Meta to Wind Down Its News Feature in the US and Australia
bloomberg.com"Lawmakers around the world have pushed Meta to compensate publishers for the stories that appear on the social network." Can somebody fill me in on what this means? Publishers want to get paid for people on facebook reposting their news stories? Or is it the embedding info you get from links?
Yes, see the laws in Canada and Australia. Meta actually now completely blocks all news links in Canada because if users posts them (or the news sites post them themselves) they would be obligated to pay for those links.
Does that makes sense to anyone? I would assume they would be happy that someone posts a link to their article and drives traffic...
It makes sense in Australia as NewsCorp (and to a lesser extent, the other trad media companies) has much influence over public opinion via TV and newspapers, so political parties are beholden to it, and thus the legislation to force internet companies to pay news sources.
See also https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2019/01/10/rupe...
News Corp typically supports the National/Liberal coalition in Australia. But Labor ministers have "quickly slammed said the decision, stating it “represents a dereliction of its commitment to the sustainability of Australian news media”."
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/mar/01/faceb...
Edit: the article has apparently been edited and the specific quote has vanished, but there is more along the same lines.
From TLA: "Australian news publishers deserve fair compensation for the content they provide."
I don't think this person quite understands that if Meta blocks all news, there's no "providing" at all! So it's fair enough that Meta makes this move. People might even venture outside the Facebook bubble, which would be a net positive.
Just so everyone reads this correctly, ministers are -slammed- being very pissy and throwing a tantrum towards Meta, not the law, in fact they're tripling down on it.
The piss poor words of "Rod Sims" demonstrates it all in that article.
Glad Meta is leaving, maybe news publishers can demonstrate their value to the people to naturally bring them to their platform. I doubt it though. They want all the eyes to look at them and will pay Meta + Google top dollar for it, but then demand they get paid back for a bad bet, then get in bed with the government to enforce their terms.
Sickening. All the more reason to never visit, turn ad-block on to its most aggressive if I ever am forced to interact with these news sites.
This is a really bad look that media companies in Australia have so much lobbying power that they can introduce nonsense laws like this.
As best as I can tell it only makes sense to the Canadian media lobbyists who found an angle to blame "big tech" for their sagging print revenues.
Wasn't there some calamity in Canada not too long ago where they were begging Facebook to show the news?
Yes, you may be thinking of last year's wildfires where some politicians where blasting meta for blocking Canadian news during the fires.
Of course, this didn't mean they were repealing the law and they still expected Meta to pay whatever rate per link the media orgs wanted for the privilege.
The claim is it doesn’t drive traffic. People read the embedded snippet or what the person said it says and doesn’t follow to the site.
I have no idea how true that is though.
I know i rarely read the articles, i just read the headlines and the small amount of blurb accompanying it. Perhaps a lot of people are like me, and the newspapers are supplying the headlines/blurbs/image and not even getting a clickthrough, and then people don't feel the need to visit the news sites to get 'up to date'. Perhaps that's why they feel they're missing out.
In a world driven by advertising revenue, they would be happier if you visit their cesspit ad-filled website than if you converted the news into a headline, image and article summary. I guess significant% of people don't bother clicking on Facebook news links?
This is really good news. Mostly because it will deprive legacy media of indirect income they leech from facebook. I certainly don't love facebook, but I hate protectionist laws that were written by the media companies in service of the media companies.
The only companies worse than social media companies are media companies lol
Actually it's even more insidious than that, at least in Australia
Facebook (I refuse to call them Meta) is obligated to pay NewsCorp for articles posted
Facebook then writes this off as a tax deduction
Meanwhile Facebook pays effectively $0 in tax as-is because of all the various loopholes they exploit
As a result the Australian tax payer effectively is paying Newscorp to continue existing
> Facebook then writes this off as a tax deduction
I'm not sure you know what a write off is. If Facebook is paying fees for licensing content then that is an expense, which is deducted from overall gross revenue in calculating profit, and businesses are taxed on the profit they make.
I may be using the incorrect term. Regardless, they're happy to claim it as an expense as far as taxation goes, but given they pay no tax to begin with, the "cost of doing business complying with the regulation" is effectively passed on to the tax payer
> I may be using the incorrect term. Regardless, they're happy to claim it as an expense as far as taxation goes
That's how business expenses work. Tax revenue goes down as a percentage of the expense.
How else would you want it to work?
And for 30% tax rate, for every $30 in reduced taxes facebook is paying $100, so they still lose $70.
And all else equal that money becomes profit for the news companies so the taxes still get paid.
> but given they pay no tax to begin with, the "cost of doing business complying with the regulation" is effectively passed on to the tax payer
If they pay no tax even before this law, then what's the problem? If they go from $0 to $0 then the tax payer isn't losing out on anything. And in that situation, even a single dollar of news company profit means a reduction in tax payer burden.
That's an incorrect understanding of the accounting.
First of all it's not a tax deduction, it's a business expense which reduces profit.
Second when you have a tax deduction only a portion (around 20%) of the amount actually reduces taxes, the rest is simply a loss for the business.
> As a result the Australian tax payer effectively is paying Newscorp to continue existing
By that logic the tax payer is paying the electric bill and janitorial services.
That's really not how accounting works.
If Facebook is avoiding taxes via legal loopholes but aren't taking any kind of government subsidies, is it really as though tax payers are paying Newscorp? No tax dollars are being spent to cover anything, the money is just never being paid by Facebook to the government because the government created carve-outs that let Facebook to reduce their liability.
Caveat here, I'm neither a fan of Facebook or tax loop holes. In my opinion tax law should be exceedingly simple and easy to calculate. I don't want to defend Facebook here, but saying the public is paying for this feels like a slight of hand.
Taxes not paid by private entities are, by definition, money out of the public coffer.
How far will you take that? Do buisiness owe all of their profit as tax?
At some point you say "this is your tax", that doesn't mean that all other profit is money out of the public coffer. Governments do not tax all money.
> Governments do not tax all money
No one said they did. I said all private money is money not available to the public. If Facebook bribes legislators to carve out tax loopholes for them, that money stays private, therefore it's denied to the public coffers.
Aside from any offended libertarian sensibilities, what part of that do you disagree with?
If elected legislators pass laws creating legal means to lower one's tax burden, the means in which the law was passed only matters to ensure it was legal.
Our system is much too complicated and corruptible today. It shouldn't be so easy to effectively buy legislation, but as long as it is legal we can't really fault anyone with the means from taking advantage.
If Facebook bribes legislators in an illegal way they should be held to account, otherwise laws should be changed and legislators should be resigned in through both elections and checks and balances.
I don't understand what the bribe has to do with anything. Did you just put that in there for an emotional response?
According to you, all money belonging to everyone is really tax money that has been stolen from the people.
There are some people who think like that but it's definitely an unusual approach. I'm sure you know what that form of society is called.
> I don't understand what the bribe has to do with anything.
I'm responding to a thread about Facebook "lobbying" legislators for tax carve outs. I choose to call it what it is - a bribe.
> According to you, all money belonging to everyone is really tax money that has been stolen from the people.
Im not going to argue for a position I never took. I said that taxes avoided is money denied to the public. You called it theft, because thats your libertarian ideology poking through.
> I'm responding to a thread about Facebook "lobbying" legislators for tax carve outs.
Yah, that's not what the thread said. Facebook is simply deducting a business expense, there was no carve out.
> I choose to call it what it is - a bribe.
Except there was no bribe, you just made something up.
> You called it theft, because thats your libertarian ideology poking through.
I did not call it theft and I'm not a libertarian.
> I said that taxes avoided is money denied to the public.
I said that there is no such concept as "taxes avoided". That not something that exists. You can't "avoid" taxes, either you need to pay them or you don't.
It's not a thing to be able to just "avoid" them.
You are arguing imaginary thing that never happened, and using concepts that don't exist to make your point.
Sure, in the same way that you not donating your home to the state is money out of the public coffers as well.
That is true. You understand that right?
Like, a donation is voluntary, taxes aren't and you think that makes them theft, I get all that. If I choose not to donate my house to the state, it is literally money denied to the public coffers.
In the case of my home, the state has no expectation or entitlement to receive it. One could argue the same in the case of Facebook bribing legislators to get tax carve outs. I wouldn't (because it's very corrupt), but one could.
Only if the taxes are actually owed. If an entity lowers their tax burden legally then the public was never owed the money.
I don't agree with this model and would much prefer a simple tax code. But as-is, its disingenuous to say that taxes unpaid because one finds a legal way to avoid owing them is taking out of the public coffers. One can't take money that was never owed in the first place.
This is completely backwards non-logic. If Facebook weren't avoiding tax, you could say that making Facebook pay News Corp means we lose out on tax revenue (because they can claim what they pay as an expense). But if they were already not paying tax, then the money they're paying News Corp is coming 100% from their profits and 0% from taxes they would've paid. (And indeed, assuming News Corp doesn't manage to avoid taxes as efficiently as Facebook, the public actually ends up better off, because News Corp does have to pay tax on their profits)
If they’re already paying 0, then paying even more 0 probably isn’t going to change much. Unless this is a refundable credit, where they can actually get that money back the same year regardless if they’ve already gotten to 0.
I don’t really agree with Canadas “link sharing” payment (people have only told me it is the case that links alone cause payment. I have not read the law. I don’t care enough to look). I do agree with Facebook having to pay for scraping and/or summarizing articles when links are posted, however.
Yeah, the publishers want compensation for the headline, photo, and text excerpt that appear on the social network. While these are really small excerpts, the publishers contend that it's sufficient to reduce demand for the article itself from users who'll read the headline and preview, maybe interact, and continue scrolling on the social network.
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.
They could just drop their opengraph tags if they don't want their content shared in this way. Of course, a simple link will be much less appealing to click on for most users.
Much less appealing to even read in the first place. Plus you're also in competition with other publishers who will happily gobble up the impressions you used to take. So even if you're willing to play hardball as a publisher, you don't have any real capacity to coerce the social media company.
It's this imbalance in bargaining power that the Australian law at least aims to change (and it's why it's administered by the competition and consumer commission).
Seems like the real problem is "competition with other publishers who will happily gobble up the impressions", and the goal of the law is to reduce such competition?
I hate Facebook, but I think laws to reduce competition are pretty stupid and do not benefit public.
Competition creates a race to the bottom; laws are often the only way to prevent those (e.g. health and safety rules, or minimum wage laws).
They have full control over these through OpenGraph Tags. It's a whole other thing if FB was scraping the content and summarising it and displaying it... but I don't believe they do that currently.
And naturally people will just copy paste the content of the report anyway.
If it's anything like the EU debates, the media companies publicly lied about how those open graph tags work.
I guess that "we provide the description ourselves and want to be paid for it" didn't sound good enough to the public.
And these same corporations stop having comments on their own site, and then complain that commentators are using other sites. It all seems so silly to me.
Why not allow links without blurbs/images, is this also something that requires payment?
Large discussion about a similar bill in Canada: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36524662
Last time Facebook decided to censor the news in Australia they ended up censoring links a bunch of government pages like links to emergency services[1].
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 basically australia's censorship, not fb's. Australia forced fb to pay news providers for each link _each user_ does share on it's platforms, which means huge money for meta for something they don't make money back, so they decided to comply with australian law
That's a cost of doing business, much like paying tax. It's entirely on Facebook for censoring users in Australia. They could choose... not to do business in Australia, shut down their office and stop taking ad dollars from Australian companies.
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.
It's not cost of doing business. This law basically made this business (of news distribution if we can call it that way) unprofitable. The choice is to either lose money or not lose money and to not provide the service. What you say about meta's revenue/cash is a completely different thing and can be tackled in other ways like increasing general tax for a company that made x amount of revenue per year or fixing tax avoidance schemes. Imposing an arbitrary tax related to news distribution is solving(killing a business model) a completely different problem. The news outlets problem could also be solved by imposing a news tax on all citizens like how it's done in some countries. The current situation is completely caused by this law. Meta just followed this law by removing something made unprofitable by this law and I find very strange blaming meta for it and not authorities. Meta can be accused of other things like radicalization, shady algorihms or others but this precise situation is not caused by it but by Australia's (and Canada's if we extend the concept) govts
This is a legal issue due to Australia forcing Facebook to pay news companies for links to their websites.
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)
As an Australian that flicks through Facebook every so often...
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".
A few notes and corrections.
I don't believe I've ever seen a "news article" anywhere that wasn't a thinly veiled advertisement.
It's fair that Meta does not have to pay the legacy big media racket the protection fee, but unfortunately this hurts the players that were not asking for the protection fee in the first place. Maybe small players will hurt from the reduced exposure, to the advantage of the big players.
that's how stupid laws work
It should be fairly simple to come up with some standard to block social media sharing i.e some .nosocial file in your root dir = don't share this site on social media.
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?
Facebook already understands robots.txt rules for FacebookBot, and maybe Meta can use that as a signal to exclude such websites.
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.
The main issue they have is that in the old days, Newspapers made most of their money from ads. Now all the ads are online and that revenue is taken by Google/Social media platforms. They consider Facebook and social media to be their competitor in this sense, sometimes even more so than other media companies.
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.
I’ve commented elsewhere that news companies are against any form of collaboration.
They could form a coalition and run their own ad network, if they are so concerned against Google taking a slice of their ad revenue.
I'm firmly convinced that social media is little more than a scapegoat here. Yes, there are incentives to spread polarizing news and echo chambers, but this is an endemic problem in journalism that sells to both consumers and advertisers. The idea that the problem will somehow vanish if we no longer discuss the world around us publicly (or indeed that those running social media are even capable of stopping this) is absurd.
it's not that they don't want sharing. They want $ for each share. These are different things
Honestly, great move by Meta.
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.
5. Ultimately, the citizens win
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).
One thing of value that was lost was that the ABC (Australian national broadcaster) had hired 60 reporters, mostly in regional areas (typically more undeserved by journalists) from the revenue they got from this deal.
Those jobs are now at risk. (This is all according to the ABC coverage on this topic.)
it's one perspective. Another perspective is that smaller news sites will be annihilated by bigger ones with this law, because traffic from social media will drop significantly and as result, revenue too, contributing to monopolization of the news category by a bunch of big players :)
Perfect use of the shocked pikachu meme
It wasn’t a braindead move, it wasnt about providing that service it was a punitive measure to prevent exposure to that service, with the icing on the cake of paying publishers if Facebook complied with it.
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.