I only follow reputable media in Facebook. My feed consists of news articles from as much non-paywalled newspaper as I can get. I'm from Mexico so most of the media here is not behind a paywall.
I unfollowed all my facebook friends because I don't want to see their shit.
Yeah Facebook can still learn things about me and manipulate me. But I find it easier and faster to use Facebook as an accumulation of my favorite media than going to each website.
I also use Twitter for the same thing plus following programming personalities (famous and non-famous) and some friends.
I do, because news sites are no longer usable with their paywalls, GDPR popups, newsletter popups, and even more popups complaining that you disabled cookies when it's literally my default setting for all sites.
I'm curious how many people consciously have something they "rely" on for news. Personally, I find news generally finds its way to me, and I don't deliberately seek it out (usually). Instead I have these bad habits I've developed, like where I open up HN without even thinking when my brain is seeking stimulation or looking for a distraction from something hard.
Ya, I mean usually I find out about local news from talking to people, or sometimes from overhearing other people talk about something. I don't have a good source of local news right now other than that, but I agree with you, it is more directly relevant to my life. What's your source for local news?
I do for extremely local news because there's no where better than it these days. All the local newspapers were bought and shut down, so first hand accounts and discussion is all that's left.
I guess you mean the period in human civilization where there was widespread literacy but also a high cost of mass producing and distributing texts, assuming people with money to invest in reporters can't be stupid or misinformed.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/literate-and-illiterate-w... Depending on where you draw that line, that never really happened (I would call 'widespread' around 80%, which happened in 2000 but then there was already an internet, although it was a niche and playful version of what it is today).
Could be. I wonder if we could (or if anyone has) poll(ed) people on opinions and, with hindsight, establish an actual truth, or at least the best possible guess at it, and see how different things affect that
I feel like my generation (90s) is a lot better informed than almost any parent, let alone grandparent. But maybe that's too long a scale and you rather mean low tide on the span of the past handful of years, on which I don't really have an opinion / can't really say
I wouldn't be so optimistic. I'm sure facebook can't perfectly categorize every link into "news" or "not news", but I imagine this means Canadian FB will be full of nearly as much misinformation but less real information.
It wasn't clear from the article if the blocking is based on the account, or the geo-located endpoint (or both?). Will Canadians in the US see news in their feed? Will a traveler from Trinidad and Tobago see news while in Canada?
Law and enforcement is based on geography. For example, Canadians in China don't have access to sites that Chinese citizens don't, just because they're Canadian.
Still waiting for Facebook Ultron. 100% Facebook unavailability globally. Happiness among the people in the world would rise 300% to 800% overnight from stopping comparing our own lives to the lives of everyone else constantly:DD
No. But they’d be doing it less. Hence the 300% to 800% figure. If everyone permanently stopped comparing their own lives to the lives of others, happiness would increase INF%
Was just thinking that nothing of value was lost, but really, first they come for that, and by the time they take the rest away it's too late. The objective is to erase and fray social ties that form anything resembling a durable narrative or identity. This is a process, and it's accelerating.
We already went though this in Australia. It was a negotiating tactic, where they blocked news for a while before reaching a deal to pay news companies.
Isn't that what you would expect? Facebook has to pay news companies to allow their users to share news articles, Facebook doesn't want to pay a lot of money for that, so if the news companies say "too much" they just block their users from sharing news articles. If the news companies want Facebook to pay them, they have to specify a price Facebook is willing to pay, and so each party has agency in this decision.
Forcing either party to give up their agency seems wrong (like France saying Facebook has to pay and can't just leave the news content sharing market if the price is too high).
i don't know if this is real in France, but here in Brazil, there is a bill trying to do the same thing (hasn't passed yet). Social media would be obligated to pay news outlets, and on the Chapter VII, Article 32, § 6º it says:
> "The provider may not promote the removal of journalistic content
made available in order to exempt themselves from the obligation referred to in this article,
except for the cases provided for in this Law, or by court order
specific."
They're not "paying news companies", The Australian Government passed a law so they collect money from Facebook and give it directly to Rupert Murdoch.
The law, as written, will only ever apply to Facebook, and will only ever result in money going to Murdoch. It's really impressive.
Although in that article they are supposedly going to "make new and significant investments in regional services", today it seems they are back to cutting.
This law will require Meta to pay news companies "for posting their journalism on their platforms". What is the intent behind the law?
> "If the government can't stand up for Canadians against tech giants, who will?" said Rodriguez.
How is this "stand[ing] up for Canadians"? More like standing up for news corps. The framing of the response from Meta by Trudeau as "bullying tactics" is a bit irritating. I'd expect Meta's experiments with blocking news to be checking whether the new costs mean it's still worth for them to post news or now. I still don't really understand what the purpose of this law is.
It's just something happens occasionally. A (neoliberal) government decides that we need X (freely available news, or something, in this case) but the free market won't provide it because is isn't profitable (news companies losing ad revenue and going bust or switching to click-bait), so they'll create a new law (not unlike copyright) as some kind of work-around to cram everything into the desired "free-market" system.
it's standing up for Canadian news companies. this is one way
this is another more dubious way this is good for people: I think this may even improve facebook as a website: no more "news" which are just some sort "advertisement" or propaganda that looks like "news".
maybe another way to understand this move is to consider it as a way to force facebook to pay to publish a certain sort of what is essentially "government advertisement". this means it's a tax from Canada to Meta's Facebook
The headline is misleading without that attribution. Canadians aren't "losing" access, they are having it taken away from them because Meta would rather just turn off the feature for the country rather than follow the new law.
This bill is so backwards. If anything the news companies should be the ones paying Facebook and Google for doing free marketing for them.
Google and other social media platforms seem like the primary source of traffic for these legacy media companies. I mean a lot of news organizations upload links to their content themselves because that's how people find what to read. I reckon very few people go directly to the news websites to find articles and that's certainly not going to change because of this law in my opinion. The concept of a service provider having to pay to host links is absurd and goes against the nature of how the internet works. It's an attack on the very nature of the internet framed in a manner of "Protecting Canadian's" when in reality, the people who's pockets its meant to line ironically are the ones who are going to be hurt the most by it.
What a disaster.
I can't wait to watch how this backfires when the legacy media companies start complaining about how they are getting next to no traffic once this passes. That's not even to mention the smaller publishers who now aren't able to promote their own content on these platforms because of this bill.
The news companies don't want clicks, they want subscribers. They don't want traffic from Google News or Facebook, they want users to open their own app/newspaper directly.
I also imagine that there's a pretty low clickthrough rate for FB embeds of news articles, compared to "see headline, leave angry comment" engagement that only benefits Facebook without returning anything to the publishers.
If that's the case, whey don't they stop posting their content to social media? Is the idea with this bill to prevent a race to the bottom, where all the news organizations post their content for free in order to compete with each other?
While social media shows news items, the traditional outlets need to compete THERE. If there's no more news on social media, the hope is that people will close those apps and open their local news app.
> The news companies don't want clicks, they want subscribers.
My understanding is that news companies make their money primarily on ads. If it's subs, then why don't these news companies go entirely behind a paywall and demand google and facebook remove all links to their content. Instead, they are using government to essentially steal money from tech companies for those links.
So the bill doesn't say that Canadians will no longer have access to news content on Facebook & Instagram.
The bill says that tech giants need to pay to post news content on their own website.
However, the giants then give a giant middle finger to the news outlets.
Full disclosure: I hate <please accept our cookies> News outlets <please provide your email address for our newsletter> and the way they <you have reached 5/5 articles this month, click here to get a subscription>.
*WirelessGigabit navigates to archive.is/link_to_article
... try to do everything to NOT focus on the article they just wrote...
But, looking at the history, I'm sure it'll play out like this:
* News outlet has website, gets visitors.
* Facebook comes along, gets many visitors.
* News outlet posts content on Facebook for exposure.
* News outlet gets visitors via Facebook and makes money on advertisement revenue.
* Facebook starts to things to keep people in their ecosystem.
* News outlet gets no visitors as everybody considers Facebook their 'entrypoint' to the WWW.
* New bill gets lobbied that force tech giants need to pay to post news.
* Tech giants don't post news.
* News outlet still doesn't get visitors.
> So the bill doesn't say that Canadians will no longer have access to news content on Facebook & Instagram. The bill says that tech giants need to pay to post news content on their own website.
Who's the one posting the news in this case? You make it sound like Facebook is taking their content and posting it for them, but the way I'm interpreting it is, those outlets are posting to Facebook of their own volition and with this bill, Facebook would have to pay The Globe and Mail whenever The Globe and Mail posts content to Facebook. Am I reading it wrong?
This is a highly compromised and imperfect attempt to solve a very real problem.
It's not exactly new information that journalism is in a tough spot right now. As subscriber revenue has dried up, national and multinational companies have bought up virtually all newspapers in Canada. Where there were once a plethora of independent newspapers, now there is just one or two national papers producing localized versions under different names all pretending to be local.
Some major Canadian cities have newspapers with no physical offices. e.g. Calgary's "Calgary Herald" building was recently turned into a bus depot, and the few employees still working in the Post Media paper are now working from home. In it's heyday, the paper had a building downtown, and city councillors would stroll from city hall to the Herald's office when news was breaking. Now the work-from-home crew only produces localization for a national paper, and interacts with city hall on reddit more than they do in person. Not surprisingly, the quality of local coverage has declined massively.
Journalism is a key part of democracy, informing the public and holding government accountable. The federal Liberals, currently in power, were correct to recognize this, but their actions have left a little to be desired. They implemented government subsidies for media with the intention of shoring up news media so that they can continue to function. This, obviously, produces a conflict of interest that the opposition has pointed out but. However, the problems with this program go even further. A few large media corporations with influential lobbyists now control the board that decides which news companies get funding, and they've used that power to freeze out upstart competition. Some of the best journalism being done in Canada right now is by upstart companies that get zero funding from the government, and will get none in the forseeable future.
So, where is the money that Meta or Google are supposed to pay for news going to go? It's likely going to go the same place that current media subsidies go, and not to the independent news sources that really need it.
This really is an awful implementation, but at least it's something. We can only hope that successive governments will iterate and improve rather than simply cancelling both subsidies and this new bill. The need for quality, local journalism is very real, and current funding models are badly broken.
Journalism didn't exist in athens. Journalism didn't exist during the founding of america. It isn't a key part of democracy because democracy existed without journalism. Sure it's nice to have, but it isn't a necessary part of democracy.
> 1. Just because it wasn't a formal profession doesn't mean people weren't doing it at an amateur level.
Yes. That was the point of freedom of the press. Anyone with a printing press could print whatever they want. But today, journalists would call it spreading misinformation. Freedom of the press didn't mean state-corporate journalism originally.
> 2. By your reasoning, electricity isn't a key part of city infrastructure because we had cities before electricity. Sure, it's nice to have...
More like claiming that electricity is a key part of democracy. It definitely is nice thing to have, but not sure it's needed for democracy. Without journalism, without electricity, we can have democracy.
...In other news, quality of life has increased among Canadians while acts of hatred fueled by polarizing media-driven echo chambers have decreased. Facebook swears these two events are unrelated. Film at 11.
69 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadAll this means is that they will no longer see links to external news articles when they are reading facebook. So effectively they won't see any news.
I only follow reputable media in Facebook. My feed consists of news articles from as much non-paywalled newspaper as I can get. I'm from Mexico so most of the media here is not behind a paywall.
I unfollowed all my facebook friends because I don't want to see their shit.
Yeah Facebook can still learn things about me and manipulate me. But I find it easier and faster to use Facebook as an accumulation of my favorite media than going to each website.
I also use Twitter for the same thing plus following programming personalities (famous and non-famous) and some friends.
Pity that it's so difficult nowadays to be accurately informed about anything.
I guess you mean the period in human civilization where there was widespread literacy but also a high cost of mass producing and distributing texts, assuming people with money to invest in reporters can't be stupid or misinformed.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/literate-and-illiterate-w... Depending on where you draw that line, that never really happened (I would call 'widespread' around 80%, which happened in 2000 but then there was already an internet, although it was a niche and playful version of what it is today).
Rather, this kind of thing seems to ebb and flow a bit. And right now it smells like low tide.
I feel like my generation (90s) is a lot better informed than almost any parent, let alone grandparent. But maybe that's too long a scale and you rather mean low tide on the span of the past handful of years, on which I don't really have an opinion / can't really say
People are more informed than ever before.
The past looks better only because it is a distorted view from a lack of information at that time.
https://apnews.com/
https://www.reuters.com/
Hot take: People don't read them as much because people don't read "news" to be informed in an unbiased manner, they read news to be entertained.
Ironic
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-23/facebook-reverses-new...
Forcing either party to give up their agency seems wrong (like France saying Facebook has to pay and can't just leave the news content sharing market if the price is too high).
Is this a typo? Did the French government really say Facebook CAN'T leave the 'news content sharing market'?
> "The provider may not promote the removal of journalistic content made available in order to exempt themselves from the obligation referred to in this article, except for the cases provided for in this Law, or by court order specific."
If Facebook simply shuts down the ability to post all external links for the Brazilian site, then that could plausibly fall outside.
The law, as written, will only ever apply to Facebook, and will only ever result in money going to Murdoch. It's really impressive.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/may/26/abc-does-deals...
Although in that article they are supposedly going to "make new and significant investments in regional services", today it seems they are back to cutting.
> "If the government can't stand up for Canadians against tech giants, who will?" said Rodriguez.
How is this "stand[ing] up for Canadians"? More like standing up for news corps. The framing of the response from Meta by Trudeau as "bullying tactics" is a bit irritating. I'd expect Meta's experiments with blocking news to be checking whether the new costs mean it's still worth for them to post news or now. I still don't really understand what the purpose of this law is.
it's standing up for Canadian news companies. this is one way
this is another more dubious way this is good for people: I think this may even improve facebook as a website: no more "news" which are just some sort "advertisement" or propaganda that looks like "news".
maybe another way to understand this move is to consider it as a way to force facebook to pay to publish a certain sort of what is essentially "government advertisement". this means it's a tax from Canada to Meta's Facebook
The headline is misleading without that attribution. Canadians aren't "losing" access, they are having it taken away from them because Meta would rather just turn off the feature for the country rather than follow the new law.
Now do America.
Google and other social media platforms seem like the primary source of traffic for these legacy media companies. I mean a lot of news organizations upload links to their content themselves because that's how people find what to read. I reckon very few people go directly to the news websites to find articles and that's certainly not going to change because of this law in my opinion. The concept of a service provider having to pay to host links is absurd and goes against the nature of how the internet works. It's an attack on the very nature of the internet framed in a manner of "Protecting Canadian's" when in reality, the people who's pockets its meant to line ironically are the ones who are going to be hurt the most by it.
What a disaster.
I can't wait to watch how this backfires when the legacy media companies start complaining about how they are getting next to no traffic once this passes. That's not even to mention the smaller publishers who now aren't able to promote their own content on these platforms because of this bill.
My understanding is that news companies make their money primarily on ads. If it's subs, then why don't these news companies go entirely behind a paywall and demand google and facebook remove all links to their content. Instead, they are using government to essentially steal money from tech companies for those links.
Their actions doesn't align with your assertions.
Then users will get their news for "rando-AI generated news outlet" posting on FB instead.
However, the giants then give a giant middle finger to the news outlets.
Full disclosure: I hate <please accept our cookies> News outlets <please provide your email address for our newsletter> and the way they <you have reached 5/5 articles this month, click here to get a subscription>.
*WirelessGigabit navigates to archive.is/link_to_article
... try to do everything to NOT focus on the article they just wrote...
But, looking at the history, I'm sure it'll play out like this:
Who's the one posting the news in this case? You make it sound like Facebook is taking their content and posting it for them, but the way I'm interpreting it is, those outlets are posting to Facebook of their own volition and with this bill, Facebook would have to pay The Globe and Mail whenever The Globe and Mail posts content to Facebook. Am I reading it wrong?
It's not exactly new information that journalism is in a tough spot right now. As subscriber revenue has dried up, national and multinational companies have bought up virtually all newspapers in Canada. Where there were once a plethora of independent newspapers, now there is just one or two national papers producing localized versions under different names all pretending to be local.
Some major Canadian cities have newspapers with no physical offices. e.g. Calgary's "Calgary Herald" building was recently turned into a bus depot, and the few employees still working in the Post Media paper are now working from home. In it's heyday, the paper had a building downtown, and city councillors would stroll from city hall to the Herald's office when news was breaking. Now the work-from-home crew only produces localization for a national paper, and interacts with city hall on reddit more than they do in person. Not surprisingly, the quality of local coverage has declined massively.
Journalism is a key part of democracy, informing the public and holding government accountable. The federal Liberals, currently in power, were correct to recognize this, but their actions have left a little to be desired. They implemented government subsidies for media with the intention of shoring up news media so that they can continue to function. This, obviously, produces a conflict of interest that the opposition has pointed out but. However, the problems with this program go even further. A few large media corporations with influential lobbyists now control the board that decides which news companies get funding, and they've used that power to freeze out upstart competition. Some of the best journalism being done in Canada right now is by upstart companies that get zero funding from the government, and will get none in the forseeable future.
So, where is the money that Meta or Google are supposed to pay for news going to go? It's likely going to go the same place that current media subsidies go, and not to the independent news sources that really need it.
This really is an awful implementation, but at least it's something. We can only hope that successive governments will iterate and improve rather than simply cancelling both subsidies and this new bill. The need for quality, local journalism is very real, and current funding models are badly broken.
Journalism didn't exist in athens. Journalism didn't exist during the founding of america. It isn't a key part of democracy because democracy existed without journalism. Sure it's nice to have, but it isn't a necessary part of democracy.
2. By your reasoning, electricity isn't a key part of city infrastructure because we had cities before electricity. Sure, it's nice to have...
Yes. That was the point of freedom of the press. Anyone with a printing press could print whatever they want. But today, journalists would call it spreading misinformation. Freedom of the press didn't mean state-corporate journalism originally.
> 2. By your reasoning, electricity isn't a key part of city infrastructure because we had cities before electricity. Sure, it's nice to have...
More like claiming that electricity is a key part of democracy. It definitely is nice thing to have, but not sure it's needed for democracy. Without journalism, without electricity, we can have democracy.
No :p Infinity + n = Infinity.