Facebook blocks news from Australia, dozens of public information pages wiped

[webfact]

Facebook blocks news from Australia, dozens of public information pages wiped

 

FILE PHOTO: The Facebook logo is displayed on a mobile phone in this picture illustration taken December 2, 2019. REUTERS/Johanna Geron/Illustration

 

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australians woke to empty news feeds in their Facebook Inc accounts on Thursday after the social media giant blocked all local media content in a surprise and dramatic escalation of a dispute with the government over paying for content.

 

The move was swiftly criticised by several local media outlets and lawmakers, many of whom pointed out that official health department pages and government meteorology pages had also been scrubbed - during the coronavirus pandemic and at the height of Australia's summer bushfire season.

 

"So Facebook can instantly block @abcperth, @6PR, @BOM_au, @BOM_WA, AND @dfes_wa in the middle of the #bushfire season, but they can't take down murderous gun crime videos? Incredible. Unbelievable. Unacceptable. The arrogance," wrote Madeleine King, a federal opposition member of parliament from Western Australia, in a tweet.

 

Lisa Davies, editor of daily The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, owned by Nine Entertainment Co Ltd, tweeted: "Well, that's a tantrum. Facebook has exponentially increased the opportunity for misinformation, dangerous radicalism and conspiracy theories to abound on its platform."

 

The Facebook pages of Nine, News Corp, and the government-funded Australian Broadcasting Corp, which acts as a central information source during natural disasters, were blank.

 

Facebook will block news content from being read and shared in its news feed in Australia, drawing a line in the sand against a proposed Australian law that would require it and Google to pay the country’s news publishers for content. Gavino Garay produced this report.

 

The Facebook pages of the Queensland and South Australia state health departments, where a quarter of the country's 25 million population are directed for reliable information about COVID-19, were similarly blank.

 

The Bureau of Meteorology, an official source for advice about bushfire danger, flooding and other natural disasters, was also scrubbed.

 

Facebook's drastic move comes ahead of the likely imposition of an Australia law that would require Big Tech firms, including Google, to reach commercial deals with Australian news outlets to use their content, or be subjected to forced arbitration.

 

Facebook said in its statement that the law "fundamentally misunderstands" the relationship between itself and publishers.

 

Google, owned by Alphabet Inc, had previously threatened to pull out of Australia because of the looming law, but has in recent days signed deals with several media outlets.

 

(Reporting by Byron Kaye; editing by Jane Wardell)

 

-- © Copyright Reuters 2021-02-18

 

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[donnacha]

I am no fan of Facebook but it is not arrogance to chose to stop using something that you don't consider to be worth paying for.

Local media owners, aghast at their diminishing influence and failing business models in an online world where they no longer have a de facto monopoly on the dissemination of information, pressure the government to pressure Facebook into paying for linking to their content in users' news feeds.

Facebook says "Well, that makes no financial sense for us, so, in a world awash with interesting free content, we'll simply drop the content you think we should be paying to link to".

As was entirely predictable, the traffic to the local media owners' sites disappears, their advertising revenue disappears, and now they feel that aggrieved that Facebook decided not to be mugged.

This is the sort of cr@p that the French try to pull, I'm surprised that the Australian government did not realise that this would happen.

 

[placeholder]

17 minutes ago, donnacha said:

I am no fan of Facebook but it is not arrogance to chose to stop using something that you don't consider to be worth paying for.

Local media owners, aghast at their diminishing influence and failing business models in an online world where they no longer have a de facto monopoly on the dissemination of information, pressure the government to pressure Facebook into paying for linking to their content in users' news feeds.

Facebook says "Well, that makes no financial sense for us, so, in a world awash with interesting free content, we'll simply drop the content you think we should be paying to link to".

As was entirely predictable, the traffic to the local media owners' sites disappears, their advertising revenue disappears, and now they feel that aggrieved that Facebook decided not to be mugged.

This is the sort of cr@p that the French try to pull, I'm surprised that the Australian government did not realise that this would happen.

 

Definitely doomed to failure...oh wait a minute...

News Corp, Google announce three-year deal to distribute journalism in exchange for payments

News Corp announced Wednesday that it has agreed to a multi-year partnership with Google, a move the company said would yield "substantial benefits for journalism and society."

The agreement, which News Corp called “historic,” will provide “trusted journalism” from News Corp's news sites from around the world “in return for significant payments by Google.”

News Corp publications joining Google News Showcase from the United States will be The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch and the New York Post.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/google-news-corp-distribution-partnership

[donnacha]

13 minutes ago, placeholder said:

News Corp, Google announce three-year deal to distribute journalism in exchange for payments

A private agreement between one massive corporation and another, the details of which have not been revealed and are unlikely to involve any actual cash renumeration, probably mostly cross-promotional stuff.

What has that got to do with an attempt to create a law that forces websites to pay to link to other websites, breaking one of the primary conventions upon which the open Web was built?
 

[Odysseus123]

"They were only playing leapfrog..

They were only playing leapfrog.."

 

It's a right cozy world up there in the stratosphere.

[placeholder]

9 minutes ago, donnacha said:

A private agreement between once massive corporation and another, the details of which have not been revealed and are unlikely to have involved any actual cash renumeration.

What has that got to do with an attempt to create a law that forces websites to pay to link to other websites, breaking one of the primary conventions upon which the open Web was built?
 

Weren't you just arguing that making a deal with news content owners makes no financial sense " in an online world where they no longer have a de facto monopoly on the dissemination of information"?

[PatOngo]

OMG!!! Can people still post photo's of what they had for breakfast???

[Dagfinnur Traustason]

11 minutes ago, placeholder said:

Weren't you just arguing that making a deal with news content owners makes no financial sense " in an online world where they no longer have a de facto monopoly on the dissemination of information"?

What did you just say????

[welovesundaysatspace]

1 hour ago, donnacha said:

What has that got to do with an attempt to create a law that forces websites to pay to link to other websites,

Apparently it worked. 

 

1 hour ago, donnacha said:

breaking one of the primary conventions upon which the open Web was built?
 

It‘s Australia‘s right to make laws as they wish. As it is Facebook‘s right to change their product as they wish. And I don’t think that stealing other people‘s contents and make money with it is “one of the primary conventions upon which the open Web was built”. 

[harada]

I’ve survived without it for 69years, it doesn’t hurt a bit.

[donnacha]

32 minutes ago, welovesundaysatspace said:

Apparently it worked. 

How did it work?

Facebook simply stopped linking to those websites. The media organisations needed the traffic Facebook provided, but thought they could squeeze some additional money out of the situation. They ended up with neither.
 

 

32 minutes ago, welovesundaysatspace said:

I don’t think that stealing other people‘s contents and make money with it is “one of the primary conventions upon which the open Web was built”.

Do you understand what a link is?

 

[donnacha]

2 hours ago, placeholder said:

Weren't you just arguing that making a deal with news content owners makes no financial sense " in an online world where they no longer have a de facto monopoly on the dissemination of information"?

I'm sorry, I don't understand what you are trying to say here. You might have left out some important words.

I will certainly answer your question if I can understand it.

[mfd101]

Anyone who gets their 'serious news' from Facebook is a fool.

 

Farewell and good riddance.

[stevenl]

Can this be circumvented by using a VPN?

[GreasyFingers]

It just shows once again how we have lightweights running the country. Can you imagine the spray Zuckerberg would have got if Keating were running the country, it would have heard all the way to America. Even Little Johnny would have done the same but with more polite words. Not a bad word from any of the current lightweights.

[PatOngo]

I'm sure Zuckerberg does'nt give a rat's toss!

[placeholder]

1 hour ago, donnacha said:

I'm sorry, I don't understand what you are trying to say here. You might have left out some important words.

I will certainly answer your question if I can understand it.

You don't understand it? Really? It's simple. You claimed it doesn't make financial sense to offer media services money for information which is available from alternative source. Yet, as I cited before,  Google just concluded a deal with Murdoch to pay for those service. You don't see that as contradicting your claim?

Of course, your belief in the superfluousness of long established media may be due to the predilection of the right for information sourced from dubious videos posted on youtube and the like.

[GreasyFingers]

5 hours ago, harada said:

I’ve survived without it for 69years, it doesn’t hurt a bit.

Yes, I have enough ... in my life now without going that far down the sewer.

[stevenl]

5 minutes ago, placeholder said:

You don't understand it? Really? It's simple. You claimed it doesn't make financial sense to offer media services money for information which is available from alternative source. Yet, as I cited before,  Google just concluded a deal with Murdoch to pay for those service. You don't see that as contradicting your claim?

Of course, your belief in the superfluousness of long established media may be due to the predilection of the right for information sourced from dubious videos posted on youtube and the like.

"Of course, your belief in the superfluousness of long established media may be due to the predilection of the right for information sourced from dubious videos posted on youtube and the like."

 

I don't think that comment is justified.

 

The present situation is caused by the long established media being too slow in using the online possibilities to disseminate their news. Now they are either more difficult to find or have to pay others to be found. I really don't see why Facebook, Google and others should be paying the long established media to show their results. And yes, those media are really important, but that does IMO not justify rewarding them for their own marketing incompetence over the years.

[welovesundaysatspace]

1 hour ago, donnacha said:

How did it work?

See Google/Newscorp. 
 

1 hour ago, donnacha said:

Facebook simply stopped linking to those websites. The media organisations needed the traffic Facebook provided, but thought they could squeeze some additional money out of the situation. They ended up with neither.

If that’s the case, they can revisit their plans and go back to the old/current model. 

 

1 hour ago, donnacha said:

Do you understand what a link is?

Yes, but I don’t understand how that is relevant here. According to the article, the government’s plan isn’t to make Facebook pay for links but “to reach commercial deals with Australian news outlets to use their content”. (Highlight by me) 

[placeholder]

Just now, stevenl said:

"Of course, your belief in the superfluousness of long established media may be due to the predilection of the right for information sourced from dubious videos posted on youtube and the like."

 

I don't think that comment is justified.

 

The present situation is caused by the long established media being too slow in using the online possibilities to disseminate their news. Now they are either more difficult to find or have to pay others to be found. I really don't see why Facebook, Google and others should be paying the long established media to show their results. And yes, those media are really important, but that does IMO not justify rewarding them for their own marketing incompetence over the years.

Really? So the author of a book or the creator of a movie has no right to be rewarded for their labor? Media companies pay people to write their stuff or produce their videos.. It doesn't just get created without labor?. They're supposed to be doing this for free? Because they may have been incompetent in promoting what they offer, that makes it okay to steal it? The consequences of a bad marketing should  a loss of revenue due to loss of viewers, but not being robbed.

[giddyup]

2 hours ago, harada said:

I’ve survived without it for 69years, it doesn’t hurt a bit.

I survived without a mobile phone for 50 years, but I find one comes in pretty handy now.

[stevenl]

2 minutes ago, placeholder said:

Really? So the author of a book or the creator of a movie has no right to be rewarded for their labor? Media companies pay people to write their stuff or produce their videos.. It doesn't just get created without labor?. They're supposed to be doing this for free? Because they may have been incompetent in promoting what they offer, that makes it okay to steal it? The consequences of a bad marketing should  a loss of revenue due to loss of viewers, but not being robbed.

This is not about stealing, but referring to the organisation.

[John Drake]

Lucky Australia! This move ought to open a lot of eyes in other countries as well. Might be a backlash coming that Zuckerberg thought he was immune to. 

[Dagfinnur Traustason]

25 minutes ago, placeholder said:

You don't understand it? Really? It's simple. You claimed it doesn't make financial sense to offer media services money for information which is available from alternative source. Yet, as I cited before,  Google just concluded a deal with Murdoch to pay for those service. You don't see that as contradicting your claim?

Of course, your belief in the superfluousness of long established media may be due to the predilection of the right for information sourced from dubious videos posted on youtube and the like.

Congratulations! By trying to explain, you just made it more confusing. What do you mean? Who talked about you tube as a credible source of information? Or do you want all that post Chuck Norris jokes online to pay a fee too?

[placeholder]

Just now, Dagfinnur Traustason said:

Congratulations! By trying to explain, you just made it more confusing. What do you mean?

And my sympathies to you for finding something doubly confusing that was both simple and obvious from the start and  re-explained in a simple way.

[donnacha]

28 minutes ago, placeholder said:

You don't understand it? Really? It's simple. You claimed it doesn't make financial sense to offer media services money for information which is available from alternative source. Yet, as I cited before,  Google just concluded a deal with Murdoch to pay for those service. You don't see that as contradicting your claim?

Of course, your belief in the superfluousness of long established media may be due to the predilection of the right for information sourced from dubious videos posted on youtube and the like.

I asked you to clarify your question, because your sentence structure can sometimes be hard to decipher, but now you are suddenly attacking me as being on the right?!!

Why engage in discussion if you must make things so personal. What, ultimately, is the point of that?

All I pointed out was that you were making factual errors.

 

30 minutes ago, placeholder said:

Google just concluded a deal with Murdoch to pay for those service

You have no way to know what the details of that private deal were, and the chance that Facebook would set a precedent of paying to link to someone else's websites are vanishingly small. It was almost certainly a cross-promotional deal.

The logical jumps you make undermine the credibility of any case you are trying to make.

The websites of "long-established media" are on the same playing field as every other website, but with the massive advantage of having a known brand, existing staffs of content producers, and the ability to cross-promote their website, Facebook, and Twitter presence on their TV channel, or radio station, or newspaper.

When I post a link to Facebook or Twitter, I am recommending it to my friends and followers. Presumably, I read the article I am linking to and found it interesting enough to share. This is good for the website that I link too and, hopefully, it is good for my friends. It is only good for Facebook or Twitter insofar as their website becomes the place where people go to find links to good articles and other content.

When Tim Berners-Lee was designed the version of the Web we use today, he made the ability for pages to link to one another a central part of it. Anyone could link to anyone else's webpage without needing to ask permission. As long as a page was publicly accessible, it was considered a good thing to link to it.

Part of the link contains words that, ideally, describe what is being linked to. So, for instance, if linking to an article you might use the title of the article. Again, this was considered completely acceptable, using the title and even explaining what the article was about has never been considered to be content theft.

When Google emerged, they used the number of other websites linking to a particular website or webpage as a rough measure of its value. The more links you had, the higher they ranked you in the search results. 

Among the biggest beneficiaries of the whole system of linking were the news sites producing the sort of stories that people wanted to share. When the social networks emerged, the amount of links being shared boomed and all the newspaper made money from that. Traffic was king.

What the French and Australian media companies are now trying to do is to persuade their governments to put a special tax on the social networks and aggregation sites that link to them. The supposed justification is that, if they did not have the old media sites to link to, the social networks would have fewer users. They want to get this extra money in addition to the money they are already making from the traffic these sites send them. 

Facebook, having a pretty good idea of what actually engages their users, have decided to say "Actually, no, we would rather just allow our users to link to sites that are happy to have us send them traffic".

Facebook is a very rich company but this comes from having billions of users spend a lot of time on their site every day. The vast majority of that engagement has nothing to do with the old media sites. If Facebook had to pay a fee every time a user linked to those sites, their financial model would not longer make sense.

If Facebook started paying in France and Australia, the old media in every country would push their governments to let them cash in too. Smaller websites, with less money than Facebook, would go bankrupt. Entirely online news sites, such as Axios, would also be unable to compete with the old media companies, disincentivizing innovation in the news industry.

Any website or blog linking to another would first have to check that if it was free or required a fee. The extra work and expense involved would simply encourage people to link to fewer things in general.
 
 

[mfd101]

1 hour ago, GreasyFingers said:

It just shows once again how we have lightweights running the country. Can you imagine the spray Zuckerberg would have got if Keating were running the country, it would have heard all the way to America. Even Little Johnny would have done the same but with more polite words. Not a bad word from any of the current lightweights.

You obviously haven't read today's news in Australia.

[placeholder]

49 minutes ago, donnacha said:

I asked you to clarify your question, because your sentence structure can sometimes be hard to decipher, but now you are suddenly attacking me as being on the right?!!

Why engage in discussion if you must make things so personal. What, ultimately, is the point of that?

All I pointed out was that you were making factual errors.

 

You have no way to know what the details of that private deal were, and the chance that Facebook would set a precedent of paying to link to someone else's websites are vanishingly small. It was almost certainly a cross-promotional deal.

The logical jumps you make undermine the credibility of any case you are trying to make.

The websites of "long-established media" are on the same playing field as every other website, but with the massive advantage of having a known brand, existing staffs of content producers, and the ability to cross-promote their website, Facebook, and Twitter presence on their TV channel, or radio station, or newspaper.

When I post a link to Facebook or Twitter, I am recommending it to my friends and followers. Presumably, I read the article I am linking to and found it interesting enough to share. This is good for the website that I link too and, hopefully, it is good for my friends. It is only good for Facebook or Twitter insofar as their website becomes the place where people go to find links to good articles and other content.

When Tim Berners-Lee was designed the version of the Web we use today, he made the ability for pages to link to one another a central part of it. Anyone could link to anyone else's webpage without needing to ask permission. As long as a page was publicly accessible, it was considered a good thing to link to it.

Part of the link contains words that, ideally, describe what is being linked to. So, for instance, if linking to an article you might use the title of the article. Again, this was considered completely acceptable, using the title and even explaining what the article was about has never been considered to be content theft.

When Google emerged, they used the number of other websites linking to a particular website or webpage as a rough measure of its value. The more links you had, the higher they ranked you in the search results. 

Among the biggest beneficiaries of the whole system of linking were the news sites producing the sort of stories that people wanted to share. When the social networks emerged, the amount of links being shared boomed and all the newspaper made money from that. Traffic was king.

What the French and Australian media companies are now trying to do is to persuade their governments to put a special tax on the social networks and aggregation sites that link to them. The supposed justification is that, if they did not have the old media sites to link to, the social networks would have fewer users. They want to get this extra money in addition to the money they are already making from the traffic these sites send them. 

Facebook, having a pretty good idea of what actually engages their users, have decided to say "Actually, no, we would rather just allow our users to link to sites that are happy to have us send them traffic".

Facebook is a very rich company but this comes from having billions of users spend a lot of time on their site every day. The vast majority of that engagement has nothing to do with the old media sites. If Facebook had to pay a fee every time a user linked to those sites, their financial model would not longer make sense.

If Facebook started paying in France and Australia, the old media in every country would push their governments to let them cash in too. Smaller websites, with less money than Facebook, would go bankrupt. Entirely online news sites, such as Axios, would also be unable to compete with the old media companies, disincentivizing innovation in the news industry.

Any website or blog linking to another would first have to check that if it was free or required a fee. The extra work and expense involved would simply encourage people to link to fewer things in general.
 
 

I'm not attacking you as being on the right, just stating what can obviously be construed from your contributions to this forum.

Did you even bother to read what I excerpted from the article. Here's a bit of it again:

"The agreement, which News Corp called “historic,” will provide “trusted journalism” from News Corp's news sites from around the world “in return for significant payments by Google.”

What does this signify to you?

[ukrules]

When I log on to facebook which is pretty rare the last thing I expect to see is news.

 

Who cares if 'the news' is no longer linked from facebook?

 

I quite like facebook self deleting in this way, they've been doing it to everyone else for long enough.