I hit my first instance of Meta blocking Canadian news content.
Rachael sent me a story from #CBCVancouver via Instagram messages.
The thumbnail is visible in messages (1), but when I click, I get the restricted message (2)
I wasn’t following the CBCVancouver account, and when I search for and visit the profile, I get a different message (3)
I guess Rachael hasn’t had this rolled out to her account yet.
Remember, there are no good guys in this #BillC18 debacle.
Remember, there are no good guys in this #BillC18 debacle.
We disagree on this point, I think the news orgs are the good guys.
Why? Because groups like Meta are profiting from scaping the site without compensation. It’s not like Meta is simply showing the headline and thumbnail, they are showing some of the content from the article itself.
Meta’s not giving free promotion, they are profiting off of the content of others.
Edit: it looks like the information that Facebook shows is consensual via “Open Graph”
The bill penalizes Meta even if they link but do zero scraping. Regardless though, news organizations can breathe a sigh of relief as Meta is terminating the totally one-sided relationship where only Meta benefited at news organizations’ expense.
Now if only more people would terminate their relationship with Meta and move to social media services where individuals have a say in how things are shared and monetized.
they are showing some of the content from the article itself.
They are showing the content found in the
og:descriptionmeta tag, you mean. The “og” bit stands for Open Graph, which is a protocol developed by Facebook so that news sites can define the content they want Facebook to show.If news sites don’t want Facebook to display this information, they could stop providing it via Open Graph. Again, Open Graph was created exactly to give publishers control over what Facebook shows when linking to their resource. A quick check of the major sites in Canada reveals that Open Graph use is omnipresent and that they are quite welcoming of Facebook using their work.
Funny, that.
I wasn’t aware of Open Graph, thanks for bringing it up
How do you feel about Lemmy bots that summarize articles in the comments?
Issue is the same for the media but there’s no advertising revenue for the social media platform, in the end it’s still shitty for the content producers.
There’s no “gotcha” there.
The real issue is how social media intentionally changed the way we consume that content. Attention span has drastically went down since Facebook released and time spent on websites that aren’t Facebook as well. In the end Meta gets the advertising money and people who click to check the articles don’t stick around long enough to be profitable.
We disagree on this point, I think the news orgs are the good guys.
Facebook brings traffic to these sites. News does not bring traffic to Facebook. There’s only one side profiting from sites like Facebook sending them traffic and it isn’t Facebook. There’s a reason why most (I want to say all, but I can’t swear to that) countries that pulled similar moves weren’t just OK with Facebook and Google just not serving news. They know they get their traffic from social media sites now, they just also want to be paid on top of that for some reason.
All news sites can be accessed directly without facebook. I quit both twitter and facebook but I never stopped reading the news.
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It’s actually a lot better to just go to the news sites.
Not true at all. Being from a small community, news is pretty well only reported by the local CTV news reporter. Said reporter was maintaining his own Facebook page, and through that I could zero in on his content that is relevant to where I live.
If I go to CTV directly, there is no way to get only the local news. It’s mixed in with news about places hundreds of kilometres away. News about a place hundreds of kilometres away has little relevance to my life. If you dig deep you can find the local news somewhere in there, but unless you work as a full-time researcher, who has that kind of time?
Maybe said reporter will create his own website in the wake of this – but at the same time, maybe he doesn’t have means to do so. There isn’t a lot of money in being a small town reporter. Facebook made that accessible to most with little investment and to those with little technical knowhow.
Maybe CTV will smarten up and build a website that is more usable. But not likely, as why bother trying when you can just go crying to the government?
But as it stands right now, the only thing keeping us abreast in the local news is that he is posting to X. But presumably it will go the same way, or, more likely, end up bankrupt in the near future.
Ping him to start RSS/Mastodon/Lemmy, then?
Then we’re back to needing technical knowhow. These are not approachable services to the common man. Lemmy is hilariously unusable. Us nerds are willing to put up with it because it is something to geek out on, but why would a small town CTV reporter who has better things to do than fumble around on a computer all day? I’m sure he gets paid the same whether or not he markets his work independently of CTV.
Moreover, what’s the point? Even if he has the technical knowhow, or is willing to put in the effort to gain it, the rest of the population doesn’t. And they are going to care even less. It is not like news is exactly seen as being valuable. If it were, we wouldn’t be here talking about how the news industry is suffering. If it is just for me, he may as well give me a phone call when he has something new to share.
He’s a journalist, not some average Joe. Adapt or die.
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I think this is a nuanced situation. On one hand, the government let this slide for a long time, and too many people became reliant on Facebook for their news. I believe it’s very important for people to have the ability to be informed on the world around them. We should be spreading awareness about these things for people who apparently forgot.
On the other hand, it’s Facebook. Facebook is also not exactly known for being unbaised or truthful. Provably false things have no business being passed off as news, regardless of what side of the coin you’re on. Information is power. We deserve the truth.
We can still use news websites, news apps, FOSS sites like lemmy, the newspaper, watch the news on TV stations, etc. Why are so many people acting like this is the end of all free information? It it really that difficult for people to find another source? I can almost guarantee that you can list 4 or 5 news outlets from the top of your head. If you visit their pages, they will still get their ad revenue. They never got that revenue before because of Facebook.
It’s also another situation where people expect other people’s labour for free. It’s becoming grating. Why are we defending a billion dollar company expecting this from small local companies? Journalists have to eat, too. If it was an easy, time-relaxed job, everyone would be a journalist. It’s almost irritating that so many people expect them to permanently lose out on their hard earned money for the sake of saving people the effort of a few different clicks.
Where is any of this anger or frustration towards Meta, the billion dollar company that refuses to pay for these articles? Meta could have negotiated, but decided to just shut it down instead. Why are we cheering on a profiteering company from the US over our own local news sources?
Some people will argue “they’ll get less clicks now”, but I’d argue that many of those clicks just sent people through an amp-website that mainly benefitted Meta. I’m kind of suprised to see these posts on a FOSS- heavy community, to be honest. I though not having one corporate overlord was kind of the whole point.
I would honestly recommend for anyone in another country to also use another source for news. Think about it, what would you do if Facebook stopped it all tomorrow, or shut down entirely? Would you still have access to information about the world around you to the extent that you do now?
Should you trust Facebook that much?
The big picture might be nuanced, but link taxes aren’t. They’re a ridiculous way to try and solve a problem.
Would it be fair to charge a phonebook for listing the mailing address of a business/person? No. Mailing addresses are just bits of information that describe where to find something. Same with links.
If a business wants to make money from people going to their physical location, they stop you at the door and ask for a ticket. They don’t go after phonebooks for telling people where they’re located.
Facebook is blocking news, not journalism specifically.
But The Beaverton isn’t “news” either, it’s literally fiction. If The Beaverton is “news”, then so is some fanfiction blog with ads on it. So is every web comic.
Ultimately, it’s really just that FB/Meta don’t want to pay people for content. They want to get paid.
Categories like “journalism” or “news” are just BS terms used to cover what they’re doing.
The Beaverton is mostly based on the news, so one can glean what is news from that fiction.
Every article shared by The Beaverton is blocked on my feed now, which I think is hilarious.
go to https://translate.google.ca/?sl=auto&tl=en&op=websites
put in the url and translate from english to english
put that url in fb
Is this an image album?
It only displays one image (presumably the first one?) on Jerboa. If not for the (1)/(2)/(3) I’d have no idea.
@Darkassassin07 it’s a post from Mastodon cross-posted into Lemmy. Only the first image got captured.
You can see the original post here with all three images https://cosocial.ca/@boris/110851857883747625
