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Facebook Reverses Australian Ban on News Sharing
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Facebook attacked a sovereign country and the country backed down. That should scare people.
The most alarming thing is that this was a preemptive attack by Facebook. The law had not even been passed yet.
The most alarming thing is that this was a preemptive attack by Facebook. The law had not even been passed yet.
What were you expecting Facebook to do? Continue to stay and do business in Australia in the face of a disadvantageous piece of legislation? Just as a country is free to target Facebook with any law it deems appropriate, so too should Facebook be free to simply leave the country and simply not have to comply with said law.
Australia is the fool for becoming so reliant on Facebook for such a critical piece of their infrastructure. Other companies should be taking notes. Not on how to take Facebook on, but on weaning themselves off Facebook so that their services remain up regardless of whatever happens.
Facebook didn't attack anyone. Facebook (and Google) were about to be attacked by this country... so they defended themselves by pulling the service in question. Facebook proved what most of us know. Facebook sharing their links is more valuable to the news publishers and than the news publishers are to them.
I hate to say it, because they're an awful company on almost every front, but Facebook was right in their initial rejection of Australia's new law. As the guy who invented the web said, this law is fundamentally antagonistic to the core nature of the internet. Australia wanted to charge one party, FB, simply because users post LINKS to news stories there. Linking to other content is the entire point of the web. Links take you to the publishers' own sites, generating revenue for them. This is an exceptionally slippery slope.
If they can charge Facebook because users post links to news sites, what they are saying is they can charge anyone for posting any type of links on any website. It is almost certain Rupert Murdoch wrote this law, and used his cronies in Australia's government to push it through.
If they can charge Facebook because users post links to news sites, what they are saying is they can charge anyone for posting any type of links on any website. It is almost certain Rupert Murdoch wrote this law, and used his cronies in Australia's government to push it through.
The only value Facebook has today is nuisance value, playing on laziness of people unwilling to fire up reliable and trusted news sites for news and pay for the news.
Facebook is not a news outlet. It cannot and often chooses to not even moderate the "news" on its platform. But it gains value from news outlets putting news on Facebook. What value is Facebook giving them in return? Viewership? Does not translate into money for news outlets.
The only way is to pay - like newspapers. Because of the internet, we have grown far too comfortable in the get-for-free mindset.
Facebook is not a news outlet. It cannot and often chooses to not even moderate the "news" on its platform. But it gains value from news outlets putting news on Facebook. What value is Facebook giving them in return? Viewership? Does not translate into money for news outlets.
The only way is to pay - like newspapers. Because of the internet, we have grown far too comfortable in the get-for-free mindset.
I liked your comment, but would like to clarify that it was also Nine/Fairfax,and to some extent ABC pushing this. No need for a Murdokkk conspiracy when “dumb, stupid politicians” will do.
it is just another example of the current crony capitalism that has taken over western society.
Does anyone know where exactly Facebook (and Google) actually publish significant volumes of news content owned by 3rd parties?
By significant, I mean republishing an entire article verbatim, or a sufficient proportion of the content to negate the need to read it on the publisher's site.
There are the pages created by the news organizations themselves of course - presumably created by their owners with content controlled by the publisher.
I understand FB has a "news feed" feature, but where does this content come from? Is it linked content from the same source FB book owned by the publisher? Or is it crawled and inserted into the feed without the publisher's consent?
How does "news content" get published without the control of the publisher? Obviously, anyone can post a link to the news article (on the pubisher's FB page or main website), or cut and paste text into their own post....but this seems unlikely to detract from people clicking into the original article if they want to read it.
I'm struggling to see how news content gets shared beyond the control of the publishers...which is what their complaint appear to be. If the publishers do actually control the publication of their content to FB and Google...then they can hardly complain about it appearing and being consumed on those platforms, can they?
Is it really as stupid as: "I'm going to publish to your platform, oh, and force you to pay me for using your service..."
By significant, I mean republishing an entire article verbatim, or a sufficient proportion of the content to negate the need to read it on the publisher's site.
There are the pages created by the news organizations themselves of course - presumably created by their owners with content controlled by the publisher.
I understand FB has a "news feed" feature, but where does this content come from? Is it linked content from the same source FB book owned by the publisher? Or is it crawled and inserted into the feed without the publisher's consent?
How does "news content" get published without the control of the publisher? Obviously, anyone can post a link to the news article (on the pubisher's FB page or main website), or cut and paste text into their own post....but this seems unlikely to detract from people clicking into the original article if they want to read it.
I'm struggling to see how news content gets shared beyond the control of the publishers...which is what their complaint appear to be. If the publishers do actually control the publication of their content to FB and Google...then they can hardly complain about it appearing and being consumed on those platforms, can they?
Is it really as stupid as: "I'm going to publish to your platform, oh, and force you to pay me for using your service..."
Yes, it is that stupid.
Here is a good article about what lead to all this:
Google & Facebook laws just a back rub for News and Nine - Michael West
Google threatens to withdraw search from Australia and Facebook to remove news posts. These are not idle threats. Kim Wingerei reports
www.michaelwest.com.au
or how New York Times gives you an excerpt or paragraph of a full article for free (even linked) until you paid for it.
still the hard work, research and proper English and editing to evoke emotion or insight into news, real news should be 1) credited with proper links and specific mention of the source and article writer (NOT just linking so a web snippet preview is shown) and 2) paid for the content - since FB doesn’t always hyperlink those copying the entire site to be read on their pages. That is theft or basic plagiarism.
FB now has Canadá to contend with and I’m sure more countries will be invoking the change as well.
so bravo on Australia for maintaining their editorial sovereignty.
Does the bold-text activity actually happen on FB? Do you have examples?
Who is doing the copying and how is it getting into FB pages or feeds?
I would agree with the following:
1) Copying significant sections of content published (and owned) by a 3rd party, such that the 3rd party is deprived of user traffic to the original, would be a copyright violation and could deter readers from reading the content on the original source website - the publishers would be justified in either receiving compensation or having unauthorized copies of their work removed from Facebook.
2) Links to content should be to the original publisher's website (or other source the publisher chooses), so that they are not deprived of traffic should the reader want to follow the link.
3) Auto-generated content previews from links should be minimal, so that they do not contain sufficient content that would deter the user from reading the original source. i.e. a one-line headline summary similar to Google search results. Either the content publishers or the platform should ensure that long-form previews (multiple paragraphs) are not generated.
The question I haven't seen answered clearly is:
"do news organizations think that HTML hyperlinks (with a short text description of the link) should be considered to be published content?"
My firm view is that a link is not content - you can't consume the underlying content from the link alone, or its textual title. If a user does not click the link, they are indicating that they do not wish to read the content. If they do click, then they can read the content on the publisher's website, with exactly the same rewards to the publisher (ad revenue etc.) as if the user had navigated directly to their site.
I have yet to see clear examples of where a publisher's content ends up on Facebook, without the publisher's consent.
If publishers really don't like their content ending up on Facebook because of this, or feel that even link previews "give too much away", then they should ask Facebook to prevent the posting of their content or links to it.
Which is exactly what Facebook did....only pre-emptively.
I’d like to offer a loosely similar example of what you’ve rebuttal in bold text of you quoting me above, since I don’t have FB and haven’t since 2011.
When anyone pastes a link in WhatsApp, a tiny preview occurs before you send the message (any lead page pic/pics, and the header of the site). Sometimes iMessage does this as well. FB actually includes the header and a few sentences or up to a paragraph; FB has done this since 2010 that I recall. Someone with FB can either validate or discredit my claim, please & thanks for either in advance.
to answer the next question yes FB and users and advertisers (latter to very minute extent), posts links to external news sources.
does news organizations think posting a hyperlink is equal to posting published content? I believe one major news site did and explicitly had all their pages NOT to be crawled by Google and FB. The name escapes me unfortunately. Generally I honestly don’t know how many others do/would.
yet in we many of us here went to school and were taught to “show your source” (which I’m failing at but it is on the net (I’m almost in bed replying now so lazy yes). I’m Zuck learned this too as silly as it sounds.
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I'm not entirely clear what points you are making here, but I think it is this:
1) Posting some links generates a preview of the content. This happens on a number of platforms and tools, e.g. Slack chat (used by a lot of businesses). The purpose of the preview is obviously to give some context to the link, and to provide enough information to make you click it if interested. Depending on the length of the preview, you could either claim that this is "providing content", or could argue that you are just providing information of what is behind the link, with the intention of enticing the reader to click it.
In the case of news articles that might be several screens long, the preview is only going to give a paragraph or two, so you're not really going to get much value out of it, unless you follow the link to the source page. The Australian news media appear to arguing that even these previews are showing their content, and Facebook should pay them. I would argue that the content fragment is guiding a Facebook user to the publishers site, where they can read it, so FB is providing a service to the news publisher, a free one at that.
2) As for "show your source", an HTTP hyperlink is a very succinct way of showing the source. Linking to http://macrumors.com makes it pretty clear that any preview content comes from Macrumors.com - unless the actual link URL is being suppressed - [just tested and FB does indeed remove the URL text and replace with the preview; however, rolling over the cursor will show the link URL ]
In summary, it doesn't look like Facebook generates verbose previews that would stop you clicking on the link and only reading the preview if you were actually interested in the content.
I don't see how this disadvantages the publisher. Maybe I'm looking at the argument wrong - possibly the publishers believe that these previews / content-fragments are benefitting Facebook by allowing people to post links....but that's kind of the point of FB isn't it? The links are of far more benefit to the publisher who get exposure to millions of FB users, a proportion of whom will click on the link and visit the publisher page.
However I look at it, it still seems like an inverted argument to ask a service provider to pay the consumer of the service. Like asking the bus driver to pay you to get on the bus - with your argument being "hey, if I didn't ride the bus, you wouldn't have any passengers and your route would be cancelled, and you'd be out of a job....you owe ME!"
You're correct in understanding my point of view/point I'm making, thank you.
1) above yes if only a very minimal preview 1 pick, site URL and header - I'd agree then yes FB shouldn't need/be required to pay the source for essentially hyperlinking - as you state in #2 above.
That said I believe FB is not simply hyperlinking ... their taking the entire content or first page (by HTML determination of what first page is) and supplying it ... causing the end user not needing to click on the hyperlink to goto the source. Therein lies the rub.
#2 above ... not all sites or the specific news article is easily determined to hyperlink.
In another context ... my son a few years back at age 17 had a conversation with me about Canadian Law being different than the USA's when talking about a specific case occuring and our views on it. When i asked him go to the 'The Law Society of Upper Canada' site ... he did a Google Search on his iPhone.
The comedy was he actually did NOT know the difference between a Google Search and going to the site directly. Probably horrible on my part not teaching him that myself when I gave him the smartphone (yet in hindsight he did know the difference on a PC/Mac). The reason I brought this up is many FB users essentially do the same thing .. the internet IS FB (or the new AOL if you will) and that's all they do to consume search or research the outside world on the internet ... it's all done through the FB portal.
That in of itself maybe the reason Australia is pushing for this. I could be wrong though.
Good points. If #1 is happening (large scale content "skimming"), then there is certainly a case for the publisher to have some compensation, because they are losing traffic through a form of plagiarism.
As for #2, you are quite right, and I've seen the exactly the same thing myself. When I say to my wife "go to this site, the URL is "www...", she types it into the Google search bar. When I tell her "you can just type the URL into the browser's address box", she tells me that it's easier to Google it. In many respects she's right - if you make a typo or can't quite remember the URL, Google will probably find it for you in the first few results. Search has become indispensable for using the Internet, especially if your memory isn't great
I also remember back in the 90s that many people's understanding of "The Internet" was that it lived on AOL, Yahoo or the "portal" that your ISP provided. They had no conception that it was a completely open (and somewhat disorganised) collection of millions of web-sites, e-mail services, chat rooms etc. They looked blank when you said..."that's not the Internet...it's just AOL's portal". Sort of like suddenly showing someone a photo of hundreds of galaxies from the Hubble Space Telescope and explaining that each one contains billions of stars and planets, when they thought the Earth was the only planet...
To me it seems bizarre that people would just go Facebook.com and look for everything there, but as you say, it's just the modern version of what I saw in the early days of the Internet.
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