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Facebook Says it Doesn't Need News Stories For Its Business and Won't Pay To Share Them in Australia (theguardian.com) 32

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Facebook has rejected a proposal to share advertising revenue with news organisations, saying there would "not be significant" impacts on its business if it stopped sharing news altogether. From a report: On Monday, the social media giant issued its response to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which has been tasked with creating a mandatory code of conduct aimed at levelling the playing field. The treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, told the ACCC to develop a code after multiple Australian media companies and regional newspapers cut jobs, or folded entirely, as a result of advertising downturn during the Covid-19 pandemic. Facebook and Google have previously refused to accept they needed to pay for using news content. In its submission to the watchdog, Facebook said it rejected many of the ACCC's potential ideas, and said there was a "healthy rivalry" between itself and news organisations. The social media giant said it supported the idea of a code of conduct between digital platforms and news publishers, but that itself and Google were being "singled out" unfairly. Facebook also said it could cut out news completely without any significant impact on its business.
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Facebook Says it Doesn't Need News Stories For Its Business and Won't Pay To Share Them in Australia More

Facebook Says it Doesn't Need News Stories For Its Business and Won't Pay To Share Them in Australia

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  • Good.

    If they're not going to pay for what they use, not using it is the right solution.

    • Facebook is a traffic generator (Score:5, Insightful)

      by brunes69 ( 86786 ) <slashdot@keir[ ]ad.org ['ste' in gap]> on Monday June 15, 2020 @11:23AM (#60185492)

      News sites get a lot more from Facebook sharing their stories, that Facebook gets out of it.

      If Facebook and Google stop "using" news publishers, those publishers will very quickly go out of business.

      • The news companies should absolutely know what is up also, they know where traffic comes from. I wonder when they will take a look at the numbers and just give Facebook a free license in perpetuity for content... that's what I would do were I news organization there, and then let the other companies try to compete against the only one Facebook was showing news from...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by xonen ( 774419 )

          But as thanks for the traffic they welcome visitors with cookie blocker nag screens. No wonder visitors don't really bother coming or staying.

          Which they wouldn't have to (in the EU zone). No-one obliged a cookie screen, if the site only uses functional cookies. That includes you, /.

        • IIRC the EU made laws to specifically prevent this. Or was it just France? Either way individual publishers can't give Google or Facebook a free license. Probably so small news sites don't get an "unfair" advantage. Gotta make sure only the big, government-friendly ones get a piece of the pie.

      • Quote: "If Facebook and Google stop "using" news publishers, those publishers will very quickly go out of business."

        Real World: Google Spain stopped "using" news publisher and... no one of the those publishers have gone out of business...

        Could you PROVIDE PROOF of your affirmation, please?

        • Re:Facebook is a traffic generator (Score:5, Informative)

          by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Monday June 15, 2020 @01:24PM (#60186108)

          Is this the same Spain where the consortium of news papers had called on the government to stop Google from shutting Spain out? The same Newspapers who admitted publicly that the result is detrimental to the news industry? https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com] I mean here we have the very organisation who lobbied for the law saying "no please stop we made a mistake".

          Or maybe there's this study here: https://siepr.stanford.edu/sit... [stanford.edu] Let me save you time I'll quote the conclusion:

          "Our analysis documents a large, positive effect of Google News on small outlets, as well as on
          the ability of consumers to access certain types of news, such as breaking news or news that
          is not well covered on their favorite outlets. These findings highlight the large potential for
          welfare benefits from improved search and discovery, the “upstream” or complementary role
          for an intermediary"

          How about some Spanish numbers from https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/de... [tse-fr.eu]

          "They finnd that treatment users have 19.7 percent higher consumption in terms of pageviews
          in the pre-shutdown period compared to control users, including their consumption of the Google
          News home page.

          Or the disparity between major news publishers and the smaller already more at risk ones:

          They find that the effect of Google News on the top 20
          outlets is not statistically different from zero as the positive effect on articles cancels out the
          negative effect on landing pages. By contrast, smaller outlets gain as much as 26.3 percent from
          the presence of Google News: the landing page traffic is unaffected but article pageviews increase
          by 44.6 percent.

          Or maybe some hard data from Germany where the law only required opt-in for long summaries and those who opted out get reduced to a picture, headline, and summary statement, that alone resulted in:

          "But when they focus on the 10 outlets Axel Springer controlled, which are part of the
          VG media outlets, they find a negative and significant reduction in daily visits of around 8%
          in Axel Springer outlets relative to all other German outlets."

          So let's end with a thought experiment: You're a small news outlet facing an existential threat. You're on the verge of bankruptcy. Is your genius idea: "Hey, know what we should do? Piss 20% of our revenue down the toilet for shits and giggles!"

          By the way that's an interesting claim that "no one" of those publishers have gone out of business. Can you provide us an exhaustive list of news publications from pre-2014 and post 2014 so we may verify this? Your turn to provide proof.

      • I've actually thought for a long time that social media could be greatly improved if they just blocked the sharing of links all together. That would make it a lot harder to engage in these endless echo chambers and fighting and get rid of all that click bait nonsense.

        The exact problem with fake news today is that so many people use social media for news and so many people on there "share" things without even reading them.

      • ummm no they don't. The news outlets are all going broke so they are definitely not getting more out of the deal, at least not significantly so. I don't think much of the plan but the reality is the news outlets are folding under the current model both in Australia and generally world wide. Now I am not suggesting this is all google and Facebooks fault or problem, but suggesting facebook and google help them survive is just ridiculous as they are NOT surviving.

    • They did not use it and never wanted to use it.

      Instead what happened is the idiot papers wanted an inducement to look at their web sites so they gave it away for free with NO restrictions on who could use it or how.

      Then they got upset when other people picked it up and used it as an inducement to look at another website.

      So they passed stupid laws to fix the problem instead of changing their websites. Mainly because they thought they could trick people into paying for something that they were giving away

    • If they're not going to pay for what they use

      There's this thing called fair use which is generally what sharing a headline, one summary sentence and a link to the original site falls under. In other news I just quoted 55% of your entire post, and you're not getting a dime from me.

  • People should not be getting ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by CaptainDork ( 3678879 ) on Monday June 15, 2020 @11:22AM (#60185484)

    ... news from cat video platforms.

    News sources exist outside the SM silos.

    • Re:People should not be getting ... (Score:4, Funny)

      by Nidi62 ( 1525137 ) on Monday June 15, 2020 @11:28AM (#60185512)

      ... news from cat video platforms.

      So are you calling Cat News Network fake news?

    • Re:People should not be getting ... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Monday June 15, 2020 @01:05PM (#60185994)
      Most of you haven't run a company so haven't run programs to gauge the effectiveness of advertising (e.g. putting a different coupon code in different ads to measure response rate, or requesting customer surveys to determine how they learned about your business). I can't speak for large companies (i.e. the ones who run national ad campaigns on TV), but for the small businesses I've worked at, roughly half our customers learned about us via word of mouth.

      That's really what's going on when people spread news stories through social media. Word of mouth - people are telling each other what they find interesting. And given that it's so much more effective at spreading (mis)information than targeted advertising, I doubt you can stop the trend of people getting their news from social media. It's not something new either. It's something they used to do when talking to each other in person or on the phone, and now technology has enabled a new way for them to do it. That is, people already used to get their news via word of mouth before, it's not something new with social media. The only difference is that social media has allowed us to trace and measure its spread for the first time, whereas before we had no clue about its effect because it was happening in private conversations.
  • ...they are 10 levels below worst tabloid.
    • But according to Dante, there are only 8 levels of hell. :-P

      • Uh, no, there's nine, unless you're not counting Limbo, which some people don't, but Dante did (virtuous pagans; their only sin was not receiving Christ's salvation and their only punishment was that they didn't get to be in heaven).

        Circle One: Limbo (virtuous pagans)
        Circle Two: Lust
        Circle Three: Gluttony
        Circle Four: Greed
        Circle Five: Anger
        Circle Six: Heresy
        Circle Seven: Violence
        Circle Eight: Fraud
        Circle Nine: Treachery

  • News belongs in the public domain.
    And that being Covid19 releases, protests and others stories that will be also at other sources.

    Now op'ed, and stories that are developed strictly within the agency, then they get a discussion about compensation.
    • Clearly you earn your living doing something other than journalism. Let's go with your instinct and extend the public domain to ALL software ever created. Sorry, developers, your work is now free for everyone.

  • A large amount of advertising move from newspapers to Facebook, Google and other online platforms. That includes things like classifieds and movie listings which used to subsidies the news gathering within newspaper companies. Now those ads have moved online, often where they cost advertisers little or nothing.

    Google and Facebook provide links to news site, but they make very little money from it. There are no ads on Google News and searches for news rarely have ads.

    • That's really interesting. It's not that we are getting our news from Facebook or Google, we simply don't spend as much time on the news as we used to. In which case it makes sense that there is less advertising money going to the news publishers, because there is actually less of an audience. The online platforms are not necessarily stealing anything, they are simply diverting people's attention away from what we used to use to fill our time.

  • Not unless they're held to the same standards as actual news organizations. That would mean users would be forbidden to act as journalists unless they're held to the same standards as journalists.
    What I'd prefer to see is Facebook being limited to only 'social' content: grandparents sharing grandchildren photos, talking about your vacation in the Bahamas, and so on. No political or news content of any kind. Basically, excise the cancer completely; curettage of 'social media'. Get it back to it's roots.
    Nev
    • It is already clear that a good sized portion of "content" circulating down the loo known as Facebook is contrived, outright false, designed to be inflammatory, and just generally salacious. Everyone looking at the turds in the bowl should know what they are gazing at by the smell emanating from Face-uckerberg's back end.

      • It is already clear that a good sized portion of "content" circulating down the loo known as Facebook is contrived, outright false, designed to be inflammatory, and just generally salacious.

        The term you're looking for is 'trolling'. Comes in all sorts of different flavors, too.

        ..Face-uckerberg..

        Personally I prefer 'Zuckerbook'. Rhymes with 'Fucker'.

  • We don't need news! (Score:3)

    by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Monday June 15, 2020 @01:11PM (#60186036)

    Who needs news when you can just make it all up!

  • We don't want or need Amerikkka centric news in Australia. FB only allows news organisations in its feed that fit its purposes. And those organisations decide what is important and what kind language to use.

  • Newspapers, TV and radio used to have a monopoly on people's attention. That's just not true any more. The fact they published "news" alongside their advertising doesn't necessarily mean that news is all we were ever interested in. The modern world of media consumption seems to prove that point. These days there are countless forms of media that we can stuff in our brains, much of it never available via a printed newspaper. Bottom line is that while newspapers used to be one of the few ways you could reach

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