It's not surprising that users will do that to me. We see plenty of people commenting on HN without reading the article, and that's just based on a text only headline.
And naturally people will just copy paste the content of the report anyway.
1. Regulators: We're going to require you do X on your product Y.
2. Facebook: That literally makes no sense. If you pass this law we will simply stop offering Y in your country.
3. Regulators: We're going to pass the law anyway.
4. Facebook: Does exactly as they warned.
5. Ultimately, the regulators and the citizens lose. Hopefully the citizens are vocal enough about it to make regulators understand just how braindead they are behaving.
Nothing of value for humanity was lost. Based on past form, not having a facebook dopamine targeting news feed is considered a huge gain for the entire human race (even for the facebook execs who have (a little bit) less money and less problems).
Those jobs are now at risk. (This is all according to the ABC coverage on this topic.)
Facebook News is toxic, the market chose something else partially because of their representatives’ attention showing what it is, Facebook exited the market. Deprecated, specifically, until their existing agreements expire.
Of course, if the news companies don't implement such a standard and they keep their social media meta tags to encourage sharing, surely that means that they don't mind their content being shared and shouldn't be trying to charge some fee for the privilege?
Of course, news companies would rather throw a fit and call big tech evil rather than trying to figure out how to provide news to users in the most efficient way possible.
So I think this is all some ploy by old media to try to claw back some of that revenue, which they legitimately lost to better performing technology.
Fortunately I've since deleted my account but the whole posturing around ownership of people's posts and shares is just wild to me.
On a semi-related note I once had a message in FB Messenger that was blocked - it refused to send and gave me an error that the link wasn't allowed. Can't remember what it was as it was a long time ago. But the Facebook censorship situarion has been dire for some time...
1: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/may/29/deliberat...
It's hard to feel bad for Facebook because they're worth hundreds of billions of dollars and monetise news headlines in user feeds. It's really not huge money for Meta, it's really peanuts for them ($20M from recollection?). I work at a small institution that pays 1/20th of that in Oracle licensing.
The money goes to various news outlets (not just News Corp - Fairfax/Nine, ABC and many smaller outlets) and helps diversify their funding.
I wouldn't call this censorship since the news companies are just trying to use the law to squeeze revenue for their dying business model. (Hardly anyone subscribes to newspapers anymore)
Australian news on Facebook every day is from a small list of headlines: "Shoppers flock to amazing new item at Kmart", "Australians can't believe new amazing item at Woolworths".
I don't believe I've ever seen a "news article" on Facebook that wasn't a thinly veiled advertisement, which these shops are quite capable of buying direct from Facebook without pretending it's "Journalism".
I don't believe I've ever seen a "news article" anywhere that wasn't a thinly veiled advertisement.
