this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (10 children)

Yeah, I am not Canadian so I’m sure there’s some information/nuance I don’t understand here, but from what I can tell from looking at a few articles from different sources:

  • Canadian government passes a law that would require Facebook to pay and/or share ad revenue for every link out (posted by the media outlet, not by Facebook) to an external news website

  • Facebook says they don’t want to do that, and will stop showing news links to comply with the law

  • Canadian government says “no not like that” and now wants to force them to allow links to news outlets, which de facto forces them to pay/share revenue with those media outlets

Like I said, I’m assuming there may be something I’m missing here, so please any kind Canadians who can help fill in the blanks would be appreciated

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (8 children)

You’ve got the just of it. Their argument is that meta benefits as the post w/ the the link and preview is content they use in their feed to keep users engaged. Presumably in said feed they’d also insert ads.

This would also apply to any user posting a link to an article, not just the news agencies.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (7 children)

(Not arguing with you, just with the concept of the bill)

Doesn’t the news outlet benefit from the traffic and clicks generated from that user engagement?

What’s the government’s rationale for social media platforms to subsidize media outlets monetarily in addition to driving people to their content?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Because most people don't click, they just read the summary of the article in their feed. They're claiming that aggregators don't share revenue from summarized articles.

[–] EhForumUser 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Yet all the major news sites I checked provided Open Graph content.

In case you don't know, Open Graph was created by Facebook to give publishers control over what information is displayed on Facebook when a news resource is introduced into their system.

If you don't want Facebook to display that content, knowing it means you won't see the traffic, why explicitly provide and denote it for their use? Open Graph content isn't naturally occurring. These news companies are going out of their way to tell Facebook exactly what they want shown.

Is this simply a case of the top brass spending too much time in Ottawa and not enough time talking to the technical people?

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