I hit my first instance of Meta blocking Canadian news content.
Rachael sent me a story from #CBCVancouver via Instagram messages.
The thumbnail is visible in messages (1), but when I click, I get the restricted message (2)
I wasn’t following the CBCVancouver account, and when I search for and visit the profile, I get a different message (3)
I guess Rachael hasn’t had this rolled out to her account yet.
Remember, there are no good guys in this #BillC18 debacle.
We disagree on this point, I think the news orgs are the good guys.
Why? Because groups like Meta are profiting from scaping the site without compensation. It’s not like Meta is simply showing the headline and thumbnail, they are showing some of the content from the article itself.
Meta’s not giving free promotion, they are profiting off of the content of others.
Edit: it looks like the information that Facebook shows is consensual via “Open Graph”
The bill penalizes Meta even if they link but do zero scraping. Regardless though, news organizations can breathe a sigh of relief as Meta is terminating the totally one-sided relationship where only Meta benefited at news organizations’ expense.
Now if only more people would terminate their relationship with Meta and move to social media services where individuals have a say in how things are shared and monetized.
> they are showing some of the content from the article itself.
They are showing the content found in the
og:descriptionmeta tag, you mean. The “og” bit stands for Open Graph, which is a protocol developed by Facebook so that news sites can define the content they want Facebook to show.If news sites don’t want Facebook to display this information, they could stop providing it via Open Graph. Again, Open Graph was created exactly to give publishers control over what Facebook shows when linking to their resource. A quick check of the major sites in Canada reveals that Open Graph use is omnipresent and that they are quite welcoming of Facebook using their work.
Funny, that.
I wasn’t aware of Open Graph, thanks for bringing it up
How do you feel about Lemmy bots that summarize articles in the comments?
Issue is the same for the media but there’s no advertising revenue for the social media platform, in the end it’s still shitty for the content producers.
There’s no “gotcha” there.
The real issue is how social media intentionally changed the way we consume that content. Attention span has drastically went down since Facebook released and time spent on websites that aren’t Facebook as well. In the end Meta gets the advertising money and people who click to check the articles don’t stick around long enough to be profitable.
Facebook brings traffic to these sites. News does not bring traffic to Facebook. There’s only one side profiting from sites like Facebook sending them traffic and it isn’t Facebook. There’s a reason why most (I want to say all, but I can’t swear to that) countries that pulled similar moves weren’t just OK with Facebook and Google just not serving news. They know they get their traffic from social media sites now, they just also want to be paid on top of that for some reason.