322
Canadian government suspends advertising on Meta-owned platforms Facebook and Instagram
(nationalpost.com)
What's going on Canada?
π Meta
πΊοΈ Provinces / Territories
ποΈ Cities / Local Communities
π Sports
Hockey
Football (NFL)
unknown
Football (CFL)
unknown
Baseball
unknown
Basketball
unknown
Soccer
unknown
π» Universities
π΅ Finance / Shopping
π£οΈ Politics
π Social and Culture
Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage:
Remember when companies had to PAY to get listed in the phone book, pay for for being discovered with ads?
WTF should google PAY news companies for posting links to them?
I can absolutely see good reason to have to pay for "content" such as images and summaries that may lower the number of clicks through to the news paper, but having to pay for every link is just absurd and as much as I have no love for FB or Google they are doing what is reasonable from their point of view.
https://www.davidgraham.ca/p/an-interim-proposal-for-media-subscriptions
https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2023/07/amac18/
Then all you have to do in order to see it through the other lens is to think content when you see link in this context. We know that the platforms don't do linking as in
<a href=...>Click here</a>
. They all embed titles, summaries, pictures and sometimes whole pages. I think the conversation about linking in this context is a straw man. It's not about linking. Then overlay how profits are generated around it. The analogies fall apart and the problem emerges. In the end it comes down to profit or wealth redistribution and priorities. For a while money has been flowing away from news and into platforms. We need to shift money back from platforms to news. If the platforms paid reasonable taxes, maybe we could redistribute it from there to the news. Except platforms don't pay reasonable taxes. In this case it's either coming out of citizens pockets, a new net subtraction, or it's gotta come from the platforms' pockets. We seem to have made the right choice to take it out of the platforms. We're going about doing that.Mind you, the conversation about the accessibility of quality news content across the classes of society is distinctly separate from this and worth having. Depending on how much we are able to get from the platforms back into the news, we may be able to decrease the cost of access for everyone. If you're concerned about that, you should be rooting for higher numbers rather than lower.
There isn't a trivial way to get those without media companies going out of their way to provide the information. If I go over to that article on nationalpost.com, I see multitudes of OpenGraph tags, such as
<meta content="Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram" property="og:title"/><meta content="https://smartcdn.gprod.postmedia.digital/nationalpost/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Pablo-Rodriguez-1.jpg" property="og:image"/>
. OpenGraph, to be clear, is a protocol created by Facebook to standardize how web pages appear on their platform. If National Post wants links to their content to look like your example, that is entirely in their hands. Heck, it's less work.(Of course, they won't do that, because that would be stupid. They'd rather make an embarrassing attempt to extort Facebook for free money because they have realized advertising is doomed and they don't know what to do about it).
Advertising seems to be making tons of money for Facebook. Do you not have a guess why it no longer does for news?
With all the talk about "they're free to paywall", are we going to consider market power imbalance here or are we pretending it doesn't affect these actions?