Australia and Facebook....

[survivalist]

Disastrous said:

captain_cynic said:

Disastrous said:

It seems Facebook actually are prepared to pay for news: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-5641033...

Suggests that it actually IS quite an important part of their model. I hope the son of the poster who is happy to pay Facebook to scrape his content sees more value for his future work.

I think this is pretty good news for journalism.

Actually it's terrible news, for more than just journalism.

It means that Murdoch gets to act like a standover man demanding payment for nothing (it's like McVitties demanding that Tesco pay them for stocking their biscuits... It's actually the other way around and stores get paid for prime shelf space).

It will actually lead to a decrease in the standard of journalism (yes, even worse than Newscorps current low standards) as they will start to interfere with what content is shown, I.E. prioritise these stories or we'll charge you more for the stuff people want to read.

Also... That article doesn't say they were willing, it said they were forced to... And that alone sets a terrible precedent. Murdoch's empire is failing, this won't be the last time he seeks rent.

Edited by captain_cynic on Tuesday 16th March 08:15

Interesting take - so is it not the case any more that Facebook is free to not use their content?

My (limited) understanding from reading this thread was that the Aussie Gov said “pay, if you want to use it, but work out a deal yourselves” so Facebook switched off news and now some weeks later has decided it’s worth paying for. Is that not the case?

I can see your concern about Murdoch essentially getting to decide what becomes news and for how much but in general, I think the model of massive tech companies scraping content isn’t a good one.

It's more complex than that. Facebook switching off news led to the proposed legislation being watered down. Both sides can paint this as a victory, as Facebook claim they prevented the government from imposing tariffs on social media companies and the government can claim that they brought Facebook to heel and have forced them to pay news outlets for using their content.

In reality, it's going to take a while to see the real world impact of these changes.

One of the main challenges for Facebook (and other social media platforms) is that in many cases they aren't curating the news content that gets posted. The search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing etc) have services that decide what news content they display. While Facebook does promote news content on peoples feeds, the users are also able to post links, which makes it much harder to curate.

So if I post a link to PistonHeads.com, Facebook could find themselves in a position to pay money for that content, even though they haven't actively promoted that content. It's a problem unique to the social media platforms as the content is dictated by users as well as the corporation and they then monetise that content and users can remain within the platform while consuming many different types of content.

The controversial element was that Facebook were/are scraping the content, but then wrapping their own advertising around it. So if I post up a news link and you, as my Facebook friend, read the article within the Facebook app, then Facebook capture the advertising revenue. If you see my link but then go to the news outlets own website, they capture the revenue through their own ads.

In this example the content providers argue that it's their IP that keeps us using Facebook and that, were it not for Facebook, we would be browsing the news websites instead and that they are therefore entitled to the ad revenue. Facebook claim that its us interacting with each other on their platform that keeps us using Facebook and that they are driving web traffic to the news websites without charging them. The reality is that both scenarios are valid, the argument is over how that ad revenue is split.

The issue with the amended regulations, is that it's a halfway house. The original proposal was effectively a pay to play model, but that was then watered down to telling the tech giants to negotiate with the content providers. Only if agreements cannot be reached would the government step in and arbitrate. Even then, there is a lot of speculation that many smaller outlets will never make it to arbitration due to the costs involved. Large amounts of arbitration requests would likely also cause a backlog as it's doubtful the Australian government has lots of IP lawyers sitting idle.

We now have a situation where news content hosted on social media could get skewed certain providers based on the price agreed. If one outlet has agreed to a significantly lower price, their content might get used / pushed more frequently as it costs Google or Facebook less to serve said content. Conversely, some organisations might want to provide their content extremely cheaply or for free, in order to get more coverage.

It's not dissimilar to the issues around net neutrality. Compensation is one angle, but the ability of the tech giants to decide what content people see is probably more worrying.

[Disastrous]

survivalist said:

Disastrous said:

captain_cynic said:

Disastrous said:

It seems Facebook actually are prepared to pay for news: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-5641033...

Suggests that it actually IS quite an important part of their model. I hope the son of the poster who is happy to pay Facebook to scrape his content sees more value for his future work.

I think this is pretty good news for journalism.

Actually it's terrible news, for more than just journalism.

It means that Murdoch gets to act like a standover man demanding payment for nothing (it's like McVitties demanding that Tesco pay them for stocking their biscuits... It's actually the other way around and stores get paid for prime shelf space).

It will actually lead to a decrease in the standard of journalism (yes, even worse than Newscorps current low standards) as they will start to interfere with what content is shown, I.E. prioritise these stories or we'll charge you more for the stuff people want to read.

Also... That article doesn't say they were willing, it said they were forced to... And that alone sets a terrible precedent. Murdoch's empire is failing, this won't be the last time he seeks rent.

Edited by captain_cynic on Tuesday 16th March 08:15

Interesting take - so is it not the case any more that Facebook is free to not use their content?

My (limited) understanding from reading this thread was that the Aussie Gov said “pay, if you want to use it, but work out a deal yourselves” so Facebook switched off news and now some weeks later has decided it’s worth paying for. Is that not the case?

I can see your concern about Murdoch essentially getting to decide what becomes news and for how much but in general, I think the model of massive tech companies scraping content isn’t a good one.

It's more complex than that. Facebook switching off news led to the proposed legislation being watered down. Both sides can paint this as a victory, as Facebook claim they prevented the government from imposing tariffs on social media companies and the government can claim that they brought Facebook to heel and have forced them to pay news outlets for using their content.

In reality, it's going to take a while to see the real world impact of these changes.

One of the main challenges for Facebook (and other social media platforms) is that in many cases they aren't curating the news content that gets posted. The search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing etc) have services that decide what news content they display. While Facebook does promote news content on peoples feeds, the users are also able to post links, which makes it much harder to curate.

So if I post a link to PistonHeads.com, Facebook could find themselves in a position to pay money for that content, even though they haven't actively promoted that content. It's a problem unique to the social media platforms as the content is dictated by users as well as the corporation and they then monetise that content and users can remain within the platform while consuming many different types of content.

The controversial element was that Facebook were/are scraping the content, but then wrapping their own advertising around it. So if I post up a news link and you, as my Facebook friend, read the article within the Facebook app, then Facebook capture the advertising revenue. If you see my link but then go to the news outlets own website, they capture the revenue through their own ads.

In this example the content providers argue that it's their IP that keeps us using Facebook and that, were it not for Facebook, we would be browsing the news websites instead and that they are therefore entitled to the ad revenue. Facebook claim that its us interacting with each other on their platform that keeps us using Facebook and that they are driving web traffic to the news websites without charging them. The reality is that both scenarios are valid, the argument is over how that ad revenue is split.

The issue with the amended regulations, is that it's a halfway house. The original proposal was effectively a pay to play model, but that was then watered down to telling the tech giants to negotiate with the content providers. Only if agreements cannot be reached would the government step in and arbitrate. Even then, there is a lot of speculation that many smaller outlets will never make it to arbitration due to the costs involved. Large amounts of arbitration requests would likely also cause a backlog as it's doubtful the Australian government has lots of IP lawyers sitting idle.

We now have a situation where news content hosted on social media could get skewed certain providers based on the price agreed. If one outlet has agreed to a significantly lower price, their content might get used / pushed more frequently as it costs Google or Facebook less to serve said content. Conversely, some organisations might want to provide their content extremely cheaply or for free, in order to get more coverage.

It's not dissimilar to the issues around net neutrality. Compensation is one angle, but the ability of the tech giants to decide what content people see is probably more worrying.

Thanks for that detailed answer - I think that mostly makes a lot of sense to me and fills in detail around some assumptions I’d made.

I get that the solution here isn’t ideal, and I definitely get that it favours news giants more than the little guys. But it’s got to be better than paying money to have FB scrape your content?

I get the nuance around the difference between a link I post to a PH article and a PH article that FB posts and gets ad revenue from but can’t believe the platforms aren’t able to distinguish?

[survivalist]

Disastrous said:

Thanks for that detailed answer - I think that mostly makes a lot of sense to me and fills in detail around some assumptions I’d made.

I get that the solution here isn’t ideal, and I definitely get that it favours news giants more than the little guys. But it’s got to be better than paying money to have FB scrape your content?

I get the nuance around the difference between a link I post to a PH article and a PH article that FB posts and gets ad revenue from but can’t believe the platforms aren’t able to distinguish?

They weren’t paying Facebook, they just weren’t getting any revenue from it.

Facebook can absolutely differentiate between content they have placed and links posted by users, the issue was that under the original legislation they would have had to pay regardless. This is why the reacted so dramatically and started blocking news on their platform.

As far as I can see, the terms they are now agreeing with content providers (primarily news organisations) is confidential. This is worrying as it has potential to influence what people see on Facebook in terms of news content.

What will be interesting to see is whether the Australian government continue their involvement or regard this as a positive result and move on.

If it’s the latter, then it will support the view that a legacy news provider (newscorp) was successful at lobbying the government to act in their interest.

If it’s the former, then I would expected the Australian government to be focussing on how to effectively regulate the tech giants, rather than just try and re-distribute some revenue from one large corporation to another.

Thats not to say I champion facebook’s cause, things like the Cambridge-Analytica scandal illustrate just how dangerous social media, or at least data gathered from social media, can be. However, half-arsed legislation to re-distribute some revenue isn’t proper legislation.