How is making Facebook pay for user-posted news links a good idea?
Should every instance this post shows up on pay the WSG for this link? Should there be piracy charges for the use of the archive service?
It’s not to do with user posted links. Google and Facebook both offer “news” areas of their website.
Yes, and all of those links on those news areas put users on the news sites.
We tried this in Australia and woke up to every news page in shutdown, including anything that even resembled news - weather pages, Council and government pages, community pages.
It was a shit show and Australia quickly backflipped in 24 hours.
No. No they didn’t. Facebook tried to extort the Australian government by removing all news content but phuked up and removed emergency warning and community notice boards. Then it was Facebook furiously backtracking and attempting to undo the shitstorm of PR damage they themselves had created.
Are you sure? I remember it as Australia demanding payment on media links, Facebook shutting everything down overnight, then an ‘agreement was reached’ and everything was quickly restored.
I work in digital marketing and had to report the issue to my Board.
You may have missed a few details then (ie; the mad scramble by Facebook to restore emergency and community services pages) and Australia passing legislation (albeit amended) to make social media Giants pay for content. Google also threatened to disable Google searching, but once again, didn’t withdraw any of its services. And really, why would they? They make mountains of money in western countries.
If anything, Canada had to pass this law to gain the same foothold as Australia had, and FB+Google kinda endorsed the idea that paying for news will NOT actually harm their bottom line enough to be not-neglible.
I don’t get it, news sites are an ad infested wasteland, don’t the news companies want links? Now if FB and Google are posting much of the article content I get that, but not simple links.
Yeah this just straight up sounds bad
Makes me wonder how much the media companies paid for that ruling.
The comma after Facebook is really pissing me off.
It’s not permissible in regular English grammar, but it’s used in headlines, which have somewhat different rules. I’d guess that you’re not a native speaker – I used to hang out on /r/Europe a lot, which had a lot of people who spoke English as a second language, and they had tons of people saying that they couldn’t understand newspaper headlines.
Yeah, this seems to be a thing a lot of news headlines do. So annoying
Maybe bc I’m not a native speaker but I don’t get it. Is a comma equivalent to an ‘and’? This is how I read it anyway.
And it is indeed super common in headlines. Maybe to keep word count lower?
That makes the most sense to me: a relic from printed news that editors continue using in order to feel like editors.
You only use a comma when listing 3 or more items. Milk, eggs, and cheese. Saying “milk, cheese” is lazy and just reeks of a writer who thinks they’re too good for the rules.
Maybe to keep word count lower?
This is it, even though it’s completely unnecessary.
“the rules”?
You do know there is more than one style guide right?
Replacing an “and” with a comma has been a headline style for like a century. I like that it reads like a professional headline.
Sorry we can’t do talk more normals for ya
That’s pretty standard formatting for a headline.
And then they are complaining that Facebook has delisted them and is no longer priortising news articles linking to them
The news sites want their cake and eat it. They want the free clicks from FB without paying for Ada, but then Facebook has to pay them for providing those links
What problem does this solve? Google and Facebook will just stop linking to news articles in Canada now.
Yes, this will kill off what’s left of local news and a lot of other sites if enacted. It’s incredibly stupid and the fact that the lobby group News Media Canada working for newspapers and digital publishers are trying to do this just shows that even 25 and 30 years after the internet became truly mainstream, these publishers still don’t understand how any of it works or how to survive.
Spot on. All the entities that supported this change are about to find out that what little traffic they once got is suddenly completely gone.
I could understand and even support an argument for imposing this kind of regulation on excerpts, but links? This is dumb, and self-destructive.
It doesn’t just fail to solve any problems; it creates them. This breaks one of the basic founding principles of the world wide web. If website owners can be held liable for hyperlinks that the target of the link doesn’t like for whatever reason, then the entire concept of having hypertext breaks down!
A major English-speaking country like Canada validating this brain-dead idiocy doesn’t just fuck over Canada; it’s dangerous for the rest of the world because it’s liable to spread.
User generated links are no longer possible in a world where this law is being enforced. websites like Lemmy, mastodon, LinkedIn and Facebook will not be available.
I don’t see how this could be considered a good idea…
websites like Lemmy, mastodon, LinkedIn and Facebook will not be available.
Well, websites like LinkedIn and Facebook won’t, anyway.
Lemmy and Mastodon, being non-commercial services run on a distributed protocol, will simply work around the censorship similarly to things like Bittorrent.
Oh good, this will help solve the problems facing Canada. Once our news publications make more money, everything should fall into place.
In other news, traffic to media sources to fall off a cliff after all links delisted by search engines & social media.
I kinda don’t see the problem here. I have all these news sites bookmarked, I scroll through them every day. They will still get my ad revenue if they are not on social media. Doesn’t everyone do this? Did everybody but me get lazy and stop using bookmarks?
Pretty sure you’re in a very small minority. I’ve practically never gone to news sites. I’ve just found articles through reddit.
