14 ms·

Facebook confirms it will drop news sharing in Canada under bill C-18

favaq 4y ago
[flagged]
- bparsons 4y ago
  [flagged]
- h10h10h10 4y ago
  [dead]
- dhritzkiv 4y ago
  [flagged]
- warkdarrior 4y ago
  [flagged]
twblalock 4y ago
Good. Payment for links is a really dumb policy, and if it works for news it will leech into other areas until the internet is a minefield of tolls and taxes for anyone who wants to aggregate information in a useful way -- including sites like HN and Wikipedia.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
motohagiography 4y ago
This seems to mean that fewer Canadians will be engaging on Facebook, and that news articles from outlets that meet the official standards of Facebook and the government will have a smaller audience. In terms of improving the quality of public discourse, how is this not win-win?
- CivBase 4y ago
  Genuine question: Why would most users engage less with Facebook as a result of this? I'd expect most users to continue what they were doing before, but now their feed of headlines will come exclusively from international sources. I doubt I'd engage less with HN if they banned articles from US companies.
  - motohagiography 4y ago
    Arguably fewer news articles means less outrage, yielding lower engagement. The recipe for a news story requires events and a conflict to tell the story of, and official news sources largely fabricate that conflict and decorate it with the events of the day. The fabrication comes from ideology, one that percieves everything as conflict and power struggle. It's why the news often seems like utter nonsense. I don't watch it anymore because I can't sustain a state of cringe that long, but anything that reduces its reach is something I can get behind.
    - cowl 4y ago
      But this will not lower engagment, User will Quote the headline and part of text and you just don't have the original link. The discussion will follow from there and worse than before. Now every discussion can by default be taken out of the context and cause even more outrage because it will not be verified by 99% of the users who will not go out of their way to search for the orginal link if it's not there. The discussion will continue as is shown uo until now without the need to read the article itself. "What's you reference for this claim?" is not a valid question anymore because linking the reference is not allowed.
pwinnski 4y ago
Lucky Canada!
s1artibartfast 4y ago
Seems like the news companies are shooting themselves in the foot, but it sounds good to me. I would love a world where google and facebook are full of links to primary sources instead of news articles. Imagine a world where you search "supreme court decision X", "California covid policy", or "FDIC action today" and the top result is the responsible agency statement followed by blogs.
- 908B64B197 4y ago
  There was no drop in user engagement when Meta tried it in Australia. However, traffic originating from Facebook has to represent a sizeable portion of incoming traffic for news site.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    yeah, that is kinda my point.
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    That is because most of the "news" is not original reporting any more. Everyone is just feeding off each other so if the store is not at site A, it will be on Site B through 184,284,756 of which at least one of them will still be sharable on Facebook, and in Google news thus the traffic will just move to those sites and users will share and engage with them losing nothing...
    - bcrosby95 4y ago
      Because it's expensive. Life is really weird for me. If you go by the numbers, we seem to have the best availability of, well, everything, compared to 30 or 40 years ago. But as someone that has lived through that timeframe, it feels like those things are a cheap, hollow, plastic piece of shit version of their former selves.
      - abeyer 4y ago
        > But as someone that has lived through that timeframe, it feels like those things are a cheap, hollow, plastic piece of shit version of their former selves. sucks to get old
h10h10h10 4y ago
Perfect. Meta is doing good things as of late, like telling the UK govt to fuck off with the 'drop E2E encryption' bs. I hope more tech behemoths start to stand their ground. Companies trying to maximize their profit >>> Authoritarian dystopia 24/7 surveillance governments ran by lunatics
- xvector 4y ago
  Do not know why this comment was killed. This is a valid take.
drbojingle 4y ago
[flagged]
- xvector 4y ago
  The good time here is greedy Canadian news companies suffocating and crumbling thanks to such shortsighted legislation, which is exactly what they deserve. Facebook will not hurt one iota from this. This bill is dumb and anti-internet/anti-information in every way possible.
tobyjsullivan 4y ago
After watching this play out in Australia, it doesn't feel like there are many new arguments to be made. It's just sad to watch. As a Canadian, it bothers me that our politicians are willing to jump through mental hoops to avoid considering the most obvious solutions. If news companies don't want people accessing their content through the web, shouldn't they simply take down their web sites? If they aren't willing to do that (because, say, the benefits outweigh the costs), then perhaps this isn't an issue that warrants legislation...
- brunoborges 4y ago
  The problem here is that people are not, at scale, hitting the news company website. Users of social media platforms see headlines, sometimes an alt text/description followed with a picture, and that is it. They start jumping to a discussion on said topic with whoever posted the news piece. People are not reading the articles in full (and therefore being presented with ads, or a subscription paywall), but they are engaging on the social media platform that in turn is making money with ads and other features thanks to the engagement produced by the shared news article. News companies are being cannibalized by social media companies who get all the engagement (and ad revenue), while people at scale are not signing up for paywalls or even visiting the news site to read the article in full. I believe this will hopefully make news companies get back to a profitable business, while making conversations on social media platforms a lot healthier.
  - Teever 4y ago
    Most of the Canadian media market is owned by American interests so really we're just watching two American companies duke it out over who gets advertising money paid by companies selling American consumer shit. As a Canadian it's really hard to give a shit about any of this.
    - b112 4y ago
      Most of the Canadian media market is owned by American interests What a weird thing to say, this is wildly untrue. Foreign ownership laws tilt this dramatically.
drooopy 4y ago
I pray that they roll this feature out to the rest of the world.
- sourcecodeplz 4y ago
  Yes, exactly my first thought. Too many people get their news from FB headlines. There was a user here who said something about people reading an obviously unresearched news article in a newspaper, knowing it is saying bullcrap BUT kept reading other pieces from that paper. Because one bad article doesn't make the whole newspaper worthless. Find yourself a couple of newspapers and read them. Scan the front page. Get a wholer picture of the news. It's sad really printed newspapers have vanished so extensively. Meanwhile on FB, people read a headline and that's it.
  - ThatMedicIsASpy 4y ago
    That isn't exclusive to FB. It's everywhere, reddit, twitter, hackernews. People have low attention spans and its getting lower and lower when you watch hundreds of 30s videos these days.
wstrange 4y ago
Bill C-18 is a big wet kiss to a few large Canadian Media companies. Their business model is under stress because of the internet. Link taxes won't fix this and they set a terrible precedent. Quoting from Candaland[0]. "In Australia, an estimated 90 per cent of negotiated revenues flowed to the three largest media companies." That hardly bodes well for independent journalism. This is just a shakedown. [0] https://www.canadaland.com/canadas-online-news-act-must-be-transparent-fair-and-include-news-innovators/ https://www.canadaland.com/canadas-online-news-act-must-be-t...
- ttul 4y ago
  I scanned through the bill (at third reading [1]). On the face of it, it seems to be intended to "level the playing field" between powerful search engines and social media platforms and Canadian news organizations, allegedly because "there is a significant bargaining power imbalance" between the platforms and the journalists. But if you have lived in Canada for any length of time, you will know that this is a country ruled by a small number of highly profitable corporations, which are largely controlled by a few wealthy families. For instance: - Corus Entertainment is 80% controlled by the family of JR Shaw. - Rogers Communications is controlled by the family of Ted Rogers (via a trust) - Quebecor is controlled by Pierre Péladeau Indeed, only BCE (the company that owns Bell Canada) is truly a diversely controlled public corporation. So really, this bill could be considered as the government acting to protect the interests of three wealthy Canadian families. [1] https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/third-reading https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/third-r...
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    Yep; Canada retains the structure of a colonial outpost, just without the colonial master. Echoes of the Family Compact, 200 years later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Compact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Compact
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nradov 4y ago
Sounds good to me. I already block news pages on my Facebook feed.
- tensor 4y ago
  I already block facebook pages and go direct to a few good news sources.
abigail95 4y ago
Happy to support this bill extended to news sites that link to my personal website and information being forced to pay me for the privilege.
- slyall 4y ago
  Over here (New Zealand) the newspaper websites never link to anywhere. Especially not the webpage a story is talking about. Pictures get grabbed off websites[1] and credited to "Supplied". [1] - Loophole in copyright laws for reporting
  - firecall 4y ago
    Over here in AU it's much the same. To the point where AU Sub Reddits posters often put 'F U Murdoch' style watermarks on their images. So much of the news and headlines is ripped straight from Reddit posts it's no longer amusing...
actuator 4y ago
I don't get people who don't understand www make these laws. The concept of linking something is core to the idea of web. It is beautiful and useful and no one should need to pay for adding an hyperlink. If media publications want others to not get access to the content, they can choose to not add OG tags or just not let the Google or social media bots scrape the information.
- monkeywork 4y ago
  It's not about not understanding the web or the concept of linking. It's a reaction to a fundamental way that users are engaging with content. User behavior has changed online, people are conditioned to tiktok / twitter length information snips, having off the cuff reactions, being the first to be outraged, etc. It used to be that if someone linked something the BULK of the people who saw that link and were interested would click it and if they wanted to engage, they likely engaged on the site hosting the content first... now the bulk to the people don't click the link to read and instead engage only on their social media platform of choice. This leads to: * Increasingly divisive click bait titles * Less informed populace (although they FEEL more informed) * Echo chambers where people get re-enforced on their view of the TITLE (not content) because they are sharing and commenting with likeminded people rather than getting opposing opinions on the source website. Not saying this bill is the solution but I disagree that it's being considered because people don't understand how linking on the web works.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    > It's a reaction to a fundamental way that users are engaging with content. It's public intervention to preserve a business model by deliberately inserting hurdles to the access of information.
  - klyrs 4y ago
    > It used to be that if someone linked something the BULK of the people who saw that link and were interested would click it and if they wanted to engage... I find myself reading comments more than news articles these days because almost every site is littered with modal popups, floating autoplay videos, dickbars covering most of the screen, consent banners, notification consent, location consent, not to mentioned ads, after every paragraph and sometimes almost impossible to scroll past without clicking. The internet has become extremely user hostile, and the true irony here (I can't believe I'm saying this) is that social media sites are focused on engagement so they're actually motivated to not make their UX a painful experience.
bawolff 4y ago
The bill seems rediculous. Imagine the non internet version where you weren't allowed to discuss the days headlines with a friend without buying the paper.
wolpoli 4y ago
It's actually a bit concerning that I am unable to find any details on the proposed Online News Act. Will HN or Wikipedia be designated as digital platforms? Are digital platforms allowed to link to non-Canadian news sources? What are the enforcement mechanisms for web sites with no Canadian operations? I wonder if the lack of detail is intentional.
- peanuty1 4y ago
  Presumably Reddit will be subject to the same regulation as Meta and Google.
  - wolpoli 4y ago
    I think so, since Reddit was included in the stakeholder engagement process, along with Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Apple News Canada, Twitter, and Verizon Media (Yahoo) [1] [1]: https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/fair-revenue-sharing/stakeholder-engagement.html#a5 https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/fair-re...
- bentcorner 4y ago
  I suppose there's a possible future where it will be impossible to find news about the Online News Act.
baron816 4y ago
I'm going to say it: news articles are bad (and always have been) and AI will make it better. The problem is that they usually provide too much context, or not nearly enough. So you either get bored reading it, or don't have the right information to know what's really going on. ie, it's not personalized. Let's take the stuff going on with SVB right now. Your typical news article is going to start with new information, provide some additional context briefing the reader on how it happened, then go further into depth on what the new info its providing, or just ramble on with additional filler. But the reader doesn't know if its going to actually provide more useful info to them. And that's an actually interesting and complex story. How many news articles do you come across thats pretty much all filler, especially on social media? AI would make articles interactive. "Tell more more about fractional banking", "does the Fed's statement mean this is a bailout?", "what does this mean for the broader economy?", "what are economists/politicians saying about the government's actions?" are all questions you could ask and get reasonable responses.
- hedora 4y ago
  You can already ask all these questions and get instantaneous answers from sources that are at least archived on archive.org With AI, propagandists will be able to feed you personalized disinformation in complete privacy. If you think I’m overly pessimistic, recall what happened with Cambridge Analytics.
zht 4y ago
good. get the foreign influence out of Canada. we don't need foreign-owned opaque AI deciding which stories to boost and which stories to not
- timbit42 4y ago
  This will mean no links to Canadian media so all Canadians will see is links to non-Canadian media. It won't get foreign influence out of Canada.
blindriver 4y ago
How stupid and self-defeating. Sharing links with your friends is the best way to get free advertising for your newspaper. Denying it will cut the revenue from newspapers, and I hope they all die from their short-sightedness. They may think I'll turn around and subscribe, but I'll just forget about them entirely.
wmidwestranger 4y ago
The great forces of those interested in suppressing the spread of news and those interested in being paid for their stories to be read are pretty much insurmountable but there is a way past this that neither will like: Simply deliver their conclusions, reasoning, mistakes, and an accurate report through Fair Use, &c. I wouldn't be surprised if the benefactors of this tripe are even more upset about that. Maybe they will take the uphill fight and challenge fair use, and so on and so on. The foundation they stand on will evaporate beneath them over time and they'll rely on lobbying and ever more pretentious foundations than they had before. We all wonder how the newsrooms and newspapers of yesteryear were so well funded and so able to nail an absolute home run in a time long gone but the answer is right in front of us. So much of the "news" is just a conduit of public relations, from the advertisers and worse, straight to the audience. At the same time, so much news made by actual reporters is not great for advertisers, the government, important people, etal. There are absolutely answers but nobody wants to pay for them with money or other means.
jrochkind1 4y ago
Allowing quotes from news or summary re-wording of articles (which are pretty darn hard to prohibit) without allowing URLs to sources... is not so great for reliability and trustworthiness and fact-checking of news shared online. I get what they are trying to do. I don't think there's a way to do it that isn't going to make everything much worse.
TulliusCicero 4y ago
Feels a bit like Media: "You have to pay us to link to us now!" Tech: "Fine, then I guess we won't link to you." Media: shocked_pikachu_face.jpg
- chihuahua 4y ago
  The solution: pass a different law that forces FB and Google to pay newspapers, even if they don't link to newspapers. I assume that's the next step.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
thefurdrake 4y ago
Oh no. Users will have to interact with content other than largely low-quality, reposted, copied news articles. This will surely be the downfall of general public discourse online, as social media sites simply don't have a purpose beyond resharing news. Good riddance. News sites lose, facebook loses, this feels like a net gain for sanity online.
Luciatrutth 4y ago
[dead]
bagacrap 4y ago
So could Facebook scrape a title and thumbnail from a link but not actually linkify the post? Great way to ensure no one rtfa
user3939382 4y ago
My only concern is how this affects independent media, which I haven’t researched enough yet to learn. If all major corporate media and corporate social media companies disappeared tomorrow, except for the workers, I’d just smile and go about my day.
HappySweeney 4y ago
Didn't they say the same thing to Australia when they tabled their version of this bill? And then did not Facebook cave? How is this statement at all credible in light of this?
- zaltekk 4y ago
  From the first paragraph: > the experience in Australia was that [Facebook's] removal [of news link sharing] had little impact on user engagement.
  - HappySweeney 4y ago
    Serves me right for commenting on the headline alone.
  - sourcecodeplz 4y ago
    But it did have a major impact on the traffic of those sites.
    - timbit42 4y ago
      Good or bad?
- clouddrover 4y ago
  Yes, Facebook restored news content in Australia. Dropping news content was a negotiating tactic: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56165015 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56165015 And Facebook knowingly and grubbily caused extra chaos as part of their effort to get their way: https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-deliberately-caused-havoc-in-australia-to-influence-new-law-whistleblowers-say-11651768302 https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-deliberately-caused-ha...
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    > And Facebook knowingly and grubbily caused extra chaos as part of their effort to get their way There is exceptionally little merit to this claim. They blocked links news outlets that would have subjected them to the link tax, and this block wasn't perfect. There was nothing to indicate that blocking sites that wouldn't have incurred the link tax was deliberate.

[flagged]

bparsons 4y ago
[flagged]
h10h10h10 4y ago
[dead]
dhritzkiv 4y ago
[flagged]
warkdarrior 4y ago
[flagged]

Good. Payment for links is a really dumb policy, and if it works for news it will leech into other areas until the internet is a minefield of tolls and taxes for anyone who wants to aggregate information in a useful way -- including sites like HN and Wikipedia.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

motohagiography 4y ago

This seems to mean that fewer Canadians will be engaging on Facebook, and that news articles from outlets that meet the official standards of Facebook and the government will have a smaller audience. In terms of improving the quality of public discourse, how is this not win-win?

CivBase 4y ago
Genuine question: Why would most users engage less with Facebook as a result of this? I'd expect most users to continue what they were doing before, but now their feed of headlines will come exclusively from international sources. I doubt I'd engage less with HN if they banned articles from US companies.
- motohagiography 4y ago
  Arguably fewer news articles means less outrage, yielding lower engagement. The recipe for a news story requires events and a conflict to tell the story of, and official news sources largely fabricate that conflict and decorate it with the events of the day. The fabrication comes from ideology, one that percieves everything as conflict and power struggle. It's why the news often seems like utter nonsense. I don't watch it anymore because I can't sustain a state of cringe that long, but anything that reduces its reach is something I can get behind.
  - cowl 4y ago
    But this will not lower engagment, User will Quote the headline and part of text and you just don't have the original link. The discussion will follow from there and worse than before. Now every discussion can by default be taken out of the context and cause even more outrage because it will not be verified by 99% of the users who will not go out of their way to search for the orginal link if it's not there. The discussion will continue as is shown uo until now without the need to read the article itself. "What's you reference for this claim?" is not a valid question anymore because linking the reference is not allowed.

pwinnski 4y ago

Lucky Canada!

s1artibartfast 4y ago

Seems like the news companies are shooting themselves in the foot, but it sounds good to me. I would love a world where google and facebook are full of links to primary sources instead of news articles. Imagine a world where you search "supreme court decision X", "California covid policy", or "FDIC action today" and the top result is the responsible agency statement followed by blogs.

908B64B197 4y ago
There was no drop in user engagement when Meta tried it in Australia. However, traffic originating from Facebook has to represent a sizeable portion of incoming traffic for news site.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  yeah, that is kinda my point.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  That is because most of the "news" is not original reporting any more. Everyone is just feeding off each other so if the store is not at site A, it will be on Site B through 184,284,756 of which at least one of them will still be sharable on Facebook, and in Google news thus the traffic will just move to those sites and users will share and engage with them losing nothing...
  - bcrosby95 4y ago
    Because it's expensive. Life is really weird for me. If you go by the numbers, we seem to have the best availability of, well, everything, compared to 30 or 40 years ago. But as someone that has lived through that timeframe, it feels like those things are a cheap, hollow, plastic piece of shit version of their former selves.
    - abeyer 4y ago
      > But as someone that has lived through that timeframe, it feels like those things are a cheap, hollow, plastic piece of shit version of their former selves. sucks to get old

h10h10h10 4y ago

Perfect. Meta is doing good things as of late, like telling the UK govt to fuck off with the 'drop E2E encryption' bs. I hope more tech behemoths start to stand their ground. Companies trying to maximize their profit >>> Authoritarian dystopia 24/7 surveillance governments ran by lunatics

xvector 4y ago
Do not know why this comment was killed. This is a valid take.

drbojingle 4y ago

[flagged]

xvector 4y ago
The good time here is greedy Canadian news companies suffocating and crumbling thanks to such shortsighted legislation, which is exactly what they deserve. Facebook will not hurt one iota from this. This bill is dumb and anti-internet/anti-information in every way possible.

tobyjsullivan 4y ago

After watching this play out in Australia, it doesn't feel like there are many new arguments to be made. It's just sad to watch. As a Canadian, it bothers me that our politicians are willing to jump through mental hoops to avoid considering the most obvious solutions. If news companies don't want people accessing their content through the web, shouldn't they simply take down their web sites? If they aren't willing to do that (because, say, the benefits outweigh the costs), then perhaps this isn't an issue that warrants legislation...

brunoborges 4y ago
The problem here is that people are not, at scale, hitting the news company website. Users of social media platforms see headlines, sometimes an alt text/description followed with a picture, and that is it. They start jumping to a discussion on said topic with whoever posted the news piece. People are not reading the articles in full (and therefore being presented with ads, or a subscription paywall), but they are engaging on the social media platform that in turn is making money with ads and other features thanks to the engagement produced by the shared news article. News companies are being cannibalized by social media companies who get all the engagement (and ad revenue), while people at scale are not signing up for paywalls or even visiting the news site to read the article in full. I believe this will hopefully make news companies get back to a profitable business, while making conversations on social media platforms a lot healthier.
- Teever 4y ago
  Most of the Canadian media market is owned by American interests so really we're just watching two American companies duke it out over who gets advertising money paid by companies selling American consumer shit. As a Canadian it's really hard to give a shit about any of this.
  - b112 4y ago
    Most of the Canadian media market is owned by American interests What a weird thing to say, this is wildly untrue. Foreign ownership laws tilt this dramatically.

drooopy 4y ago

I pray that they roll this feature out to the rest of the world.

sourcecodeplz 4y ago
Yes, exactly my first thought. Too many people get their news from FB headlines. There was a user here who said something about people reading an obviously unresearched news article in a newspaper, knowing it is saying bullcrap BUT kept reading other pieces from that paper. Because one bad article doesn't make the whole newspaper worthless. Find yourself a couple of newspapers and read them. Scan the front page. Get a wholer picture of the news. It's sad really printed newspapers have vanished so extensively. Meanwhile on FB, people read a headline and that's it.
- ThatMedicIsASpy 4y ago
  That isn't exclusive to FB. It's everywhere, reddit, twitter, hackernews. People have low attention spans and its getting lower and lower when you watch hundreds of 30s videos these days.

wstrange 4y ago

Bill C-18 is a big wet kiss to a few large Canadian Media companies. Their business model is under stress because of the internet. Link taxes won't fix this and they set a terrible precedent. Quoting from Candaland[0]. "In Australia, an estimated 90 per cent of negotiated revenues flowed to the three largest media companies." That hardly bodes well for independent journalism. This is just a shakedown. [0] https://www.canadaland.com/canadas-online-news-act-must-be-transparent-fair-and-include-news-innovators/ https://www.canadaland.com/canadas-online-news-act-must-be-t...

ttul 4y ago
I scanned through the bill (at third reading [1]). On the face of it, it seems to be intended to "level the playing field" between powerful search engines and social media platforms and Canadian news organizations, allegedly because "there is a significant bargaining power imbalance" between the platforms and the journalists. But if you have lived in Canada for any length of time, you will know that this is a country ruled by a small number of highly profitable corporations, which are largely controlled by a few wealthy families. For instance: - Corus Entertainment is 80% controlled by the family of JR Shaw. - Rogers Communications is controlled by the family of Ted Rogers (via a trust) - Quebecor is controlled by Pierre Péladeau Indeed, only BCE (the company that owns Bell Canada) is truly a diversely controlled public corporation. So really, this bill could be considered as the government acting to protect the interests of three wealthy Canadian families. [1] https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/third-reading https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/third-r...
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  Yep; Canada retains the structure of a colonial outpost, just without the colonial master. Echoes of the Family Compact, 200 years later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Compact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Compact

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nradov 4y ago

Sounds good to me. I already block news pages on my Facebook feed.

tensor 4y ago
I already block facebook pages and go direct to a few good news sources.

abigail95 4y ago

Happy to support this bill extended to news sites that link to my personal website and information being forced to pay me for the privilege.

slyall 4y ago
Over here (New Zealand) the newspaper websites never link to anywhere. Especially not the webpage a story is talking about. Pictures get grabbed off websites[1] and credited to "Supplied". [1] - Loophole in copyright laws for reporting
- firecall 4y ago
  Over here in AU it's much the same. To the point where AU Sub Reddits posters often put 'F U Murdoch' style watermarks on their images. So much of the news and headlines is ripped straight from Reddit posts it's no longer amusing...

actuator 4y ago

I don't get people who don't understand www make these laws. The concept of linking something is core to the idea of web. It is beautiful and useful and no one should need to pay for adding an hyperlink. If media publications want others to not get access to the content, they can choose to not add OG tags or just not let the Google or social media bots scrape the information.

monkeywork 4y ago
It's not about not understanding the web or the concept of linking. It's a reaction to a fundamental way that users are engaging with content. User behavior has changed online, people are conditioned to tiktok / twitter length information snips, having off the cuff reactions, being the first to be outraged, etc. It used to be that if someone linked something the BULK of the people who saw that link and were interested would click it and if they wanted to engage, they likely engaged on the site hosting the content first... now the bulk to the people don't click the link to read and instead engage only on their social media platform of choice. This leads to: * Increasingly divisive click bait titles * Less informed populace (although they FEEL more informed) * Echo chambers where people get re-enforced on their view of the TITLE (not content) because they are sharing and commenting with likeminded people rather than getting opposing opinions on the source website. Not saying this bill is the solution but I disagree that it's being considered because people don't understand how linking on the web works.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > It's a reaction to a fundamental way that users are engaging with content. It's public intervention to preserve a business model by deliberately inserting hurdles to the access of information.
- klyrs 4y ago
  > It used to be that if someone linked something the BULK of the people who saw that link and were interested would click it and if they wanted to engage... I find myself reading comments more than news articles these days because almost every site is littered with modal popups, floating autoplay videos, dickbars covering most of the screen, consent banners, notification consent, location consent, not to mentioned ads, after every paragraph and sometimes almost impossible to scroll past without clicking. The internet has become extremely user hostile, and the true irony here (I can't believe I'm saying this) is that social media sites are focused on engagement so they're actually motivated to not make their UX a painful experience.

bawolff 4y ago

The bill seems rediculous. Imagine the non internet version where you weren't allowed to discuss the days headlines with a friend without buying the paper.

wolpoli 4y ago

It's actually a bit concerning that I am unable to find any details on the proposed Online News Act. Will HN or Wikipedia be designated as digital platforms? Are digital platforms allowed to link to non-Canadian news sources? What are the enforcement mechanisms for web sites with no Canadian operations? I wonder if the lack of detail is intentional.

peanuty1 4y ago
Presumably Reddit will be subject to the same regulation as Meta and Google.
- wolpoli 4y ago
  I think so, since Reddit was included in the stakeholder engagement process, along with Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Apple News Canada, Twitter, and Verizon Media (Yahoo) [1] [1]: https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/fair-revenue-sharing/stakeholder-engagement.html#a5 https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/fair-re...
bentcorner 4y ago
I suppose there's a possible future where it will be impossible to find news about the Online News Act.

baron816 4y ago

I'm going to say it: news articles are bad (and always have been) and AI will make it better. The problem is that they usually provide too much context, or not nearly enough. So you either get bored reading it, or don't have the right information to know what's really going on. ie, it's not personalized. Let's take the stuff going on with SVB right now. Your typical news article is going to start with new information, provide some additional context briefing the reader on how it happened, then go further into depth on what the new info its providing, or just ramble on with additional filler. But the reader doesn't know if its going to actually provide more useful info to them. And that's an actually interesting and complex story. How many news articles do you come across thats pretty much all filler, especially on social media? AI would make articles interactive. "Tell more more about fractional banking", "does the Fed's statement mean this is a bailout?", "what does this mean for the broader economy?", "what are economists/politicians saying about the government's actions?" are all questions you could ask and get reasonable responses.

hedora 4y ago
You can already ask all these questions and get instantaneous answers from sources that are at least archived on archive.org With AI, propagandists will be able to feed you personalized disinformation in complete privacy. If you think I’m overly pessimistic, recall what happened with Cambridge Analytics.

zht 4y ago

good. get the foreign influence out of Canada. we don't need foreign-owned opaque AI deciding which stories to boost and which stories to not

timbit42 4y ago
This will mean no links to Canadian media so all Canadians will see is links to non-Canadian media. It won't get foreign influence out of Canada.

blindriver 4y ago

How stupid and self-defeating. Sharing links with your friends is the best way to get free advertising for your newspaper. Denying it will cut the revenue from newspapers, and I hope they all die from their short-sightedness. They may think I'll turn around and subscribe, but I'll just forget about them entirely.

wmidwestranger 4y ago

The great forces of those interested in suppressing the spread of news and those interested in being paid for their stories to be read are pretty much insurmountable but there is a way past this that neither will like: Simply deliver their conclusions, reasoning, mistakes, and an accurate report through Fair Use, &c. I wouldn't be surprised if the benefactors of this tripe are even more upset about that. Maybe they will take the uphill fight and challenge fair use, and so on and so on. The foundation they stand on will evaporate beneath them over time and they'll rely on lobbying and ever more pretentious foundations than they had before. We all wonder how the newsrooms and newspapers of yesteryear were so well funded and so able to nail an absolute home run in a time long gone but the answer is right in front of us. So much of the "news" is just a conduit of public relations, from the advertisers and worse, straight to the audience. At the same time, so much news made by actual reporters is not great for advertisers, the government, important people, etal. There are absolutely answers but nobody wants to pay for them with money or other means.

jrochkind1 4y ago

Allowing quotes from news or summary re-wording of articles (which are pretty darn hard to prohibit) without allowing URLs to sources... is not so great for reliability and trustworthiness and fact-checking of news shared online. I get what they are trying to do. I don't think there's a way to do it that isn't going to make everything much worse.

TulliusCicero 4y ago

Feels a bit like Media: "You have to pay us to link to us now!" Tech: "Fine, then I guess we won't link to you." Media: shocked_pikachu_face.jpg

chihuahua 4y ago
The solution: pass a different law that forces FB and Google to pay newspapers, even if they don't link to newspapers. I assume that's the next step.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

thefurdrake 4y ago

Oh no. Users will have to interact with content other than largely low-quality, reposted, copied news articles. This will surely be the downfall of general public discourse online, as social media sites simply don't have a purpose beyond resharing news. Good riddance. News sites lose, facebook loses, this feels like a net gain for sanity online.

Luciatrutth 4y ago

[dead]

bagacrap 4y ago

So could Facebook scrape a title and thumbnail from a link but not actually linkify the post? Great way to ensure no one rtfa

user3939382 4y ago

My only concern is how this affects independent media, which I haven’t researched enough yet to learn. If all major corporate media and corporate social media companies disappeared tomorrow, except for the workers, I’d just smile and go about my day.

HappySweeney 4y ago

Didn't they say the same thing to Australia when they tabled their version of this bill? And then did not Facebook cave? How is this statement at all credible in light of this?

zaltekk 4y ago
From the first paragraph: > the experience in Australia was that [Facebook's] removal [of news link sharing] had little impact on user engagement.
- HappySweeney 4y ago
  Serves me right for commenting on the headline alone.
- sourcecodeplz 4y ago
  But it did have a major impact on the traffic of those sites.
  - timbit42 4y ago
    Good or bad?
clouddrover 4y ago
Yes, Facebook restored news content in Australia. Dropping news content was a negotiating tactic: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56165015 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56165015 And Facebook knowingly and grubbily caused extra chaos as part of their effort to get their way: https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-deliberately-caused-havoc-in-australia-to-influence-new-law-whistleblowers-say-11651768302 https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-deliberately-caused-ha...
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  > And Facebook knowingly and grubbily caused extra chaos as part of their effort to get their way There is exceptionally little merit to this claim. They blocked links news outlets that would have subjected them to the link tax, and this block wasn't perfect. There was nothing to indicate that blocking sites that wouldn't have incurred the link tax was deliberate.