hates the ABC a fervent passion, and has spent years utterly shredding its budget and reputation. This government has largely created the problem we now find our nation deeply mired within. It's definitely not so simple as tweaking website cookies or changing the social media habits of 25 million people.
posted by prismatic7 at 1:38 PM on February 18, 2021 [11 favorites]
Some things just are natural monopolies and introducing competition into their provision will only ever make them more complicated and therefore more expensive, not better.
Unlike the provision of physical services, I don't think a search engine or a social platform are natural monopolies. Social platforms definitely benefit from network effects, but there can be multiple social networks just fine. Strava and Ravelry exist fine in the face of FB.
As for search engines, there are no cables to lay or cell towers to build for Bing and Google to coexist. To some extent there is catering to regional needs - Google is losing regionally to Yandex, Naver and Baidu. But there's no public cost to Bing and Google competing for english-language users. There are some network effects (but much less than a social network), but Google simply has a better brand and although no one loves destroying their own brand value as much as Google there's still a lot of it there. But going to Bing is just as easy as going to Google for the most part (setting aside deals to set defaults in search boxes in devices and browsers, which does have a positive feedback loop, but is neither insurmountable nor a permanent barrier)
Now, do we need regulation of search engines? Sure. We already have quite a lot of it really. We have existing copyright law, the DMCA, the Communications Decency Act and section 230 and similar laws worldwide like GDPR. Mandating payments from one industry to another is a pretty bold move. If governments want to rewrite tax law to make companies pay more tax to fund newspapers, go for it, but these special one-to-one deals don't see very fair, at least to me. I'm not against more regulation personally but I've seen more bad ideas than good ones. Fundamentally people will go where they want to go online and do what they want and there will be winners and losers online. News is a public good but paying for it isn't ever going to be simple.
Per prismatic7, the ABC like it's foreign counterparts is a great service, but private interests will lobby against it (as they lobby against the CBC and BBC, endlessly) and there's way more news than any one service can truly handle.
posted by GuyZero at 1:58 PM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
Unlike the provision of physical services, I don't think a search engine or a social platform are natural monopolies. Social platforms definitely benefit from network effects, but there can be multiple social networks just fine. Strava and Ravelry exist fine in the face of FB.
As for search engines, there are no cables to lay or cell towers to build for Bing and Google to coexist. To some extent there is catering to regional needs - Google is losing regionally to Yandex, Naver and Baidu. But there's no public cost to Bing and Google competing for english-language users. There are some network effects (but much less than a social network), but Google simply has a better brand and although no one loves destroying their own brand value as much as Google there's still a lot of it there. But going to Bing is just as easy as going to Google for the most part (setting aside deals to set defaults in search boxes in devices and browsers, which does have a positive feedback loop, but is neither insurmountable nor a permanent barrier)
Now, do we need regulation of search engines? Sure. We already have quite a lot of it really. We have existing copyright law, the DMCA, the Communications Decency Act and section 230 and similar laws worldwide like GDPR. Mandating payments from one industry to another is a pretty bold move. If governments want to rewrite tax law to make companies pay more tax to fund newspapers, go for it, but these special one-to-one deals don't see very fair, at least to me. I'm not against more regulation personally but I've seen more bad ideas than good ones. Fundamentally people will go where they want to go online and do what they want and there will be winners and losers online. News is a public good but paying for it isn't ever going to be simple.
Per prismatic7, the ABC like it's foreign counterparts is a great service, but private interests will lobby against it (as they lobby against the CBC and BBC, endlessly) and there's way more news than any one service can truly handle.
posted by GuyZero at 1:58 PM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
Now, do we need regulation of search engines? Sure. We already have quite a lot of it really. We have existing copyright law, the DMCA, the Communications Decency Act and section 230 and similar laws worldwide like GDPR.WE don't. The US and the EU do, but in particular the application of the DMCA and CDA in overseas jurisdictions is incredibly problematic and another example of US principles being forced on the wider world. One of the biggest problems we have with Facebook globally is a US-centric approach to 'free speech' that privileges loud and powerful voices at the very clear expense of marginalised communities and even the concept of 'truth'. It really frustrates me when US solutions are blithely declared as global ones. They're not, and maybe it's time for Americans to actually listen when people in other countries say 'hey, shut up about you for a minute'.
flabdablet was not arguing that search engines or social media should be a monopoly - the complete opposite, in fact. The reason that Strava and Ravelry exist 'just fine' is that they are adjunct to (and integrated with, to a greater or lesser extent) Facebook. Most Australians use FB on a daily basis, we have a very high takeup of mobile devices (one of the most saturated mobile markets in the world), and there are systemic problems with that, such as false competition, which flabdablet laid out very clearly in their post. We are culturally, economically, politically, and socially very distinct from the US, and our historical accumulation of bad decisions has proceeded very differently, so our solutions need to be different as well.
posted by prismatic7 at 2:49 PM on February 18, 2021 [15 favorites]
Strava and Ravelry exist fine in the face of FB.
Both of those are organized around niche interests, though. Neither has anything like the pull of Facebook for general users; they are remoras to Facebook's whale.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against remoras. All I'm suggesting is that if there is to be a whale (as positive feedback pretty much guarantees that there will be in social networking) then it should be in public hands and bound by a charter that requires it to operate in the public interest.
there's way more news than any one service can truly handle
There's way more news than any one outlet can truly handle. But if you imagine for a moment making a single change to the way news is collected and disseminated in this country right now - a change of ownership, not a change to staffing levels or newsroom count or newsroom diversity or staff activity - then it's unclear to me why that change necessarily involves any reduction at all in the quantity of news to which the public would have access.
And if the new owner is us, collectively, and if the direction that our equivalent of the board of directors gives to the reconstituted organization is that it puts the interests of the public ahead of those of advertisers, I can't see how the result could be anything other than an improvement over what we currently have. In fact I would expect to see the diversity of news sources represented sharply increase rather than decline.
posted by flabdablet at 2:57 PM on February 18, 2021 [7 favorites]
Both of those are organized around niche interests, though. Neither has anything like the pull of Facebook for general users; they are remoras to Facebook's whale.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against remoras. All I'm suggesting is that if there is to be a whale (as positive feedback pretty much guarantees that there will be in social networking) then it should be in public hands and bound by a charter that requires it to operate in the public interest.
there's way more news than any one service can truly handle
There's way more news than any one outlet can truly handle. But if you imagine for a moment making a single change to the way news is collected and disseminated in this country right now - a change of ownership, not a change to staffing levels or newsroom count or newsroom diversity or staff activity - then it's unclear to me why that change necessarily involves any reduction at all in the quantity of news to which the public would have access.
And if the new owner is us, collectively, and if the direction that our equivalent of the board of directors gives to the reconstituted organization is that it puts the interests of the public ahead of those of advertisers, I can't see how the result could be anything other than an improvement over what we currently have. In fact I would expect to see the diversity of news sources represented sharply increase rather than decline.
posted by flabdablet at 2:57 PM on February 18, 2021 [7 favorites]
No more Murdoch press on facebook? Don't threaten me with a good time.
posted by adept256 at 5:07 PM on February 18, 2021 [3 favorites]
posted by adept256 at 5:07 PM on February 18, 2021 [3 favorites]
Yeah, as flabdabbet said there are really fundamentally Australian problems with this that go along with the generalised 'why should we pay for links' argument. Australia's media landscape and our tech legislation is fucking terrible, and Everyone's the Arsehole Here. The fact that huge swathes of government websites were zukked "by accident" is part of the flex. It's Facey demonstrating its power, a big ole Old Media vs New Media with the population of Australia stuck in the middle.
We can stand to regulate things somewhere between every hyperlink having a prohibitive price tag and the whole thing returning to the ad-free glory days. Scale it so if you're a small company it comes out of your ISP fees and you don't notice it's there, but the 4% news driven traffic Facebook enjoys gets a representative take of the $86 billion US dollars they made last year.
It's just that the current Australian government is uniquely placed to make the absolute worst decisions around that sort of subtlety.
posted by Jilder at 7:03 PM on February 18, 2021 [6 favorites]
We can stand to regulate things somewhere between every hyperlink having a prohibitive price tag and the whole thing returning to the ad-free glory days. Scale it so if you're a small company it comes out of your ISP fees and you don't notice it's there, but the 4% news driven traffic Facebook enjoys gets a representative take of the $86 billion US dollars they made last year.
It's just that the current Australian government is uniquely placed to make the absolute worst decisions around that sort of subtlety.
posted by Jilder at 7:03 PM on February 18, 2021 [6 favorites]
Those saying FB only links to content: not entirely true isn’t it. They also carry content from select news sites on their own pages and serve their ads, don’t they. This is made worse by the fact that they deliberately confuse between a link to a site and that to an FB-hosted page.
posted by the cydonian at 7:34 PM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by the cydonian at 7:34 PM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
prismatic7 - hear hear.
posted by freethefeet at 8:32 PM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by freethefeet at 8:32 PM on February 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
Unlike the provision of physical services, I don't think a search engine or a social platform are natural monopolies.
Given what we've seen historically, why wouldn't they be natural monopolies? The fact that there are no physical barriers is exactly why the internet is uniquely conductive to the creation of natural monopolies, given the needed investment in infrastructure. You say that there are no cables to lay or cell towers to build, while ignoring that both Alphabet and Facebook maintain massive data centers to operate at the scale they do. And it's that investment in infrastructure that is the barrier. You say that Google and Bing can coexist, while ignoring that the only reason that Bing survives is because Microsoft heavily subsidizes it so as to have a non-Google search engine in their stack. If not for that, Bing would have been long dead.
Basically, your argument for there not being natural monopolies on the internet is based on a tech industry myth - the idea that competition online is easy because users can easily switch - that really needs to die in a fire. The internet is actually predisposed to the development of natural monopoly because the usual barriers don't actually exist, and the necessary infrastructure investment to operate a major internet service at scale are such that from a societal point of view, it makes little sense to replicate, given their costs. About the only barriers that do exist online are language and culture, and unsurprisingly, that's where we've seen some cleavage, but even then, what we wind up seeing is that you just have a different entity as the big fish in those particular ponds.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:50 PM on February 18, 2021 [5 favorites]
Given what we've seen historically, why wouldn't they be natural monopolies? The fact that there are no physical barriers is exactly why the internet is uniquely conductive to the creation of natural monopolies, given the needed investment in infrastructure. You say that there are no cables to lay or cell towers to build, while ignoring that both Alphabet and Facebook maintain massive data centers to operate at the scale they do. And it's that investment in infrastructure that is the barrier. You say that Google and Bing can coexist, while ignoring that the only reason that Bing survives is because Microsoft heavily subsidizes it so as to have a non-Google search engine in their stack. If not for that, Bing would have been long dead.
Basically, your argument for there not being natural monopolies on the internet is based on a tech industry myth - the idea that competition online is easy because users can easily switch - that really needs to die in a fire. The internet is actually predisposed to the development of natural monopoly because the usual barriers don't actually exist, and the necessary infrastructure investment to operate a major internet service at scale are such that from a societal point of view, it makes little sense to replicate, given their costs. About the only barriers that do exist online are language and culture, and unsurprisingly, that's where we've seen some cleavage, but even then, what we wind up seeing is that you just have a different entity as the big fish in those particular ponds.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:50 PM on February 18, 2021 [5 favorites]
@ flabdablet And if we need to invent a new class of transnational publicly owned corporation to make this work for social network operators, I can think of no good reason why that shouldn't be the path we pursue instead of letting the Zuckerborg dictate terms.
We need some form of distributed social media protocol to actually get traction (like Mastodon or something), so there's no lock-in to one platform or the other. Turn it into the equivalent of email. I don't worry about if the person I'm emailing if on GMail, using a work address, Outlook, or anything. I just send it to their address, and it's generally fine. If I don't want to hear from someone, I add them to a spam filter.
Think about it in terms of the Australian situation at the moment. Facebook stops allowing news, but if another provider decides it worth keeping it, you're able to move your account or sign up there. Might be that the other provider has a service charge, only allows smaller images, doesn't have real time chat, has more intrusive advertising or another downside, but you have the choice and ability to move without losing the ability to communicate with people on Facebook.
@the cydonian Those saying FB only links to content: not entirely true isn’t it. They also carry content from select news sites on their own pages and serve their ads, don’t they. This is made worse by the fact that they deliberately confuse between a link to a site and that to an FB-hosted page.
Are you talking about this? It's not launched in the UK yet, so I can't see what it looks like, but the key distinction to me between this and the link metadata is that they're paying the news sites for the content they're hosting on Facebook. Apologies if that's not what you were referring to.
@NoxAeternum - still would appreciate an example where Facebook "don't just grab a link, but also a snippet from the piece, big enough to get across enough that in the case of news the reader doesn't need to click through. [...] The whole issue is that they have created a system where content is used, but the advertising money stays with [...] Facebook.".
posted by MattWPBS at 2:04 AM on February 19, 2021
We need some form of distributed social media protocol to actually get traction (like Mastodon or something), so there's no lock-in to one platform or the other. Turn it into the equivalent of email. I don't worry about if the person I'm emailing if on GMail, using a work address, Outlook, or anything. I just send it to their address, and it's generally fine. If I don't want to hear from someone, I add them to a spam filter.
Think about it in terms of the Australian situation at the moment. Facebook stops allowing news, but if another provider decides it worth keeping it, you're able to move your account or sign up there. Might be that the other provider has a service charge, only allows smaller images, doesn't have real time chat, has more intrusive advertising or another downside, but you have the choice and ability to move without losing the ability to communicate with people on Facebook.
@the cydonian Those saying FB only links to content: not entirely true isn’t it. They also carry content from select news sites on their own pages and serve their ads, don’t they. This is made worse by the fact that they deliberately confuse between a link to a site and that to an FB-hosted page.
Are you talking about this? It's not launched in the UK yet, so I can't see what it looks like, but the key distinction to me between this and the link metadata is that they're paying the news sites for the content they're hosting on Facebook. Apologies if that's not what you were referring to.
@NoxAeternum - still would appreciate an example where Facebook "don't just grab a link, but also a snippet from the piece, big enough to get across enough that in the case of news the reader doesn't need to click through. [...] The whole issue is that they have created a system where content is used, but the advertising money stays with [...] Facebook.".
posted by MattWPBS at 2:04 AM on February 19, 2021
We need some form of distributed social media protocol to actually get traction (like Mastodon or something), so there's no lock-in to one platform or the other.
Well yes, we do, but the entire history of proprietary tech demonstrates clearly that most people don't actually give a shit about lock-in; most people just choose what they've heard of, which is in general just what other people are already using, and give zero consideration to how any of it is implemented.
Email is the exception because email was the first social media protocol and it was federated right out of the gate. Everything since that's had any degree of mass uptake has been proprietary and single-supplier.
Again, to be clear, I'm totally not defending this situation, but it's how things are and I can't see any way to unpick or cut these Gordian knots any more. Seems to me that the only path forward that has any realistic chance of achieving anything resembling the public good has to start with seizing control of one of the existing whales and then federating it by stealth.
posted by flabdablet at 2:48 AM on February 19, 2021 [3 favorites]
Well yes, we do, but the entire history of proprietary tech demonstrates clearly that most people don't actually give a shit about lock-in; most people just choose what they've heard of, which is in general just what other people are already using, and give zero consideration to how any of it is implemented.
Email is the exception because email was the first social media protocol and it was federated right out of the gate. Everything since that's had any degree of mass uptake has been proprietary and single-supplier.
Again, to be clear, I'm totally not defending this situation, but it's how things are and I can't see any way to unpick or cut these Gordian knots any more. Seems to me that the only path forward that has any realistic chance of achieving anything resembling the public good has to start with seizing control of one of the existing whales and then federating it by stealth.
posted by flabdablet at 2:48 AM on February 19, 2021 [3 favorites]
Diaspora* is the closest thing I can think of to a federated Facebook. It's been a thing since 2014, but do you know anybody who is on it? Why or why not?
posted by flabdablet at 3:04 AM on February 19, 2021
posted by flabdablet at 3:04 AM on February 19, 2021
We have existing copyright law, the DMCA, the Communications Decency Act and section 230 and similar laws worldwide like GDPR.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but like: wow the DMCA is nothing like the GDPR.
posted by pompomtom at 4:38 AM on February 19, 2021 [5 favorites]
Correct me if I'm wrong, but like: wow the DMCA is nothing like the GDPR.
posted by pompomtom at 4:38 AM on February 19, 2021 [5 favorites]
The idea that social media is a natural monopoly because of network effects makes the unstated assumption that monopoly is the only way to achieve interoperability, but this is like saying electrical appliances are a natural monopoly because of the enormous benefits of all using the same size plugs and operating voltages. There is nothing natural at all about the way the big social media players shun standards in favor of pushing their users into increasingly siloed platforms for the purpose of collecting ever more data for advertisers. There is no insurmountable natural law preventing Google Hangouts and Facebook Messenger from talking to each other.
posted by Pyry at 4:40 AM on February 19, 2021
posted by Pyry at 4:40 AM on February 19, 2021
The idea that social media is a natural monopoly because of network effects makes the unstated assumption that monopoly is the only way to achieve interoperability
Not really. All that's required is the assumption that most people who are about to choose a social media platform will (a) choose whatever their contacts are already using and (b) not be interested enough in the underlying technology even to be able to give an accurate definition of "interoperability", let alone recognise it as something desirable.
In any case, interoperability exists and is largely being ignored. Free software that allows people to exchange messages with other people over any of a wide variety of supported protocols (e.g. Pidgin) is readily available and has been for many years. Compared to the native Facebook messaging app, the user base is negligible.
People are on Facebook because other people are on Facebook, and the obvious thing to get on Facebook with is the Facebook app. Expecting the vast bulk of humanity to engage with IT in any way but the most obvious is, as history clearly demonstrates, unrealistic.
posted by flabdablet at 5:08 AM on February 19, 2021 [2 favorites]
Not really. All that's required is the assumption that most people who are about to choose a social media platform will (a) choose whatever their contacts are already using and (b) not be interested enough in the underlying technology even to be able to give an accurate definition of "interoperability", let alone recognise it as something desirable.
In any case, interoperability exists and is largely being ignored. Free software that allows people to exchange messages with other people over any of a wide variety of supported protocols (e.g. Pidgin) is readily available and has been for many years. Compared to the native Facebook messaging app, the user base is negligible.
People are on Facebook because other people are on Facebook, and the obvious thing to get on Facebook with is the Facebook app. Expecting the vast bulk of humanity to engage with IT in any way but the most obvious is, as history clearly demonstrates, unrealistic.
posted by flabdablet at 5:08 AM on February 19, 2021 [2 favorites]
There is no insurmountable natural law preventing Google Hangouts and Facebook Messenger from talking to each other.
Indeed. And if both of the organizations who run those services were in public hands being run as public utilities, rather than in private hands and competing for advertiser dollars, that might even happen.
posted by flabdablet at 5:11 AM on February 19, 2021 [3 favorites]
Indeed. And if both of the organizations who run those services were in public hands being run as public utilities, rather than in private hands and competing for advertiser dollars, that might even happen.
posted by flabdablet at 5:11 AM on February 19, 2021 [3 favorites]
@NoxAeternum - still would appreciate an example where Facebook "don't just grab a link, but also a snippet from the piece, big enough to get across enough that in the case of news the reader doesn't need to click through. [...] The whole issue is that they have created a system where content is used, but the advertising money stays with [...] Facebook.".
And I'm going to continue to decline to play the game of "provide a sample that meets my standards", especially after warriorqueen pointed out (using the links you provided) how Facebook sets their metrics and guidelines to revolve purely around engagement on Facebook. If you can look at how Facebook decimated a swathe of content creators - costing several hundred people their jobs - by lying about the viability of video because they found video to better suit their needs and still don't think that Facebook puts itself ahead of the content creators it relies on to provide content - then I'm not going to, no matter what examples I give. As a wise computer said, the only winning move is not to play.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:02 AM on February 19, 2021 [2 favorites]
And I'm going to continue to decline to play the game of "provide a sample that meets my standards", especially after warriorqueen pointed out (using the links you provided) how Facebook sets their metrics and guidelines to revolve purely around engagement on Facebook. If you can look at how Facebook decimated a swathe of content creators - costing several hundred people their jobs - by lying about the viability of video because they found video to better suit their needs and still don't think that Facebook puts itself ahead of the content creators it relies on to provide content - then I'm not going to, no matter what examples I give. As a wise computer said, the only winning move is not to play.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:02 AM on February 19, 2021 [2 favorites]
(Oh, and let's not forget Facebook turning a blind eye to freebooting (that is, the reposting of video content published on another service by someone not the original creator with the intent of capturing viewership from that creator) as part of their attempt to make inroads in the video market. That's another example of how Facebook put their position ahead of content creators.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:16 AM on February 19, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:16 AM on February 19, 2021 [1 favorite]
People are on Facebook because other people are on Facebook, and the obvious thing to get on Facebook with is the Facebook app. Expecting the vast bulk of humanity to engage with IT in any way but the most obvious is, as history clearly demonstrates, unrealistic.
And in the alternate timeline where mains voltages were never standardized someone would be saying "People use Edison appliances because those are the ones that work with their power outlets. Expecting people to use transformers so they can use third-party appliances is unrealistic." It is both true and yet takes as a given that interoperability must necessarily be overt and complicated.
posted by Pyry at 6:24 AM on February 19, 2021 [1 favorite]
And in the alternate timeline where mains voltages were never standardized someone would be saying "People use Edison appliances because those are the ones that work with their power outlets. Expecting people to use transformers so they can use third-party appliances is unrealistic." It is both true and yet takes as a given that interoperability must necessarily be overt and complicated.
posted by Pyry at 6:24 AM on February 19, 2021 [1 favorite]
And in the alternate timeline where mains voltages were never standardized someone would be saying "People use Edison appliances because those are the ones that work with their power outlets.
Umm... but... weren't mains voltages in many places decided somewhat after the USA had decided that it's first stab was the bestest USiest voltage, and now lots of people who enjoy tea use 240v, and there are hilarious videos on youtube where Americans mutilate tea?
posted by pompomtom at 6:33 AM on February 19, 2021 [2 favorites]
Umm... but... weren't mains voltages in many places decided somewhat after the USA had decided that it's first stab was the bestest USiest voltage, and now lots of people who enjoy tea use 240v, and there are hilarious videos on youtube where Americans mutilate tea?
posted by pompomtom at 6:33 AM on February 19, 2021 [2 favorites]
Yeah but the point is you don't buy your appliances from a vertically-integrated monopoly with your power company. The fact that social media companies do operate like that, with social network infrastructure deeply coupled to proprietary user-facing applications, isn't in any way necessary or inevitable. Obviously we can't just redo history, we have to operate in the situation we actually find ourselves in, but that doesn't mean we have to accept the current state of affairs as the only possible one, as if the only choice is who gets to run the social media monopoly.
posted by Pyry at 6:45 AM on February 19, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by Pyry at 6:45 AM on February 19, 2021 [2 favorites]
A few years back, Gizmodo did an article about why there are so many plugs around the world..The nations using 240v tend to be ones having to rebuild their infrastructure after WWII (this is also why Brits wire their houses in giant loops directly attached to mains power and have power regulation built into the plug), while for the most part nations on 110-120v tend to be ones that electrified prewar. (Then there is Japan and their mess of a power grid.)
Obviously we can't just redo history, we have to operate in the situation we actually find ourselves in, but that doesn't mean we have to accept the current state of affairs as the only possible one, as if the only choice is who gets to run the social media monopoly.
No, but you have to give a positive case for interoperability, which has always been the problem. People aren't going to care about interoperability for its own sake - they need to be given reasons to care. And that has always been the stumbling block.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:55 AM on February 19, 2021 [1 favorite]
Obviously we can't just redo history, we have to operate in the situation we actually find ourselves in, but that doesn't mean we have to accept the current state of affairs as the only possible one, as if the only choice is who gets to run the social media monopoly.
No, but you have to give a positive case for interoperability, which has always been the problem. People aren't going to care about interoperability for its own sake - they need to be given reasons to care. And that has always been the stumbling block.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:55 AM on February 19, 2021 [1 favorite]
@NoxAeternum - And I'm going to continue to decline to play the game of "provide a sample that meets my standards", especially after warriorqueen pointed out (using the links you provided) how Facebook sets their metrics and guidelines to revolve purely around engagement on Facebook. If you can look at how Facebook decimated a swathe of content creators - costing several hundred people their jobs - by lying about the viability of video because they found video to better suit their needs and still don't think that Facebook puts itself ahead of the content creators it relies on to provide content - then I'm not going to, no matter what examples I give. As a wise computer said, the only winning move is not to play.
I'm not asking you to "provide a sample that meets my standards", I'm asking you for an example link that shows the behaviour you're talking about. To be clear, the example is entirely down to your standards. I want to see the issue you're talking about in the wild, and look at that example on Facebook to better understand your point. Literally the only 'standard' for the link is that you think it shows the problem.
There's a multitude of other problems to do with Facebook, things like the ranking algorithm favouring clickbait over genuinely interesting links or important news, the pivot to video lies about demand and corresponding payment, the fragmentation of the internet, the abuse of data through Cambridge Analytica and similar, the prevalence of dark advertising in 2016 politics, the psychological damage done to content moderator contractors. We could go on for hours talking about them.
Being clear, you're mistaken when you put that I "still don't think that Facebook puts itself ahead of the content creators it relies on to provide content". Facebook puts itself ahead of everyone, and frequently damages other people with its actions.
If there's another problem to add to the list I want to know about it, see it, and understand it. You're telling me there is, so I want to see it.
posted by MattWPBS at 8:14 AM on February 19, 2021
I'm not asking you to "provide a sample that meets my standards", I'm asking you for an example link that shows the behaviour you're talking about. To be clear, the example is entirely down to your standards. I want to see the issue you're talking about in the wild, and look at that example on Facebook to better understand your point. Literally the only 'standard' for the link is that you think it shows the problem.
There's a multitude of other problems to do with Facebook, things like the ranking algorithm favouring clickbait over genuinely interesting links or important news, the pivot to video lies about demand and corresponding payment, the fragmentation of the internet, the abuse of data through Cambridge Analytica and similar, the prevalence of dark advertising in 2016 politics, the psychological damage done to content moderator contractors. We could go on for hours talking about them.
Being clear, you're mistaken when you put that I "still don't think that Facebook puts itself ahead of the content creators it relies on to provide content". Facebook puts itself ahead of everyone, and frequently damages other people with its actions.
If there's another problem to add to the list I want to know about it, see it, and understand it. You're telling me there is, so I want to see it.
posted by MattWPBS at 8:14 AM on February 19, 2021
His conclusion is spot on.
posted by Dysk at 11:31 PM on February 19, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by Dysk at 11:31 PM on February 19, 2021 [1 favorite]
Just an update, it seems that Aussies are able to post news links behind images of cats. Once again proving that cats are the true rulers of the internet.
posted by adept256 at 3:53 AM on February 20, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by adept256 at 3:53 AM on February 20, 2021 [4 favorites]
Do you have a cite for that, adept256? I'd like to learn more.
posted by flabdablet at 5:46 AM on February 20, 2021
posted by flabdablet at 5:46 AM on February 20, 2021
flabdablet: Apparently if you post a photo of something unrelated, you can use the space for the caption for the link. I wouldn't put money on this holding, but you can post any links from off Facey that aren't news related. That's a wobbly definition, so I've mostly been either using Tinyurl or posting the news itself to Dreamwidth then linking back to Facey from there. I've had other mates do it with Twitter, too.
posted by Jilder at 7:44 PM on February 22, 2021
posted by Jilder at 7:44 PM on February 22, 2021
Facebook reverses Australia news ban after government makes media code amendments
The government said under the changes:
• A decision to designate a platform under the code must take into account whether a digital platform has made a significant contribution to the sustainability of the Australian news industry through reaching commercial agreements with news media businesses.
• A digital platform will be notified of the government’s intention to designate prior to any final decision – noting that a final decision on whether or not to designate a digital platform would be made no sooner than one month from the date of notification.
• Non-differentiation provisions will not be triggered because commercial agreements resulted in different remuneration amounts or commercial outcomes that arose in the course of usual business practices.
• Final offer arbitration is a last resort where commercial deals cannot be reached by requiring mediation, in good faith, to occur prior to arbitration for no longer than two months.
posted by Jilder at 10:29 PM on February 22, 2021 [1 favorite]
The government said under the changes:
• A decision to designate a platform under the code must take into account whether a digital platform has made a significant contribution to the sustainability of the Australian news industry through reaching commercial agreements with news media businesses.
• A digital platform will be notified of the government’s intention to designate prior to any final decision – noting that a final decision on whether or not to designate a digital platform would be made no sooner than one month from the date of notification.
• Non-differentiation provisions will not be triggered because commercial agreements resulted in different remuneration amounts or commercial outcomes that arose in the course of usual business practices.
• Final offer arbitration is a last resort where commercial deals cannot be reached by requiring mediation, in good faith, to occur prior to arbitration for no longer than two months.
posted by Jilder at 10:29 PM on February 22, 2021 [1 favorite]
How Morrison's media bargaining code sold Australia's soul to wretched Rupert and Mark Zuckerberg: Independent Australia 25-Feb
posted by flabdablet at 2:17 PM on February 24, 2021
posted by flabdablet at 2:17 PM on February 24, 2021
How Morrison's media bargaining code sold Australia's soul to wretched Rupert and Mark Zuckerberg: Independent Australia 25-Feb
If Australia still had a soul, we wouldn’t have elected as our PM a racist, misogynist dollar store mannequin brought to life by a second-rate witches curse.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 12:11 AM on February 25, 2021
If Australia still had a soul, we wouldn’t have elected as our PM a racist, misogynist dollar store mannequin brought to life by a second-rate witches curse.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 12:11 AM on February 25, 2021
You describing Abbot or Morrison there, htwrt?
posted by freethefeet at 1:28 AM on February 25, 2021
posted by freethefeet at 1:28 AM on February 25, 2021
You describing Abbot or Morrison there, htwrt?
Yes.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 2:16 AM on February 25, 2021 [4 favorites]
Yes.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 2:16 AM on February 25, 2021 [4 favorites]
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posted by jjderooy at 2:22 PM on February 17, 2021 [2 favorites]