To illustrate the absurdity, imagine if a newspaper had a community section containing blurbs about upcoming local events. Some well-meaning politician comes in and says that the newspaper should pay $10 to every event they feature, because they're benefitting from selling ads on the next page.
The obvious outcome would be for the newspaper to decide that it's just not worth the trouble and remove the community events page. Now everyone is crying and blaming the rich evil newspaper because the events are struggling with less attendance than before.
It turns out that having free links to their stories all over social media really was beneficial to the media, and they were the ones who would be harmed the most by punishing social media companies for allowing it.
I've even seen news organizations' official accounts posting obfuscated links to their stories to get around the ban. Why would they do that, if the core premise that uncompensated links are "stealing" were even remotely close to being true?
With respect to news organizations and social media, they (or at least a subset of them) felt that social media companies were receiving a disproportionate benefit from their product. What resulted was a battle of the titans, where pretty much everyone loses out. It's important to remember that bit about titans. Both the news organizations and social media companies are taking their stance to benefit themselves, not consumers.
Don't you think they would have stopped if they felt they were being harmed by it?
It looks like the agreements have expired in the last few weeks and things are working their way through a process.
I run a website. I can pay Google, MS, Meta, etc money to make my site show up higher in search results. Or gain an audience through SEO and organic growth, including on social media. I'm happy when someone shares a link to it, because that means more eyeballs on what I'm putting out. Then I can choose if and how to monetize it. By suggesting that this harms the publisher makes no sense. Why would anyone ever pay for Google sponsored search results if it's harmful to their business?
The lobbyists and politicians have framed it as "using" or "stealing" the content, which is an outright lie: reproducing content without permission is already covered by copyright law. Many of these news sites even have abstracts and social cards specifically for preview when shared.
The other analogy I like is "journalists drink coffee when writing. Starbucks has lots of money. Let's force Starbucks to give journalists free coffee, and a dollar out of their till whenever a journalist walks in."
It's backwards! Offensively so!
If these publishers didn't want their content on Facebook or Google, they can use paywalls, robots.txt, or referral blocks to stop it showing up. But none did - they just wanted to bite the hand that feeds for a few bucks, and we see how well that worked out for them.
Well fine, then adjust the corporate tax rate however you like -- but don't be surprised when the corporations you just described as self-interested and greedy react in the obvious way to a brand new, explicitly created economic disincentive.
Cough, reddit.
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/08/01/1129247/reddit-ceo-...
Same mistake? Note that "AI training" has now made an appearance. Ignore that Reddit has no ownership of the user-written content in the first place.
Analogies are nice, but one should always be cautious that they don't oversimplify the issue.
I would characterize the current gov't as staunchly neolib.
The Trudeau gov't has listened with great attention to all corpo lobbyists from oil & gas to big media groups, so I don't think "hostile to economic principles" particularly applies eotber.
In short, just another billionaire profiting off of other people’s work without ever paying for it.
Those new AI companies, which are also conducting large-scale theft, are no different and should either seize operation or also start paying their fair share.
Yet I keep seeing sob stories after sob stories from the exact same media organizations that were vehemently pushing for this. Something about leopards and faces getting eaten comes to mind
(Also, media corporations here are -in typical Canadian fashion- a handful of giants controlling basically most outlets. A part from the state sponsored/funded CBC. So there's basically no little guys in this fight, and Canadian corporations always try to pull this type of stuff to protect their little corporatist fiefdoms through the federal government)
There is no evidence of it being true, and some circumstantial evidence of it not being true: namely, that FB was willing to block news from their site, and there was no obvious impact to e.g. their financials.
Why are the news orgs unhappy after Facebook stopped doing it?
In this case, those big newspapers were betting that they drive a large portion of Facebook engagement in Canada, so they wanted a cut. Facebook didn't think so. It's trying to find the answer to the question "How many people use Facebook because that's where they get their news?" vs "How many people get the news because they happen to be on Facebook?"
I don't think this is a bad thing tbh. I've also started reducing my news consumption years ago. First there was the pandemic where there was only bad news not worth watching. And now we have an extreme-right government in Holland so I'm simply disillusioned and I don't care what they do anymore.
At the same time most news sites (like the mainstream nu.nl) require either payment or logging in with an account which I refuse so I'm just skimming the news headlines on the national state broadcaster (NOS) once a day or so.
I still follow the local city news a bit because those things actually matter in my life. But not on social media, I've blocked all news outlets there (on the few i still check because I've greatly disconnected from socials since even before the pandemic). I simply don't care anymore.
And guess what? I'm a lot happier for it. A lot less things to get angry about. I just spend my time talking to friends and people I do actually care about.
I think it's because both socials and the regular news love promoting controversial topics because they get more engagement. People get all wound up and that makes them stay on the platform to argue and thus see more ads. I'm kinda done with that.
And most news is really not that important anyway. My life is not noticeably changed by not knowing all but the most important news facts. I'm fine without it, most of it was just FOMO.
Ps I really appreciate HN for not doing this. I still learn a lot of nice and interesting things here.
I am quite sure this does not mean that Canadians consume less digital content. Just that is is not news (from Canadian news outlets).
For a sovereign country this is catastrophic.
It probably means that Canadians consume even more reddit style media, YouTube shorts or outright propaganda from foreign nations.
scaremongering people’s amygdalas 24 hours a day for more than six consecutive months must have left a mental scar on people’s minds and the newborn children
It’s not a hard ban. I’ll click a link someone sends me, not that people do that. I’ll walk past my partner’s iPad and look over her shoulder. Occasionally I’ll pick up a print edition of the Economist.
But, by and large, I don’t ’read the news’. I can only recommend it. ‘The news’ as published on the majority of sites is mostly crap you don’t care about. Even the reputable sites. And then when it’s some big event that you are supposed to care about, that just makes you sad/angry/whatever.
People say that I’m absolving myself of my responsibility to society. Nah. I vote (I have to, I’m Australian). My vote hasn’t changed in 20 years, nothing I read is going to do that now. And I wasn’t politically active before, so that hasn’t changed.
Just stop reading the news.
Australians need to care more about improving society - not just the media landscape but in so many facets. Its not going to fail-forwards for much longer, and the cracks are showing
If that's indeed the case, it should be an alarm call for all citizens to start caring and getting politically involved even more than before. It's not like the world owes us not to go up in flames, and if it does, we shouldn't just sit down shaking our head in disappointment.
It's not. The Netherlands remains a parliamentary representative democracy.
And I'm already politically active, I always was. But I the these people thrive on dissent just like social media does. Anger is a very strong emotion.
Ps I have since edited the term fascist to extreme-right as it's a more appropriate description. Though both apply IMO. For example the party in question doesn't even permit members. It's all about the one guy who decides everything.
> I don't think this is a bad thing tbh.
Less real news, but not necessarily less political content. And now you can't reply to misinformation with a link to a real news story.
A lot of newsrooms have already done mass layoffs over the years and there isn’t much more to cut other than shutting down.
https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-wire-news-releases-pm...
https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/corus-entertainment-says-ong...
Can sort by date here and see a pile of newspaper closures in 2023: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_newspapers_o...
Metromedia filed for bankruptcy and shut down all papers in August 2023: https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/an-atomic-bomb-for-local-news-me...
Or how is the proportion of people who don't know that news content is blocked interesting?
Basically, this appears to be a study of data that was easy to get, not of data that could produce any kind of actionable insights for anyone.
In addition to the kind of data you asked for, data on whether use of FB/Instagram went down when the block was put in place would be fascinating.
> Canadians continue to learn about politics and current events through Facebook and Instagram, but through a more biased and less factual lens than before and many Canadians do not even realize the shift has occurred.
If you read 10x less news from Joe and Billy on Facebook but start reading from professional sources of news, they still might be bad but it will probably be a better article to read.
Is this because these sites were already failing and failed regardless of the ban? Or did they see enough of a drop in engagement to matter? Or did this ban just help entrench the big players at the expense of the smaller ones and forced consolidation?
In other words, it’s hard to draw conclusions of a larger story just from raw data points.
The "outcome" of the bill and the deal with Google was essentially a slush fund for entrenched media companies in Canada. Instead of fostering competition, the government just funnels more money into old guard monopolies, as is tradition in Canada where monopolistic behaviour usually gets explicit government endorsement.
Commentators and lawyers like Micheal Geist have argued for years at this point that the ban and deal are blatantly counterproductive to ensuring a functioning and competitive news and media ecosystem.
But to play devil’s advocate. How do you know that without government intervention even the big players would have failed even worse and the smaller players died even more quickly?
I respect Michael Geist and he’s more knowledgeable in this space than I am, so if this is his position I’m more likely to believe it, but it’s really hard to say anything so definitively without a control to evaluate against.
In other words most people don't care about the news and weren't paying attention anyway. Doesn't seem like much has been lost.
Note: I'm not saying whether that result is good or bad I'm only saying that not being aware of the ban doesn't mean nothing has been lost.
If 1% of the population was responsible for seeking out interesting news and sharing them, and 4% was reading what was being directly provided to them, and then the ability to see what that 4% is reading disappeared, it would look like an 80+% reduction in people reading the news, even though all that happened was that the sharing is now occurring in an illegible fashion.
Until Facebook bans screenshots as well. Or maybe they can switch tactics to prosecute the users posting screenshots for copyright infringement. They're at least equally to blame, no?
Is it immoral not to buy the $15 hotdog at a sports stadium even if you decide you're not that hungry?
Unfortunately, is is not very interesting because the study seems to rely almost completely on Facebook data. The effects on that platform were pretty predictible.
There are obvious questions left unanswered:
- What was the effect on direct traffic ?
- What was the effect on paid subscriptions ?
- Are people effectively less informed ?
There's a couple important caveats there that you're eliding.
> made available by dominant digital news intermediaries and generates economic gain
https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-charte/c18_...
> Despite the ban, news organization content is still available on Meta platforms through work-around strategies like screengrabs, with 36% of Canadian users reporting encountering news or links to news on Facebook or Instagram. This arguably should make Meta subject to the requirements of the Online News Act.
I wonder if this will be a new argument from the news media lobbyists. It will loom as a new type of threat similar to removal of safe harbour protections : if web sites have to take full liability for what their users post and no amount of active measures to prevent infringing content are sufficient to relieve that, we arrive back at the end-game where user generated content is just not viable except for the giant monopolists that can pay off rights holders or defend against the liability.
Canadian journalism is suffering – but Meta isn't budging
* has this impacted biases or political stances (extreme or middle) in any direction?
* has this impacted individual happiness in any way?
Okay, but what kind of engagement? Because "engagement" alone is not a metric.
> Less news is being consumed by Canadians
Again: that's not a metric in and of itself, given that constant cries of information saturation. How much news is being consumed, and is that still to much?
What makes a piece of content a news article? Is all written content banned from Meta?
[citation needed]
This arguably should make Meta subject to the requirements
of the Online News Act.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-02/meta-is-o...