Meta is ending its deals to pay for Australian news content. This is how it could change your Facebook and Instagram feeds

How often do you think people ask Google a question, either to the assistant or just in the search bar and get served the answer scraped directly into the search results, and never need to actually click into the article at all?

The thing is, you can't copyright facts. If Google takes an article and gives you its entire contents, that's copyright infringement and we don't need a new special law to stop them doing it. If their article is so devoid of insight that a brief snippet and the title (which probably qualify under our Fair Dealing laws—our nearest equivalent to America's Fair Use) are enough to deter people from clicking, it probably didn't have much of value to begin with. And they're even better-protected if they're extracting key facts from the article without quoting verbatim, such as the Knowledge Graph does.

The problem with this law is that it completely ignores the fact that Google and Facebook are actually providing value to these news organisations. People very rarely choose to go to a news site directly. They search for something on Google and click the relevant link, or they find things that people and pages have posted links to on Facebook. You take away a source from Google and that company loses a huge chunk of its business. If Facebook has to pay to send people to news organisations, those organisations are double-dipping. They're making money from their regular revenue stream (advertising or paywalls) and making money on the side by grifting Facebook. It's a model that makes absolutely no sense if you think for one minute about what's actually going on.

should have a right to claim a cut of the advertising or not have the information shown.

Seems like Facebook is not going to show their content. Guess they'll see if that brings more or less people to their site. And seeing as they're already complaining, I think they already know the answer.

This. Freebooting is a huge issue and Meta made it a big thing and profits from it.

A video or image goes viral. Creator has it on a platform where they can monetise or benefit from the views. Some chucklefugg at a content network like ladbible takes it, strips watermarks and logos, posts it on their own Facebook page. Facebook makes money off the adverts on that page.

Original creator is deprived of clicks, and likely revenue, dutifully completes a DMCA on their stolen content. Maybe a day or two later Meta takes it down. They don't care, they still made money. Ladbible got a few thousand more subscribers to make impressions on their promoted posts, which nets then more money. The virality of the content has passed, the original creator doesn't even get 1% of the same clicks and even less credit for their work.

Now multiply the number of content networks by about 500. Some of whom are fully automated with no human intervention.

This is not okay, and Meta should be held to task for creating a financial incentive for people to do this.

Yes - there’s a problem. Why is Meta the company that should fix it? They are not, and never have been, a news platform.

Meta is all about letting people communicate with each other. Obviously sharing news is one use case for that, but it’s not even close to the primary one.

Also as an Australian… virtually all of the local reporting is behind a paywall. So it literally can’t be shared on social networks (not legally anyway - any distribution there would be copyright infringement).

Why should Meta pay for content that their users can’t even access? It’s ridiculous.

when they first started being plagiarised

But they're not being plagiarised. They're being linked to. If you start saying "no, people can't post links to us", that breaks the entire foundation of the Web.

I agree completely that they've been far too reliant on Google and especially Facebook lately, and that investing in their own platforms that they control would have been a much smarter strategy. I just view this as a tangential concern to the one of link taxes.