16 Comments
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ivalley's avatar

Yeah, I don't care about FB at all. I only use/have it as a tool to reach out to my readers. Period.

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Andrew Reilly's avatar

It's hilarious. Best possible outcome, in my opinion. Facebook should focus on its knitting: friends and family catch-up.

What's much more hilarious is the level of bleating on supposedly sensible media (including and especially the ABC: probably others but I'm not aware of them...)

The number of people who seem to think that (to take an example from The Conversation) VicHealth or the BoM vanishing from Facebook is somehow equivalent to it vanishing from the web, which of course it hasn't. Still there, same as ever.

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Marc D's avatar

...bleating...sensible media...

yes, the BBC enthusiastically joined the ‘bleat-mob’

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Elana Mitchell's avatar

Yep an organisation I volunteer for had its page caught up in the ban, probably because we share a lot of 3rd party news and articles from our website on current issues. We seem to be back up and running though, so the Zuck's minions are sorting through the innocent bystanders pretty quickly.

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Marc D's avatar

“Bunch of vested interest moguls and their pet politicians throw tantrum” says one talking-head “Facebook needs to understand that people are concerned that, in this country [uk] 50% of advertising is through FB. That’s unacceptable “.

Well, to the big media companies seeing FB eat their lunch, perhaps.

Sympathy for ‘media’ = 0

Support for FB? Hell they don’t need it. They let the massive, truly ginormous user base do the talking..and the engaging.

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insomniac's avatar

I am in general agreement. Facebook can tweak their filter to allow community or health pages, but stuff everybody else. Why should Facebook pay Nine because Nine posted some news on their Facebook page? Just go straight to the source if you want news or weather or whatever. Facebook have made a commercial decision. I'm just a little annoyed the Labor party got caught up in the gubbermunt's faux outrage, instead of saying 'so what'.

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bob gibson's avatar

my main bitch is that , the muppets , rorters , rapists and coal fondlers in government are OUR muppets , in theory we can vote them out ! policy dictated by a foreign mega corporation is not a good thing .....

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Therbs's avatar

Tiniest violins being played here at the moment on this one. Not an FB clicker so its pretty irrelevant to me. The whole exercise was probably just a click bait thing writ large.

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Michael Barnes's avatar

I think I read something on twitter from Asher Wolf about this?

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Dave W's avatar

I am kind of confused on this thing. I agree that content creators should be reimbursed by entities that profit from their work. I thought that's what this shitstorm was about.

But then I understand that the ABC and SBS are not covered by it. If so, is it some kind of cosy deal between the Gov and the commercial players?

But yes, I'm on the zucherbox and still don't care if this helps to screw it.

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Elana Mitchell's avatar

I think the key point that is being very carefully glossed over by the government and the big media players is that FB and Google provide TONS of traffic to the media players' websites, so why should they pay the media majors' for all that free advertising? Arguably it's the other way around...

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Andrew Reilly's avatar

What makes you think that _any_ of the money that Nine/News are able to extort from Google (but not Facebook now) is going to go towards journalism, rather than, say, fatter dividend outflows?

As usual, Benedict Evans has a masterful analysis up on his blog this morning. Good to get some of the international perspective too.

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Dave W's avatar

Agree, the money could go anywhere, but so could any of their revenue.

I need a reliable primer on this issue. Badly.

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Andrew Reilly's avatar

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/2/17/paying-for-news

This one's also good, as is "The Regulator's Dilemma" from a little earlier:

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/1/17/speech-and-publishing

Bernard Kene in Crikey is one of the few that's been publishing sane takes on it since pretty early on. Here's today's: https://www.crikey.com.au/2021/02/18/facebook-media-ban-bluff/

There have been many, many words written on the subject, but for sheer obtuseness the drafts of the bill itself are an interesting read. In particular, the government thought that it was very clever by defining news as anything that Australian citizens might reasonably be interested in for contemporary debate, which is probably why Facebook has chosen to play on the cautious side by removing everything that even smelled a bit like it had been sitting next to some news.

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dweeze's avatar

Totally their choice. As is mine to not play their game. Can't miss what I never had.

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The Rhino's avatar

They can, agreed. I just hope that their choices cause them to die.

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