The demographics of this site have changed so much that people here are applauding… that it is now illegal to embed opengraph information on Facebook? This is deranged. And it only happens because the government is in bed with legacy media. The government being in bed with the media is awful for the common person.
Embedding opengraph data is a clear case of fair use, and it’s sad to see all of this coming from a community that has long been against copyright.
Its because the rightsholders instead of treating copyright to advance the arts and sciences and acknowledging that fair use exists, instead use it to nurf creativity under guise of drowning you in a hypotheitical neuanced multi year litigation that will cost millions, if you feel your use is within your right.
People are now upset because since that was the status quoe for so long it got people to believe that they if they made a song, and all they saw was copyright, and copyright sues for everything and wins, and someone heard that song in the background while inventing a microwave they are entitled to all the microwaves earnings, and before if you said no thats absurd, you had to spend millions to see if the system didnt fail you.
And now people are spending millions to prove that it is absurd, and everyone is up in arms that someome called their bluff with resources.
>The demographics of this site have changed so much that people here are applauding
I don't think it has. Meta has been pretty much hated on HN since the beginning. And has only gotten worse and peaked during 2020. It is not about linking information, it is about Facebook.
The commenters here used to be able to separate their disdain for Company X from the actual subject of importance.
Disliking Facebook shouldn't have you supporting government overreach. Defending people or groups you don't like is how you know you have actual convictions.
The article is talking about a link tax, or put another way: Italy forcing a website to pay for the privilege of referring traffic to the referees who benefit from the additional traffic when their mutual users link to news sites.
The only reason this is getting applauded by anyone is because the enforcement target is Facebook and years of the news media using their voice to complain loudly and religiously about their business competition (social media) has primed the pump for bad laws like this.
They only show what the website gives them through opengraph tags. If the site doesn’t want to give up that information they can remove the opengraph tags. Even still, fair use should allow Facebook to summarise the contents of the link if they wanted to (but they don’t do that).
In what sense is Meta a monopoly? It seems like they have a huge amount of competition in the form of Google (YouTube), Microsoft (LinkedIn), Reddit, X, Snapchat, Telegram, TikTok, Signal, etc.
But they're also prioritizing news sources with such snippets, which forces publishers to have them or lose traffic to competitors, because Facebook is taking advantage of a dominant position in the market.
That's what they're arguing about, it's literally the same thing that happened with Google news (and was negotiated) years ago.
Are they putting a thumb on the scale to prioritize them, or are users organically deciding that they are more interested in them? The former I agree would be concerning, but I hadn't heard of this happening before and the article doesn't seem to engage in this level of detail.
I don't think it's the demographics that have changed, but the state of the internet, and the awareness that big tech's stranglehold over our media is a problem.
Of course the likely end result is going to be that legitimate news will disappear from Facebook and there will only be misinformation left. I'd rather see them address the spread of misinformation instead of the spread of quality news.
> awareness that big tech's stranglehold over our media is a problem.
The legacy consolidated news organizations getting a sweet free new revenue stream are glad that they've been able to convince so many people that big tech linking to them is actually a "stranglehold" and a problem!
Well, while I am not saying this is incorrect, I also fail to see why US mega-corporations should proxy-control europeans.
I trust neither involved side here, ever since the EU tries to push for age snifing and abolishing VPNs. At the same time US corporations ruin a LOT of the world wide web, and that continues. I don't think we need to accept this anylonger. Out with them.
>I don't think it's the demographics that have changed, but the state of the internet, and the awareness that big tech's stranglehold over our media is a problem.
The less charitable interpretation is that interest groups are just harnessing the current kneejerk reaction for anything anti-"big tech" to serve their own interests. See also: people being theoretically in favor of affordable housing, but are also against "greedy developers" and "luxury condos" so nothing gets built.
In the 90s, the business model was bundle the news with classifieds (classifieds were the main profit source for print newspapers, inline ads only covered the cost of paper, ink and distribution). The web unbundled news and classifieds, and we have been without a working business model ever since.
You're gonna have to expand on that. I'm not going to pull out my credit card to subscribe to every random small town paper or TV station that might have a newsworthy story I want to read every 5 years. Also, almost every news site I read is drowned in advertising, visual cruft and dark patterns (eg autoplay video that are deliberately annoying to close in order to maximize play time), and I don't know what a site is going to serve before I click on it.
Isn’t Facebook just as full of ads that can’t even be blocked by uBO? When I log into the FB account I haven’t really been using in more than a decade, it’s 99% “sponsored” stuff, ads and reels. Really I could scroll through pages and pages of things I never chose to have in my feed before I see any post from a friend.
At least on a news website I get to read just the news and can block the ads.
My Facebook feed is like 90% posts from local news and radio stations that I don't follow. I rarely see ads, just people posting ragebait comments under those local news articles.
The ads are "Sponsored" posts which are ads for anything you can think of. The rest are posts from pages I never liked or clicked on. Most have stupid names like "This is the best thing I've seen in at least 5 or 6 minutes" and post almost exclusively memes, a few are pages like Wccftech or XDA because FB remembers 15 years ago I clicked on them.
The pattern I noticed just now is that for every sponsored post there are exactly 2 "non-ad" posts, usually both from random pages, but occasionally 1 of those posts will be from one of my real connections. Here and there there are some reels. My feed is 98% noise I don't care about nor want to see and no combination of ad and script blocking helps. It's worse than any news site.
> My feed is 98% noise I don't care about nor want to see and no combination of ad and script blocking helps. It's worse than any news site.
I agree. I click on some of the news articles I see, since they're usually local to me, but it's still noise. I didn't actually follow any of those pages so I don't know why Facebook puts them in my feed (well, I do know why: some corporate schmuck A/B tested it and found it eked out more engagement on the level).
Why ? When the alternative is to let companies to whatever makes the number go up at the expense of everyone else, regulation is the only thing to protect normal people.
You are not protecting "normal people". These types of laws are nothing but attempts at rent seeking by dying legacy media companies that were too incompetent to figure out working digital strategies on their own. And they would already be dead without the traffic that big platforms like Meta and Google are sending their way.
If you send traffic to some e-commerce platform through an affiliate link, you are the one who gets paid. These companies are instead trying to rig the system in such a way that the affiliate would be forced to pay them. It's an absurd and desperate proposal that deserves to be rejected.
Oh enough already. 99% of 'new media' is complete ass - clickbait, sensationalist drivel, opinion masquerading as fact, or all 3. Blogging and the rise of 'citizen journalists' has led to very little journalism but vast amounts of information pollution.
While you might not like the legacy media, the fact is they're still doing some work. That work needs to be reimbursed?
If Meta and co create their own content, they're free to do with it what the like. I need to pay google maps for a certain amount of useage etc. Why should Meta and co get an exception on content ?
>If you send traffic to some e-commerce platform through an affiliate link, you are the one who gets paid. These companies are instead trying to rig the system in such a way that the affiliate would be forced to pay them. It's an absurd and desperate proposal that deserves to be rejected.
This isn't what is happening. People read the summarized headline/article on meta's turf and then don't go to the source article. If meta were just posting the link, it would be fine, but that isn't what is happening here.
Should HN links be compensated on a percentage of non-click-throughs? There are people who just come for the comments. Would you support this law being universal and not only applied to Meta/news?
They are in Australia, and it’s probably safe to assume this law would be pretty similar to ours. In our version, Part 52B explicitly renders these three things as being exactly the same for the purposes of the law:
(a) the content is reproduced on the service or is otherwise
placed on the service; or
(b) a link to the content is provided on the service; or
(c) an extract of the content is provided on the service.
Which quite literally means that they consider a post that only contains hyperlink (b) or a link and only a title (even just the title would fall under (c)) to be as bad as a social media site ripping off the whole article!
This was the same conflation used by the supporters of the law and pretty much every news article about it before it was passed, basically all of which dishonestly claimed that social media sites were doing (a) when they were mostly only posting a title and sentence or two synopsis (that is supplied by the news site itself in its meta tags!!)
Meta doesn't have to pay for the links. It's the summaries. I suspect the publishers would welcome the links, as they'd drive traffic and ad revenue. Instead, Meta is siphoning the revenue by summarizing the content.
Did I hallucinate several years of discourse about volunteer work on the internet should be paid? And that lefty types were yelling about how billionaire corps should compensate volunteer work because they clearly had money?
Those conversations have definitely happened and while I have no clue what the lefty types settled on, in my opinion such internet volunteers should lose money.
Meta does this in Canada. These same media outlets need to be funded by the government to survive, and as such treats the government with kid gloves, very little criticism, deflection, bias etc.
So I’d say that deal is working well for both the legacy media & the Canadian government.
Canada passed a similar bill a few years ago causing meta to stop showing Canadian news content on their platforms. It didn’t really impact them financially or user wise. So the same thing will probably happen in Italy.
Canadian news might've been easier to replace with American news outlets due to the deep ties between the two and the shared language. I doubt this would be the case for Italian news.
No, ads make them money. Users see the ads because they view their feeds.
It’s been proven in other markets that removing News from the feed doesn’t decrease engagement. Meta will continue to make money, and Italian news sites will see their traffic vanish.
Turns out they’re simply not valuable in the way they used to be, and country after country is learning this
It so nice to see megacorps not being allowed to whatever they like as in the US. The EU has regulations and standards. If you don't follow them you can't just try to sue the body. Just follow the rules like you're supposed to. It's quite simply really.
You certainly can sue: "The ruling comes after Meta sued Italy’s national telecommunications regulatory agency (AGCOM) in Italian court in 2023"; that's the normal process for disputing regulatory rulings. Doesn't mean you'll win though.
I'm very much in two minds about this because "news" is not a morally neutral category in itself, such as with similar laws benefiting News Corp in Australia, but it's clear that Meta/FB is a much worse unrestrained actor.
I am not a facebook user, but going by that post they seem to go a step further and outright block any links pointing to news sites. The article mentions some provisions in the Italian law that prohibit restricting visiblity of the news sites, at least during negotiations, so that kind of salted earth move could backfire .
Yes, meta took the salt-the-earth approach. Rather then allow users to post links and meta not summarize the content, meta is now destroying its own value for Canadians.
These hypercorps and their CEOs act like giant fucking children, and rather than abide by a ruling being told to play fair, they just decide to take their ball and go home.
Good riddance. The sooner social media dies, the better off humanity will be.
If Meta refuses to back down and removes news from the feed, could that actually be a net positive? It might push people to visit newspaper sites or apps deliberately, rather than stumbling across news passively and mistaking that for being informed.
The demographics of this site have changed so much that people here are applauding… that it is now illegal to embed opengraph information on Facebook? This is deranged. And it only happens because the government is in bed with legacy media. The government being in bed with the media is awful for the common person.
Embedding opengraph data is a clear case of fair use, and it’s sad to see all of this coming from a community that has long been against copyright.
Its because the rightsholders instead of treating copyright to advance the arts and sciences and acknowledging that fair use exists, instead use it to nurf creativity under guise of drowning you in a hypotheitical neuanced multi year litigation that will cost millions, if you feel your use is within your right.
People are now upset because since that was the status quoe for so long it got people to believe that they if they made a song, and all they saw was copyright, and copyright sues for everything and wins, and someone heard that song in the background while inventing a microwave they are entitled to all the microwaves earnings, and before if you said no thats absurd, you had to spend millions to see if the system didnt fail you.
And now people are spending millions to prove that it is absurd, and everyone is up in arms that someome called their bluff with resources.
Reading the article and the court ruling, it seems to me that the reference to Open Graph here is beside the point.
>The demographics of this site have changed so much that people here are applauding
I don't think it has. Meta has been pretty much hated on HN since the beginning. And has only gotten worse and peaked during 2020. It is not about linking information, it is about Facebook.
The commenters here used to be able to separate their disdain for Company X from the actual subject of importance.
Disliking Facebook shouldn't have you supporting government overreach. Defending people or groups you don't like is how you know you have actual convictions.
The situation has changed a lot since then, so peoples attitudes have shifted accordingly.
The article is talking about a link tax, or put another way: Italy forcing a website to pay for the privilege of referring traffic to the referees who benefit from the additional traffic when their mutual users link to news sites.
The only reason this is getting applauded by anyone is because the enforcement target is Facebook and years of the news media using their voice to complain loudly and religiously about their business competition (social media) has primed the pump for bad laws like this.
You can go back and view the threads on Bill C-18 and see the change in attitude
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37353770
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35134751
What's changed is that people are so focused on harming Meta that they're willing to set a precedence for a link tax.
I think they should be able to show the link, and like a normal one sentence link text, but not a large snippet, images, etc
They only show what the website gives them through opengraph tags. If the site doesn’t want to give up that information they can remove the opengraph tags. Even still, fair use should allow Facebook to summarise the contents of the link if they wanted to (but they don’t do that).
Sure, but then proper monopoly laws would ban most of what meta does.
In what sense is Meta a monopoly? It seems like they have a huge amount of competition in the form of Google (YouTube), Microsoft (LinkedIn), Reddit, X, Snapchat, Telegram, TikTok, Signal, etc.
Sue through those, then.
Making insane laws prohibiting people to talk about facts they've seen elsewhere won't help.
Where does Meta have a monopoly? TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, etc. all compete with it
They are displaying the snippet and image the website is giving them for a preview.
But they're also prioritizing news sources with such snippets, which forces publishers to have them or lose traffic to competitors, because Facebook is taking advantage of a dominant position in the market.
That's what they're arguing about, it's literally the same thing that happened with Google news (and was negotiated) years ago.
Are they putting a thumb on the scale to prioritize them, or are users organically deciding that they are more interested in them? The former I agree would be concerning, but I hadn't heard of this happening before and the article doesn't seem to engage in this level of detail.
I don't think it's the demographics that have changed, but the state of the internet, and the awareness that big tech's stranglehold over our media is a problem.
Of course the likely end result is going to be that legitimate news will disappear from Facebook and there will only be misinformation left. I'd rather see them address the spread of misinformation instead of the spread of quality news.
> awareness that big tech's stranglehold over our media is a problem.
The legacy consolidated news organizations getting a sweet free new revenue stream are glad that they've been able to convince so many people that big tech linking to them is actually a "stranglehold" and a problem!
Well, while I am not saying this is incorrect, I also fail to see why US mega-corporations should proxy-control europeans.
I trust neither involved side here, ever since the EU tries to push for age snifing and abolishing VPNs. At the same time US corporations ruin a LOT of the world wide web, and that continues. I don't think we need to accept this anylonger. Out with them.
>I don't think it's the demographics that have changed, but the state of the internet, and the awareness that big tech's stranglehold over our media is a problem.
The less charitable interpretation is that interest groups are just harnessing the current kneejerk reaction for anything anti-"big tech" to serve their own interests. See also: people being theoretically in favor of affordable housing, but are also against "greedy developers" and "luxury condos" so nothing gets built.
Why not just build affordable housing instead of luxury condos, you're creating a weird false equivalence.
Good for these news corps , bad for consumers. Free News websites almost 100% consist of ads trash .
What a perverted logic. Like Meta won't bury you in ads and spy the living shit out of you while you're using.
Adding link tax doesn't change any of that.
> Free News websites almost 100% consist of ads trash .
Most folks don't want to pay for news, but how do you pay journalists so you have an informed citizenry/electorate?
In the 90s, the business model was bundle the news with classifieds (classifieds were the main profit source for print newspapers, inline ads only covered the cost of paper, ink and distribution). The web unbundled news and classifieds, and we have been without a working business model ever since.
Donation.
You're gonna have to expand on that. I'm not going to pull out my credit card to subscribe to every random small town paper or TV station that might have a newsworthy story I want to read every 5 years. Also, almost every news site I read is drowned in advertising, visual cruft and dark patterns (eg autoplay video that are deliberately annoying to close in order to maximize play time), and I don't know what a site is going to serve before I click on it.
Isn’t Facebook just as full of ads that can’t even be blocked by uBO? When I log into the FB account I haven’t really been using in more than a decade, it’s 99% “sponsored” stuff, ads and reels. Really I could scroll through pages and pages of things I never chose to have in my feed before I see any post from a friend.
At least on a news website I get to read just the news and can block the ads.
My Facebook feed is like 90% posts from local news and radio stations that I don't follow. I rarely see ads, just people posting ragebait comments under those local news articles.
The ads are "Sponsored" posts which are ads for anything you can think of. The rest are posts from pages I never liked or clicked on. Most have stupid names like "This is the best thing I've seen in at least 5 or 6 minutes" and post almost exclusively memes, a few are pages like Wccftech or XDA because FB remembers 15 years ago I clicked on them.
The pattern I noticed just now is that for every sponsored post there are exactly 2 "non-ad" posts, usually both from random pages, but occasionally 1 of those posts will be from one of my real connections. Here and there there are some reels. My feed is 98% noise I don't care about nor want to see and no combination of ad and script blocking helps. It's worse than any news site.
> My feed is 98% noise I don't care about nor want to see and no combination of ad and script blocking helps. It's worse than any news site.
I agree. I click on some of the news articles I see, since they're usually local to me, but it's still noise. I didn't actually follow any of those pages so I don't know why Facebook puts them in my feed (well, I do know why: some corporate schmuck A/B tested it and found it eked out more engagement on the level).
Does this mean HN will have to pay for all the links too? Tired of this overregulation
> Tired of this overregulation
Why ? When the alternative is to let companies to whatever makes the number go up at the expense of everyone else, regulation is the only thing to protect normal people.
You are not protecting "normal people". These types of laws are nothing but attempts at rent seeking by dying legacy media companies that were too incompetent to figure out working digital strategies on their own. And they would already be dead without the traffic that big platforms like Meta and Google are sending their way.
If you send traffic to some e-commerce platform through an affiliate link, you are the one who gets paid. These companies are instead trying to rig the system in such a way that the affiliate would be forced to pay them. It's an absurd and desperate proposal that deserves to be rejected.
Oh enough already. 99% of 'new media' is complete ass - clickbait, sensationalist drivel, opinion masquerading as fact, or all 3. Blogging and the rise of 'citizen journalists' has led to very little journalism but vast amounts of information pollution.
While you might not like the legacy media, the fact is they're still doing some work. That work needs to be reimbursed?
If Meta and co create their own content, they're free to do with it what the like. I need to pay google maps for a certain amount of useage etc. Why should Meta and co get an exception on content ?
Why don't you just subscribe to these newspapers and give them a read instead of demanding other tax payers subsidize their business?
>If you send traffic to some e-commerce platform through an affiliate link, you are the one who gets paid. These companies are instead trying to rig the system in such a way that the affiliate would be forced to pay them. It's an absurd and desperate proposal that deserves to be rejected.
This isn't what is happening. People read the summarized headline/article on meta's turf and then don't go to the source article. If meta were just posting the link, it would be fine, but that isn't what is happening here.
Should HN links be compensated on a percentage of non-click-throughs? There are people who just come for the comments. Would you support this law being universal and not only applied to Meta/news?
HN links are not article summaries, so your question is not apt.
Do you think Meta is asked to pay for the titles?
They are in Australia, and it’s probably safe to assume this law would be pretty similar to ours. In our version, Part 52B explicitly renders these three things as being exactly the same for the purposes of the law:
(a) the content is reproduced on the service or is otherwise placed on the service; or
(b) a link to the content is provided on the service; or
(c) an extract of the content is provided on the service.
Which quite literally means that they consider a post that only contains hyperlink (b) or a link and only a title (even just the title would fall under (c)) to be as bad as a social media site ripping off the whole article!
This was the same conflation used by the supporters of the law and pretty much every news article about it before it was passed, basically all of which dishonestly claimed that social media sites were doing (a) when they were mostly only posting a title and sentence or two synopsis (that is supplied by the news site itself in its meta tags!!)
Fair enough. Wonder what Italians want to do. I searched briefly and all I could find was "content", which I assumed were actual extracts.
Meta doesn't have to pay for the links. It's the summaries. I suspect the publishers would welcome the links, as they'd drive traffic and ad revenue. Instead, Meta is siphoning the revenue by summarizing the content.
Why not? We the posters are providing free content and views and exposure for a VC fund worth billions of dollars.
Why are we not getting kickbacks?
Because you're doing it voluntarily.
Agree. But, sadly, we live in a world in which so often what is obvious needs to be stated.
Did I hallucinate several years of discourse about volunteer work on the internet should be paid? And that lefty types were yelling about how billionaire corps should compensate volunteer work because they clearly had money?
Something starting from Reddit mods?
Those conversations have definitely happened and while I have no clue what the lefty types settled on, in my opinion such internet volunteers should lose money.
Sometimes but I've never seen commenting counted as work.
I don't know if you read it but I've never heard such a thing and i do read the lefty sites sometimes.
Sounds ridiculous, but yes. They earn "something" via their exclusive advertisement spots here.
I guess the daily active users are something else though.
Why won't Meta just stop showing Italian news now?
Meta does this in Canada. These same media outlets need to be funded by the government to survive, and as such treats the government with kid gloves, very little criticism, deflection, bias etc.
So I’d say that deal is working well for both the legacy media & the Canadian government.
Yes
Why do they show Italian news before?
Because it makes them money.
Canada passed a similar bill a few years ago causing meta to stop showing Canadian news content on their platforms. It didn’t really impact them financially or user wise. So the same thing will probably happen in Italy.
Canadian news might've been easier to replace with American news outlets due to the deep ties between the two and the shared language. I doubt this would be the case for Italian news.
All news links are blocked on FB in Canada, including American sources
Soon they can only show US news. Then they become irrelevant to the rest of the world.
No, ads make them money. Users see the ads because they view their feeds.
It’s been proven in other markets that removing News from the feed doesn’t decrease engagement. Meta will continue to make money, and Italian news sites will see their traffic vanish.
Turns out they’re simply not valuable in the way they used to be, and country after country is learning this
It so nice to see megacorps not being allowed to whatever they like as in the US. The EU has regulations and standards. If you don't follow them you can't just try to sue the body. Just follow the rules like you're supposed to. It's quite simply really.
You certainly can sue: "The ruling comes after Meta sued Italy’s national telecommunications regulatory agency (AGCOM) in Italian court in 2023"; that's the normal process for disputing regulatory rulings. Doesn't mean you'll win though.
I'm very much in two minds about this because "news" is not a morally neutral category in itself, such as with similar laws benefiting News Corp in Australia, but it's clear that Meta/FB is a much worse unrestrained actor.
But there is real, broad competition between news outlets.
I'm also not happy that news organizations get special exceptions. It is very easy to construct cynical motives:
- Politicians need the news so journalists are protected.
- If news organizations get paid, they have no incentive to be AI critical.
The article says that "news are vital". So is open source, films, images, art, and the authors do not get paid by the thieves.
> The article says that "news are vital". So is open source, films, images, art, and the authors do not get paid by the thieves.
"Vital" does not merely mean "important".
I view it as protecting a group of producers from a monopoly (or at least dominant) buyer.
They already did this with Canada.
Meta decided to stop showing news links in Canada. [1]
Presumably, it would choose the same thing here.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/sureshsingaratnam/posts/so-meta-is-...
Yes, that was a great move. I wish Meta would do the same in all countries. I don't go to Facebook to read news.
> Yes, that was a great move. I wish Meta would do the same in all countries. I don't go to Facebook to read news.
Lots of news organization saw their traffic drop though, and this reduced revenues. (Not judging either way, just noting some effects.)
I am not a facebook user, but going by that post they seem to go a step further and outright block any links pointing to news sites. The article mentions some provisions in the Italian law that prohibit restricting visiblity of the news sites, at least during negotiations, so that kind of salted earth move could backfire .
Yes, meta took the salt-the-earth approach. Rather then allow users to post links and meta not summarize the content, meta is now destroying its own value for Canadians.
These hypercorps and their CEOs act like giant fucking children, and rather than abide by a ruling being told to play fair, they just decide to take their ball and go home.
Good riddance. The sooner social media dies, the better off humanity will be.
If Meta refuses to back down and removes news from the feed, could that actually be a net positive? It might push people to visit newspaper sites or apps deliberately, rather than stumbling across news passively and mistaking that for being informed.