Meta's Canada News Ban Fails To Dent Facebook Usage (reuters.com) 116
Meta's decision to block news links in Canada this month has had almost no impact on Canadians' usage of Facebook, data from independent tracking firms indicated on Tuesday, as the company faces scorching criticism from the Canadian government over the move. From a report: Daily active users of Facebook and time spent on the app in Canada have stayed roughly unchanged since parent company Meta started blocking news there at the start of August, according to data shared by Similarweb, a digital analytics company that tracks traffic on websites and apps, at Reuters' request. Another analytics firm, Data.ai, likewise told Reuters that its data was not showing any meaningful change to usage of the platform in Canada in August. The estimates, while early, appear to support Meta's contention that news holds little value for the company as it remains locked in a tense standoff in Canada over a new law requiring internet giants to pay publishers for the news articles shared on their platforms.
Maybe it's for the best (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Maybe it's for the best (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm usually not on Meta's side on any issue. But in this case, the law is absolutely absurd. It's absurd in principle (why should anyone be required to pay for giving someone else free traffic?) but what people don't understand is the insanely broad nature and scope of the law.
To put this into perspective, my wife and I are planning a vacation to Walt Disney World in 6 months and even a Facebook page called "Disney World Updates" is subject to the ban. That's how broadly scoped it is.
And while I certainly wouldn't trust Facebook itself for news sources, I did follow a local independent news outlet's page as a convenient way to get updates on local events in my city. I can't see their posts or their page anymore. That wasn't "the algorithm" feeding me Global Affairs news from CNN or NBC ... that was very local stuff that I looked to find out about summer festivals and things. Do I need Facebook for that? No. But it's no one's business if that's the tool I chose, nor can I think of any justification for The Online News Act. It's one of the most ill-conceived and ill-written laws I have ever heard of.
Re: Maybe it's for the best (Score:2)
Curious, does the scope even extend to newspapers putting their content on YouTube, and then fecebook users linking that YouTube video?
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in this case, the law is absolutely absurd.
The one the government down here in Brazil is trying to approve is even more insane.
It's being modeled after the Canadian and Australian one, while also "fixing" their shortcomings. How are they fixing it, you ask? Well, they're wording the law such that social media sites must pay for links to news sources and are forbidden from blocking news sharing. It also establishes that the bigger a news source is, the more it's paid compared to smaller news sources, so as to best protect huge incumber media conglome
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why should anyone be required to pay for giving someone else free traffic?
Because it wasn't free traffic. It was rendered in the Facebook page, with their ads, creating load on the news providers servers and providing nothing in exchange while generating revenue for Facebook.
The law is accomplishing its goals whether Facebook pays or not. If they don't pay, it will increase traffic to the news sites and generate ad revenue there. If they do end up paying, then the news sites get fair remuneration for their content.
The interesting metric isn't whether or not Facebook is losing
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> Because it wasn't free traffic. It was rendered in the Facebook page, with their ads, creating load on the news providers servers and providing nothing in exchange while generating revenue for Facebook.
"Rendered", you mean a quick embed preview which every site does. Also "providing nothing", except you know, an opportunity to reach eyeballs and could click. If you want to argue clickrate, do so. But don't pretend there's no value to having a link to your website on more popular websites. That's ju
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> So, what, your argument is that social media platforms like Facebook are little more than link aggregators?
I mean, that's what they are ultimately. You subscribe to a news organization's page like you would your friends, and you see their status updates which are a bunch of links to their stories.
> You say that as if they haven't invested billions of dollars into UX, HCI, psychology and behavioural experts creating dark patterns
What does that have to do with this story ? I also hate Facebook's "Su
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The interesting metric isn't whether or not Facebook is losing traffic, but whether the news providers are seeing more.
That is absolutely correct. No one knows what effect Meta blocking news on Facebook is having except for the news outlets. One interesting signal, however, is how loudly the news outlets are complaining about Meta blocking news on Facebook. If this is win-win, they don't have much to complain about. In this case they want their cake and to eat it too.
Because it wasn't free traffic. It was rendered in the Facebook page, with their ads, creating load on the news providers servers and providing nothing in exchange while generating revenue for Facebook.
A little bit of context here is in order. First, if this is a problem, there are very easy remedies that don't involve passing a law forcing " digital news int
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It comes down to a difference of opinion over when fair use applies to copyrighted material.
An individual showing their friend a headline and byline is definitely fair use. A friend showing 100 of their friends a snippet from a newspaper, with only minimal comment and original work surrounding it, is starting to look questionable. It gets even murkier if they are profiting from it in some way, such as how Twitter now shares ad revenue with some users.
And what of the company providing the platform for all th
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> Fair use wouldn't protect a company that simply copy/pasted chunks of articles from other newspapers
Ironic considering a lot of of news companies simply republished what the AP or Reuters vomits out.
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AP gets paid though.
Re: Maybe it's for the best (Score:2)
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Re:Maybe it's for the best (Score:5, Interesting)
From what I'd read about the issue the problem was how Meta, and the other tech companies, were doing it. Apparently when you followed the link to the article using the built in browser it would replace any advertisement shown with their own ad content, or would inject ads if there wasn't any, effectively profiting off of someone else's work without license.
While you no doubt read exactly that, it isn't a reflection of reality.
There was no ad hijacking going on here.
Facebook was reproducing news summaries on their own website, which facebook users read by nature of being on facebook already.
Most of those users do not click the links to the original articles.
It is literally identical to Slashdot in that regard. People come to slashdot to read the summary and most never click any of the links to the articles.
Note how slashdot does have ads too! It may be nothing more than a counter on your adblocker, but the point is the ads are there.
Slashdot is not ad hijacking anymore than facebook was like you claim.
The law was meant to compensate Canadian news agencies where this was happening as they were losing the revenue for any ads they might have had on their sites. Rather than maintain an ever changing list of Canadian news organizations, then tracking which ones were linked and figuring out who they needed to pay, Meta simply decided to "comply" by going scorched earth and block the ability to share / link all news items within Canada.
That claim is arguable at best. Never believe what a government says a law was "meant to" do. Look at what the law *DOES*
There is no maintaining a list or paying sources. This is a fee paid to the government, regardless of your use of Canadian news.
Under this law Slashdot has racked up a huge bill. No, they haven't linked to any Canadian news sources, nor is that required.
*WE* are discussing the news, here in the comments, with no links at all. That is the only legal requirement.
Slashdot just has no reason to care as they don't operate in Canada and so can safely ignore it.
THAT is why Facebook had to ban even the mention of Canadan news by their users.
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In fact, Slashdot is probably worse - the “summaries” that Facebook displays are generated by the external site being linked to in the first place, through the use of meta tags.
The news sotes themselves tell Facebook what title, image, summary and other information to display - Facebook then displays it whenever someone pastes that link into a post or comment.
So if the news sites are complaining that Facebook is giving away their content, its only because they are enabling it - they can reduce o
Re:Maybe it's for the best (Score:5, Insightful)
Your entire premise is just not true. Facebook did not high jack anything. It didn't replace ads. It did exactly what all other news aggregators do. Allowed for a news agency to themselves link to stories and share them with users of Facebook.
If you clicked the links, it would bring you to the news agency's website, where they could serve up their own ads to generate revenue.
The reality is this : most news has become stale, agency drivel, and most often just wrong on most topics. People's faith in news is gone. And people just don't click the links anymore, give a glance at the headline and then just roll their eyes.
That's why Facebook hasn't seen a user drop from doing this. People just don't care about news. The law just robbed news agencies of a few free clicks they could get. Literally the law has harmed those it sought to "protect" because of misunderstandings about the tech like you just said you "read about". They were warned, they ignored actual knowledgeable folks, and probably relied on the same "experts" that have sunk trust in News so low.
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The problem is that companies start to hire everyone at this wage
It's even worse than that. Something is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. That includes labour. If a business was willing to pay for a particular position, but then the costs of filling that position rise above what they were willing to pay for it, then the position can disappear entirely. Examples of this type of thing are having employees on staff to bag groceries, carry groceries to cars etc. These are the types of thing that may be worth paying a teenager $5 / hour to do but at $15 / hou
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Let me introduce a law, by which you are not allowed to drive faster than 10kmh. If you have a business that relies on drivers to move goods around and because of this law now your business is unsustainable, that is because your business model is bad.
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Well that's what minimum wage was supposed to be, a very low wage for someone starting out.
It only means that now after decades of corporate propaganda designed to eliminate the concept of the minimum wage. Minimum wage, when first implemented, was meant to provide the minimum a person needed to live a decent life and provide for their families.
Decades ago you could buy a house, a car, and go on a decent vacation once or twice a year on minimum wage. You also need to keep in mind that when introduced the single income family was common and the minimum wage allowed a single income earner to prov
That's pretty much why it didn't affect usage (Score:1)
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I don't read facebook for the news, I read it to see what my friends are up to.
I hear that Canadian PM Justine Trousseau still reads FB, looking for hookers, now that the divorce has been announced.
After all, a guy/gal still has certain needs.
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JT don't need to pay, he's a thirst trap for a lot of ladies.
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I don't read facebook for the news, I read it to see what my friends are up to.
Pretty much this. People aren't getting their news from Facebook.
That being said, I don't agree with rent-seeking laws designed to prop up buggy whip manufacturers who refuse to modernise. So this is good news.
Data from independent tracking firms? (Score:2)
So the survey's population is only the subset of phone users who have other apps with the tracking code.
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Law if (Un)intended Consequences (Score:4, Informative)
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Some already do. You get a message that because of GDPR, page cannot be displayed in your location when viewing from a known EU based ip address.
Actual change required is exceptionally easy though, unless you want to slip in some really invasive tracking. So when I get a page that tell me that, I can reliably tell that these are the people who anally probe you so much that you probably should avoid visiting said site in general. To add to this, there are easy one click software packages that are available t
Re: Law if (Un)intended Consequences (Score:5, Insightful)
Forcing the people who are the primary target of propaganda apparatus to pay for your totalitarian propaganda apparatus is in fact one of the core functions of every Communist party that ever existed.
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It's actually hilarious that you think the Canadian government are communists. Right now they are acting on behalf of the capitalists who own the media in Canada.
It's early days, and an evolving area of law. Along with AI companies trying to claim they can use any and all material to train their products, I doubt we have seen the last attempt to modernize and apply copyright law to tech.
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Query above:
>Oh boy, it may be a lot of things, but what part of paying for the news, or making companies pay other companies for a service they provide - or stop using it, is COMMUNIST?
>You know who gets free news? Communists.
I answer with a short explanation that Communists in fact do this as a matter of routine..
And you project that explanation onto Trudeau government. And then melt down because of the shadow you yourself cast.
I applaud you good sir. Truly, your hatred shines through with your ever
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I answer with a short explanation that Communists in fact do this as a matter of routine..
Lunkyo: Making a company pay to link to another company's work if they choose to do so is communist
Also Lunkhead: Nobody should have to pay for news
So how does the capitalist media operate in Lunkistan, please do tell, comrade.
The People... that choose to look at the news of their own free will and volition... pay for it? Like Facebook.
How do you breath air and be that stupid.
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You really are a phenomenally ideologically captured individual aren't you?
Not only are you utterly blind to the fact that every Communist party that ruled a nation creates a propaganda bureau specifically aimed at controlling, financing and producing news specifically aimed to further said party's goals, but you're also blind to the fact that "linking to someone's work" is nothing more than pointing and saying "this thing is here".
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Forcing the people who are the primary target of propaganda apparatus to pay for your totalitarian propaganda apparatus is in fact one of the core functions of every Communist party that ever existed.
What?
What are you talking about, what propaganda, nobody is making Meta carry anything. Facebook can choose to link exclusively to stories in whatever Canadian Playboy is if they want to, and comply with the law. They can link anything they want, and pay for it.
Are you really that dumb?
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There was a question in your previous post. Sure, it was a question that demonstrated your utter lack of knowledge of history combined with extreme ideological capture. But it was a question nontheless. And one I chose to answer.
If you don't like the answer, don't ask the question.
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> or making companies pay other companies for a service they provide
Then the law is upside down. It should have forced News companies to pay Facebook for the privilege of sharing their links with the wider Meta userbase.
Facebook provided service to news companies, not the other way around, except maybe in Soviet Russia.
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> or making companies pay other companies for a service they provide
Then the law is upside down. It should have forced News companies to pay Facebook for the privilege of sharing their links with the wider Meta userbase.
Facebook provided service to news companies, not the other way around, except maybe in Soviet Russia.
Content producing companies don't provide a service to Facebook. Reeeeeeaaalllly. That's your take? I suppose we should all have to pay for Facebook, because of the service it provides. But no, that would be communist.
I can't even...
Hah (Score:4, Insightful)
Canadian and I have no love for Meta, but yeah, there is no tense standoff.
Meta basically called Canada out on its BS law, and now Canada is either going to back down when they realize they have no leverage and will probably face the same from other big platforms, or this will just be a thing on all platforms and the content creators this aimed to help will be absolutely fucked.
Media will get Paid Somehow (Score:2)
Canada is either going to back down ...[or] the content creators this aimed to help will be absolutely fucked.
Don't count on it. Trudeau relies on bribing the media with other people's money to make himself look good. I suspect that if this fails to deliver money to his media friends it will get replaced by a tax of some sort that he will use to fund media. This would at least be more transparent about government funding media (and all the serious problems that raises) than this current attempt to hide behind Meta which has not worked out at all well.
Why would it? (Score:5, Insightful)
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This law was created because the news sites pushed for it. The push was not from the government. Similar laws are being passed in other countries as well. [wikipedia.org]
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This law was created because the news sites pushed for it. The push was not from the government.
True, but since when has stating facts got in the way of a good anti-government rant?
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It's also important to realize that some news agencies are publicly funded, for instance the CBC, in that case they shouldn't be allowed to have these kind of blocks in place. The CBC is public news, but now the public can'
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And the law isn't even in force yet
There is no reason to block the news. The law doesn't come into play until much later - it's enabling the CRTC to figure out what to do.
Google isn't blocking any news links yet - they're just making profit off them because otherwise that's leaving money on the table. They only announced they will.
Meta is doing it because
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Aim was to Pay Publishers (Score:2)
The Canadian government is still getting what they want.
I disagree. What they wanted was to use someone else's money to pay the media so it will be strongly in the media's best interest to make the government look good. After all, if all the news makes them look good why would they care if people discuss it?
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I, for one, hate Facebook because they subjected the world to React and GraphQL. Not because I have any issue with their social media service.
Captain Obvious' latest discovery (Score:5, Insightful)
People don't visit Facebook to be informed. They visit Facebook to learn about their cousin's latest bowel movement, learn their favorite rapper's opinion on Calvin Klein underwear and say hello to Grandma at the retirement home.
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to learn about their cousin's latest bowel movement
While I don't much care about my cousin's bowel movements, I did find this funny mainly because I only typically use Facebook when I'm at work making a bowel movement because when one's gotta go poop they might as well do it at work that way they get paid.
But it's getting the newspaper all that big bucks (Score:2)
Or not. They're expecting Facebook and Google to subsidize their work.
No, they are going out of business, thankfully. (Score:1)
bravo! (Score:2)
i, for one, am grateful to these canadian overlords!
who said politicians were useless? this is comedy gold. and now they're throwing "scorching criticism" at meta ... fucking hilarious!
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Need more... (Score:1)
Impact on news sites? (Score:4, Interesting)
The real question is: what is the impact on the news sites? How much traffic have they lost?
Whatever impact Facebook's ban has had, multiply by 10 if the search engines also follow through.
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If? Google (~93% market share in Canada) has already announced that they will block links to news sites in search results once C-18 comes into full effect around the end of the year. No other search engine has a large enough market share to fall under C-18's rules.
This is very much a monkey's paw scenario for Canadian news organizations. They lobbied for a bill that makes it illegal for social media and search engines to link to their content without paying, so social media and search engines stopped linkin
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If I can use Google to search for CBC or CTV or whatever, do I care that it doesn't aggregate the top 3 stories on the main search page? If I want to know anything I'll have to click a
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According to C-18 (https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-assent), Google will not be able to allow "access to the news content, or any portion of it", and the front-page of news outlets does contain a portion of the news content. Namely, headlines, photos, and blurbs. As such, Google will not be able to return links to the CBC or CTV main page if you search for CBC or CTV, as that would require them to negotiate payment. CBC and CTV could, of course, turn their main pages into landing p
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Facebook did the same thing in Australia, then reversed course. [wikipedia.org] Can anyone here compare the Australian law to the Canadian law? I wonder if it will go the same way.
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I don't know a ton about the "News Media Bargaining Code" in Australia, but I believe that one crucial difference between that law and the Online News Act here in Canada is that in Australia there is a regulatory body of the government that decides which news outlets apply and which do not. In Canada, there is no such regulatory body (we have the CRTC which has some role to play but they do not get to decide who applies and who doesn't). So basically, under the statue in Canada, various publishers and outle
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Super informative, thanks!
Clearly the ban wasn't broad enough! (Score:2)
Rather than target Facebook, they should have targeted Chrome. Clearly Chrome derives huge value from being able to open news websites - Google should pay for that, or Chrome should not be able to open news sites!
That will surely make the news companies very happy.
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opt in (Score:1)
where do I opt-in to this "awesome new feature"???
I've been using the FB Purity extension... (Score:2)
So I never saw anything but things my friends posted or groups I'm a member of anyway. If I wanted news I'd go to a news site. If I want to share a link I just cut it into "https://" "URL" ".domain" and let people select and right click the URL if they want to follow it.
The Only News in Cananda (Score:4, Funny)
Junkies... (Score:2)
Slightly annoying is all (Score:2)
Canadian FB user. I use FB to keep in touch with friends and family and to get booked on comedy shows. I certainly don't use it to look for news.
It is slightly irritating that FB doesn't let you share news links because sometimes there's something interesting or funny I want to share, but meh... it's not a big deal.
The one time I really wanted to share a news story, I used a technical means to circumvent Facebook's block. I'm not going to give the details lest FB catch on. So I might use that techni
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> circumvent Facebook's block. I'm not going to give the details lest FB catch on.
Facebook doesn't actually care. They only blocked what they legally had to block. Unless the Canadian government complains, there is no motivation for them to concern themselves with your circumvention of the block.
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Mandatory Bargaining (Score:2)
"The Canadian regulator responsible for implementing the country's online news law said on Thursday that it would start setting up a framework for negotiations between news organizations and internet giants this autumn, with the aim of initiating mandatory bargaining by early 2025."
So, Facebook decides to not carry news in Canada, so now the Canadian government is going to *force* them to deal with news outlets? Facebook has said they are not interested in news.
I find this whole things sort of strange (Score:2)
I'm not the biggest fan of Facebook by a long shot, hell I don't even use it. I'm not even sure I understand the ins and outs of this, my assumption was that platforms would have to pay for content they aggregated and projected in some what which didn't offer the user any meaningful reason to head over to that new sources site at all.
The way I read the headline makes it sounds more like a user sharing a link to a news article is blocked. That doesn't sit well with me. for at least two reasons right off t
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> I'm not even sure I understand the ins and outs of this,
The ins and outs is that a bunch of politicians with 0 knowledge of the Internet thought they could regulate the Internet and gouge Facebook into buying something they didn't need. Now news in Canada is blocked from Facebook.
> First, the user is able to grab a link to the content. Therefore the publisher intended on it being shared.
That is exactly what Facebook is doing, you cannot post a link to a story on a news website anymore. The content
Re:Bad news - pro sources will still be visible on (Score:5, Informative)
Canadian here. I just checked. Breitbart is subject to the ban. Their FB Page shows no posts and a message saying:
People in Canada can't see this content
In response to Canadian government legislation, news content can't be viewed in Canada.
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> I'm assuming that Breitbart and others are not subject to the ban?
Breitbart has better news than the Toronto Star anyway. Most Canadian news is just fluffing Trudeau. Literally the CBC sued the conservative party. That tells you how neutral they are.
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That's still a pretty low bar. "This low grade propaganda is worse than that slightly higher grade propaganda".
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> "This low grade propaganda is worse than that slightly higher grade propaganda".
All modern news (and probably older news as well) is biased trash akin to propaganda. None of them can stop themselves from inserting their political agendas and personal bias in their reporting. None of it is "hard hitting" or "investigative", it's all surface level factoids with no context, cherry picked to paint a picture the journalist personally wants you to see.
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There are degrees to propaganda however. And there still is some hard hitting and investigative journalism.
It's just that most of it is sadly exactly what you talk about. Here's my view on it from a few days ago:
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]