A key part of this legislation is the requirements for tech companies to provide selected news organisations with advance notice about changes to ranking algorithms. This has been generally overlooked in the reporting and discussion but I believe it is the actually the most important part of the legislation. It will give the selected news organisations an enormous advantage over other companies not included and protect them from new competitors, basically entrenching the current media landscape for the foreseeable future.
Given the current Australian government's cosy relationship with a particular media company that currently dominates the media landscape here, I don't think it is coincidence.
It's even broader than that. The law applies to any "alterations to the ways in which a service distributes content". The law never actually defines what this means, but it gives a bunch of examples that go beyond ranking. For example, anything that affects a particular "class of content", such as deciding whether or not to make all videos auto-play, is an alteration.
Basically, this law would prevent Facebook from deploying just about any non-trivial change to its product without first doing a detailed analysis of how it would affect the Australian news business, in order to determine whether a notification is required.
Thanks for highlighting this. The initial reporting and FB’s own blog posts do not make this clear. Even running experiments at scale could be problematic with the way this is written (interpretation as a non-lawyer).
Google has been busy making major deals with news organisations. Facebook has chosen the opposite track. The problem Facebook has is government in Australia is wildly popular because of the pandemic. They can do what they want right now it won't lose them any votes. Ministers are already telling Facebook to leave the country completely!
I would not call the federal government “wildly popular”. Most people are (rightly, IMO) laying our pandemic success at the feet of state politicians and realising that the federal level had been ineffective at best.
Australia does have competitive federalism, and so many of the localised decisions have been from the states, but the major decisions for seeding - closing borders, acquiring vaccines, etc, along with fiscal backstopping - are federal.
The federal government (under ScoMo) has never polled so well as it has during covid, and for good reason.
(NB: I am no blind Coalition supporter, but they have made decisions which are very popular, and no amount of directing attention to the states would absolve them from blame if we had a situation more like Europe or the US.)
The United States has land borders with two countries: Canada and Mexico. However these are NOT considered to be major sources of Covid infection in the U.S.--instead it has been China and Europe. The U.S. could have set up controls eliminating people movement by air as easily as Australia did--but it failed to do so.
This is an artefact of bad testing in non-developed countries.
You should assume it's ten or twenty times worse than the figures show, AT LEAST, in any countries that aren't fully transparent and rich enough to test widely.
Facebook and Google have not taken opposite tracks; Google hasn't made deals to pay for linking, a major problem with the legislation. Google's deals are around news content, but FB lacks comparable products to negotiate deals around, leaving them with only a refusal to pay for linking.
Yup, and given that we have largely managed the pandemic extremely well as a society with a competent government that has a publicly funded health care system, I think it's unlikely that Facebook preventing us from reading the news via Facebook is much of a concern.
We were a large consumer of news before Facebook. We will be a large consumer of news after Facebook.
That’s not a fair characterisation of GDPR, nor one borne about by examples.
And 2020 put pause to any Australian brain drain and given how well we’ve handled the pandemic, is likely to be seen significant increases in net migration.
I actually suspect that new news carousel product they launched might be related. If they push news articles onto the carousel, they can apply a different algorithm to the carousel.
Honestly, I think that makes sense and it doesn't immediately strike me as a negative for either side. These are articles coming from trusted sources. There's no need to apply the anti-spam parts of the algorithm. News agencies get a more stable algorithm, Google gets to keep their secret sauce.
There is still an advantage to the incumbents. Those carousels are usually in prime real estate. Google would hold the keys to who is in the carousel though, so they could expand it without legislative changes. I like the flexibility, though I don't love handing Google the keys to more kingdoms.
The only problem I have with this requirement is that it requires giving only news organizations access to this information. Your concerns can adequately be addressed by ensuring everyone has even access to that information.
Google and Facebook's algorithms should be required to be publicly disclosed. As a society, we should demand that we are able to see the algorithms that every web property lives and dies based on, that lives are built and destroyed by.
These algorithms are not human readable code. They are massively complex interconnected systems of many black box ML models. I don't understand what clarity people think releasing the "algorithms" will bring. In fact, describing ranking as a single algorithm is pretty misleading.
As you say, explaining the intracicies of the algorithm is a fools errand. I guess it is more reasonable if you turn it around: these changes have drastic impact on businesses, so there is a duty to behave responsibly in administering them.
If Google really has no idea what the impact of a change will be then it is fairly irresponsible to make that change given the real world harm it can cause. But I suspect in general it does have at least a reasonable idea what the effect of changes will be - that is why it is making them.
So the more reasonable version of this is that they need to submit human interpretable descriptions of the effect of changes based on reasonable evidence and validation of their models.
Monitoring search engine and social network ranking and filtering updates should be more efficient than complaining about biased parrots (language models). This is a tip to certain ethics researchers who are raising scandals about search bias, but not in the right place - go in the field, check the fucking feeds, leave your abstract ethical tower and measure the reality.
Instead of trying to argue the gender bias in "doctor - man + woman == nurse" (abstract ethical argument) they should check the search results for bias (concrete, measured effect).
In many cases they (Google) don't know the impact of changes until they try deploying the changes, and there's ML in the picture, not just algorithms. As I understand it, they often run tests that expose the change to a limited subset of users first.
Yes, but they don't just do random stuff. They make changes with the intention to adjust the experience in certain ways, so making those intentions public is important.
I also believe any algorithm that isn't human-readable should be banned. If it can't be understood, nobody can validate that it isn't racist, sexist, or slanted towards encouraging violence and harm.
The fact that technology companies have been grossly negligent and irresponsible isn't a reason to not regulate them: It's proof regulation needs to be much, much stronger.
This is an incredibly naive perspective. I guess you want to ban search engines, self driving cars, automated filtering of lewd and abusive content (why do you think FB isn’t full of porn? It’s not a hand engineered algorithm), automatic speech recognition for the hearing impaired, and a vast swath of important technology I didn’t list. I don’t think you really understand the implications of what you’re asking for. Sorry - black boxes are here to stay. And they are immeasurably useful. I could spend hours listing important and crucial technologies that you want banned because you are scared of racism.
> I agree with you but I am still scared of racism.
My suspicion is that the concern with machine learning over racism is rooted in two things. The first is just the general modern trend of accusing anything you don't like of being racist, because everybody hates racism and wants to fight it. And the second is the fear on the part of people who make a living fighting racism that machine learning might actually put them out of a job.
Because machine learning is basically a paperclip optimizer. You tell it to maximize a thing, it maximizes the thing and minimizes everything else. Racism isn't paperclips, so the paperclip optimizer will optimize for smashing it in favor of making more paperclips. And then they're out of business.
Because when you look at the criticism of this stuff, it generally looks like this. ~12% of the population is black, only ~5% of the selected applicants are black, the algorithm is accused of racism.
But nothing is that simple, because all kinds of things like income and education level and so on correlate with race, so you have to take all of those things into account before you can tell what's going on. And taking into account all of the available data is how machine learning works.
Which isn't to say that you couldn't make an algorithm racist. Tell it to optimize for applicants with a particular skin color and it does. But then your problem isn't with the algorithm, it's with the jackasses who asked for that.
What to optimize for is a much more general and difficult question. (Hint: Not paperclips.)
> My suspicion is that the concern with machine learning over racism is rooted in two things. The first is just the general modern trend of accusing anything you don't like of being racist, because everybody hates racism and wants to fight it. And the second is the fear on the part of people who make a living fighting racism that machine learning might actually put them out of a job.
I don't get to how you go from this statement, to then again explaining exactly how racism is embedded in algorithms. By using the biased data we have in the real world...
It isn't the data that's biased. If you're hiring a computer scientist and disproportionately few black people have a degree in computer science, the data is not lying about who the qualified applicants are and the algorithm can't change that.
To fix that you have to cause more black high school students to go to college and study computer science and then wait two generations until their proportionality in the installed base of qualified computer scientists reaches parity. There is no magic wand that makes it happen overnight.
But concentrating on the places where it can't be solved instead of the places where it can will make it take even longer.
No, the racism is a real issue, though a lot of it is caused by limited training data. Having an image recognition algorithm identify Africans and South Asians as gorillas doesn't happen because the designers intended it, but because their training data had only light-skinned human faces and dark-skinned primates. But the effect is racist even though this wasn't the intent.
Likewise, if the system is trained to duplicate human decision-making (like who gets loans), interesting things can happen: if the decision-makers unconsciously favored whites over blacks, the algorithm could wind up weighing skin color or stereotypically Black or Latino names negatively, meaning that the final model is explicitly racist, just because there is a correlation in the training data. That doesn't mean we shouldn't use deep learning, it means that it's not responsible to just fit the training data and ship without testing for such problems.
> Having an image recognition algorithm identify Africans and South Asians as gorillas doesn't happen because the designers intended it, but because their training data had only light-skinned human faces and dark-skinned primates. But the effect is racist even though this wasn't the intent.
This isn't racism at all. It's just bad PR because humans take the implication that calling black people monkeys is calling them stupid, since that's the implication you would draw if a person did that.
An algorithm doing that is just recognizing that humans and gorillas are both primates:
And then it's a bug, in the same way that recognizing a black balloon as a balloon but a white balloon as a light bulb is a bug. It has nothing to do with race at all. The algorithm isn't racist against white balloons. The solution is a general increase in the amount of training data, which is what you want in all cases regardless.
> if the decision-makers unconsciously favored whites over blacks, the algorithm could wind up weighing skin color or stereotypically Black or Latino names negatively, meaning that the final model is explicitly racist, just because there is a correlation in the training data.
Except that this is exactly the thing that a paperclip optimizer will smash to bits because it interferes with the goal of making more paperclips.
I’m not an expert in this, but I think racists call black people apes, not just because they think they are stupid, but because they think they are sub-human.
Blacks don’t reach the intelligence and blah to be human. I think that’s what racists drive at when they call someone a monkey, and that’s why it’s so offensive.
It would also make your theoretical AI racist, as it identified blacks as not human.
Honestly, at the end of the day that is what is so difficult about much of this. It’s mostly subjective
> It would also make your theoretical AI racist, as it identified blacks as not human.
That isn't how racism works. It's like saying that an AI that misclassifies a bat as a bird is racist. It's not racism, it's just error.
And it's not a race-specific error, it's a general error for which someone cherry picked the instances that imply a racially motivated intent that doesn't actually exist.
Calling it racism is pointless and misleading because there is no race-specific cause or solution to the problem. The solution is completely identical to the one for the same error in the general case, i.e. get more training data.
This isn't theoretical: Google Photos was identifying Black people as gorillas, and they didn't fix it, they worked around the bug by removing "gorilla" as a possible label in 2018. Some here seem to be saying that we can't call this racist unless someone specifically intended to do this because of hate. It's not subjective when someone's own face is so flagged.
I absolutely want to ban self-driving cars that behave in ways no human can explain or understand! The mere idea that anyone would think that should be legal is borderline insane.
All you are doing here is convincing me that tech companies are just runaway trains with nobody at the controls!
Humans are held responsible if they cause harm to others.
If a driver hits a pedestrian on purpose he is charged with murder.
Who do you charge if a self-driving car behaves in this way?
the humans that designed the car? to be clear, computers don't intentionally do anything. if an engineer deliberately programs a car to hit pedestrians for no reason, they would be charged with murder. if the car hits a pedestrian as a result of an engineering mistake, the company would be liable for damages, and if particularly egregious, engineers might face manslaughter charges.
To be clear, that was my point. You can't punish the computer and good luck finding the one to punish for an accident ten years later.
But maybe if it's free software...
Punishing bad driving is - I assume - intended to incentivise better driving.
If a company makes a self-driving car and that car then drives badly, surely the response needs to be to incentivise the company to improve their engineering practices, eg, spend more on testing, or require more levels of review of changes, or whatever other organisational changes they need to make safer cars. You don't need to find an individual person responsible to create that incentive. And if you really do want to find an individual responsible it can easily just be the executives of the company (and the executives are probably pretty easy to find even a decade later).
What about all the other examples he listed. What about cancer detection? Or viral spread prediction? Drug discovery or medical imaging diagnosis? Physics research?
Machine learning is very widely used in the sciences and extremely beneficial to humanity in uncountably many ways and assuredly countless more to come. Of course technologies can be used for evil but so can nearly everything that exists. I believe your proposal comes from a desire to help or better the world, but to ban all non-human-readable algorithms is frankly ridiculous and demonstrates a naive understanding of the issue. It sounds a lot like the calls by the U.S. Congress to ban encryption.
- In medical: your doctor should be responsible for your diagnosis and drug company is responsible for defective drugs, except when they get away with lobbying and hiring good lawyers.
- In physics: I'm not sure if it's as big of a problem as in social networks. But consider this case: If you cannot reproduce the result of an experiment due to a ML model being cryptic, that would lead to huge credibility issue in science.
At best, you may be able to justify black boxes providing secondary indicators: Maybe using AI to study cancer detection might lead you to a new solid discovery, but "we use AI to determine if you have cancer" should never be the mission, as it fails to generate useful information about how it is detected.
We can't even explain all physical phenomena, so good luck with banning anything that depends on the gravity of earth to function, because we don't know what gravity is.
But gravitational laws stay unchanged for millenials isn't it ? If I toss an apple, it will falls down. If I throw it fast enough, it goes into orbital mode.
> I also believe any algorithm that isn't human-readable should be banned. If it can't be understood, nobody can validate that it isn't racist, sexist, or slanted towards encouraging violence and harm.
I'm not sure a human-readable algorithm exists for ranking all the web pages in the world based on natural language input. In fact, I'm pretty sure such an algorithm does not, and potentially cannot, exist given the absolute failure of all approaches towards NLP that weren't based on absolute masses of text data and complex models.
Are you willing to make Google 10% as effective to achieve your goal of a human-readable algorithm?
you don't need any NLP to rank webpages (in fact the entire innovation of Google was that they figured out a way to rank pages completely ignoring that fact). Pagerank works fundamentally by treating the web as a graph and prioritising results based on their connections, that is to say it ranks based on popularity and is agnostic about the content of the actual page.
This generally has worked well. On the other hand, actually attempting to manipulate search results based on automated handling of content is what has given us countless of censorship debates or simply failure where even uncontroversial content is removed or downranked because it violated some sort of strange rule because it had a 'bad word' in it. On Facebook recently clothing ads for the disabled people were banned[1], because turns out the ML system only cared about the wheelchair, not the person in it.
It's actually fairly straight-forward to build recommender systems on transparent, graph-based algorithms and it gives you the added advantage of not discriminating in strange ways.
You've just skipped over the early days of Google where they relied primarily on PageRank and bad actors manipulated it to death.
It's trivial to generate webs of fake, inter-related content and use that specifically to feed incoming links to valuable pages. Or to comment-spam websites so aggressively it ruins them. Or all of the secret deals between high-ranking sites to feed links even though the sites weren't related. There are countless examples of black-hat techniques to break PageRank.
I am sorry but you simply can't build a sustainable search engine without deeply understanding the user intent and the meaning behind the indexed pages.
>There are countless examples of black-hat techniques to break PageRank
there are also countless of adversarial examples to trick ML algorithms. In fact this is in many ways worse because of the 'idiot savant' character of ML systems, which are almost always oblivious to context and can be tricked in ways that aren't apparent from the design of the system.
In contrast to systems that are legible or even formally verifiable ML systems are entirely unable to provide any guarantees. When someone breaks pagerank at least it's apparent how they broke it. When an ML system mistakes a turtle with a fractal pattern on its shell for a gun nobody knows how to fix the system in any reliable way, other than feed it more data and pray.
Pagerank worked fine when it was invented. It's a very elegant algorithm. But in a perfect illustration of Goodhart's law, it fell apart once people realized that they could game it to increase their traffic. Google has been in a constant arms race against unscrupulous SEO practices ever since.
>Google has been in a constant arms race against unscrupulous SEO practices ever since.
One company controls 80% of what is found on the internet. They set rules, restrictions, penalties that are not public. They do not pass any sort of regulatory muster. They rip and tear through businesses standing in their way. They crush out a person's online existence through never explained reasons. They use every advantage they can to tweak a human's emotions, drive and needs to feed more and more advertisements.
You suggest those trying to use every advantage they can to rank higher unscrupulous?
Google's fight to keep search results crisp ended soon after they began selling advertising. Google long ago quit innovating search to be better for people, they've made it better for advertisers.
I agree that you don't need NLP to rank webpages (though it certainly helps), but you do need it to parse the kinds of queries given to search engines these days. The days of logical OR and NOT are long gone I'm afraid.
> It's actually fairly straight-forward to build recommender systems on transparent, graph-based algorithms and it gives you the added advantage of not discriminating in strange ways.
I think other commenters have addressed the PageRank issue, but I'd be super interested in papers doing the work you note above.
To me, their response didn't seem to indicate that it should be directly decided by people. This is a consumer protection matter, and to stretch an analogy, like a list of ingredients on a consumable. Here we have these black boxes, and no list of ingredients, yet they drive and shape our world. A Person can't EVEN directly decide if they wanted to.
If you look at the actual data, you will find that black box models are in fact responsible for preventing the majority of abusive content including hate speech and porn on social media platforms. Ban these models and you’d find your favorite social media platform is more abusive. Most of the racism and sexism you are concerned about comes from other humans.
Tell me, how did your brain come up with what you wrote? How do I validate that it isn't racist, sexist, or slanted towards encouraging violence and harm?
Seems to me that’s a viable answer. How can we test an algorithm like Google’s ranking though? We can’t feed it consistent data like in a software test. It relies on too much information, and what we know about it indicates we can’t extract it out to test against it—except for results in the real world.
Not to mention Facebook’s are even more difficult. Tangentially related, remember when you could use “View As” on your profile page to see what your profile looked like to others? It doesn’t work anymore, only works for Public and Yourself; you can no longer choose the person to view as.
It’d be great to test these algorithms. We can’t. They need to be designed and instrumented so this is possible.
lol. sorry, but that reminds me of a skit by an Australian comedian:
male guest: "now first of all, let me just start by saying I'm not racist..."
female guest: "pfft..."
host: "ah see you made a noise there, but a lot of people accuse him of being a racist, so I think it's very helpful to know that he actually isn't one..."
Right, like I said, credibility is a different problem. But at this point, we don't even get a lie from them, we get nothing. At least a lie can be checked and examined. There's nothing available at all currently.
We actually have a reasonable way to test for human biases in AI - perturb the input a bit and see how the AI responds - For e.g., change the name, change the gender etc. and we use them to measure if AI is fair. It is different question whether all AI can be subject to such tests. For e.g., how will you detect a human bias in a page ranking algorithm? but for where it matters, you can test them and we do test them.
Yes. True and fair. But how can we test the page rank algorithm “ourselves"? Who is "we" in the "we do test them"? Is the public even asking for 3rd party examinations by transparent/public organizations (or at least, publicly funded)? Seems like we only get to "test" against the live system, and third party examination seems relatively impossible. It seems like something with such far reaching and invasive results should be more accessible, at the very least.
Very few people have the ability to influence the success or failure of every business on the planet. Those that do are heavily scrutinized for racist or sexist behavior. (Sometimes they also don't get convicted anyways, but that's another matter.)
Yeah, they can give you the architecture drawn as a nice mind map, list the hyper-parameters, but that's like knowing the algorithm of the compiler, it doesn't help detect a bad program. The question is what the model is learning, not how. What are the inputs and what is it learning to output.
Explainable models do not preclude the systemic problems you highlight. Plenty of systems before the advent of non-explanatory ML models had those defects. One option is to define test and validation sets and encourage 3P validation, somewhat like how accreditation works in other contexts.
Publicly disclosing the algorithms would drastically increase the pace of gaming them and resulting in pay to play system where the fanciest SEO wins.
Google and Facebook partially relies on the obscurity to keep the fighting the spam battle. IMO we don't have the technology yet to have fully open ranking algorithms that are not quickly broken.
Google's best asset for ranking is their user data. Even if you had the exact algorithm, you couldn't game it without massive amounts of user traffic. (At least not for popular searches.)
delegating the war against spam rather then being picked up by the user doesn't seem right. To give Big Tech such power to relieve ourselves of a mild annoyance is destructive. This is understood in other aspects of life Hence we have local governments which are inefficient and inconvenience people greatly. Yet it is found that selling all our problems is counterproductive. It ends with monopolies. The answer to this isn't to charge tech companies for the privilege of dictating our lives, rather, it's greater accountability on behalf of big tech and more responsibility on the part of consumers. The only cure for google domination is for the transfer of information online to become more democratised.
This excuse has been used to protect Google and Facebook for decades, but considering disinformation campaigns, civil unrest, and outright genocide has been the cost... I think the price of using obscurity to prevent SEO tactics is way too high.
The root cause isn't algorithms, it's a lack of accountability (both of companies and of users). The problem with 8chan wasn't some inadvertently harmful AI, it's that the site and its users damaged the world for several years without facing consequences.
I'm curious how this advance update thing is supposed to work. What does disclosing those details look like, actually?
The reason I'm asking is that as these things grow in complexity, it's quite possible that even if you join the team that works on these systems it will probably take you a pretty long time to understand how they really work. Their actual behaviour is likely to still be mysterious a lot of the time because they're driven by data.
Is a high-level description in english OK? Do we need to see pseudocode? The source code code? Do they have to open source it? What parts, if it's tied to internal frameworks? If there is ML, do they have to disclose all their sauce there? The trained network / weights? The training data, if the alg alone is useless without a data set?
Any human-initiated change to search algorithms is presumably human-understandable. Someone writes a rule to downrank some terms or traits of a website, they presumably document it somewhere.
That documentation will need to be shared, and the implementation of the rule change will need to be delayed until the disclosure window has passed.
Honestly, first and foremost, I expect a firehose of documentation, if Google isn't lying about making dozens of changes to it's algorithms every day. News companies might need a full-time guy (or team) just to sit there and read through them all.
But on the other hand, a bunch of journalists will have a ton of never-before-seen information about how the world's most powerful companies affect every other company on the planet. That alone is going to be worth some major exclusives.
Also, by the mere nature of being forced to share it, Google and Facebook will have to clean up their acts, they'll have to assume any change they make that could open them up to legal scrutiny will be found.
You underestimate the complexity here by orders of magnitudes. You also overestimate the usefulness to news companies. You underestimate the harm that bad actors can take.
The search algorithm tells you the order of search results for a particular set of terms. Except that as input you need to feed it a graph of the entire indexed internet, which is re-indexed periodically as the content on the index changes. How does knowing that benefit new companies? What, exactly would your hypothetical full-time guy/team, equipped with that index at huge cost, tell their company that would justify the time and expense? That they should write interesting content that lots of people consume?
Second, the general approach has been published and is well documented [1], as are its susceptibilities to attack [2]. So there's your algorithm, what does it tell you?
Third, general SEO isn't the problem, it's coordinated attacks that can poison all search results / ads markets if enough detail is known. Google invests [3] heavily to address these areas [4].
Finally, you underestimate how much of a firehose you'd have to drink from. It describes all of the internet.
You might want to note some very important parts of your first-listed source:
> Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
Larry and Sergey themselves both believed that ad-funded search was problematic, and that a transparent search engine in the academic realm was "crucial".
Unfortunately, Larry and Sergey's price was clearly billions of dollars.
Instead of relying on ignorance to push your agenda, you could frame that paragraph against what search engines were doing at the time, how Google was doing something different, and what Google still is transparent about today [1][2].
Publishing "the algorithm" doesn't have value for most of the internet, it is impractical to use even if it was, and bad actors would use it to destroy search quality to the detriment of e-commerce everywhere.
No, I've lived in the SEO world my entire life and I guarantee you that if the ranking changes were published spam would be so bad is to make search engines or social media totally unusable.
While I share your hesitation here, I think two points are important to keep in mind:
1. There is quite a difference between compulsory auditing (what the post you reply to refers to) and the government directly controlling industry.
2. In other industries this is quite commonplace and hasn't led to government takeover of industries (banking comes to mind. In their regulatory implementation on the Basel III accords developed in response to the 2008 financial crisis, both the UK and EU mandate government audits to ensure compliance with stress-testing and and leverage requirements; the US is also a signatory to these accords, but I am less familiar with their implementation into US law).
I'm not personally a huge fan of this approach, but I don't find the argument that government oversight is a slippery slope to totalitarianism that persuasive. In my opinion, a much a stronger critique of mandatory government audits is that they are often not that effective at preventing the negative outcomes they set out to prevent but still massively increase the legal complexity of operating in (or entering) a given industry without falling afoul of the law.
I wonder why Josh Frysenberg didn’t mention this at his presser today. Contrast this to him repeatedly saying “digital giants must pay traditional news”... I was waiting for him to slip once and say “tradition news must pay my boss Murdoch”
No, it's newscorp. They have a 55%ish(?) readership share for print media in Australia and are very cosy with the incumbent government. Afaik it's one of the most concentrated markets in the world. (Behind Egypt and China I believe).
As others have started, when looking at events in Australia, you can consider the currently-governing Liberal party (economically liberal, socially conservative) and News Corp as effectively the same organisation.
On the other hand, the Liberal party is very hostile to the public service in general and the ABC in particular.
They should be hostile to the ABC, because their journalistic standards are terrible. I've reported 3 factual inaccuracies to them and all of them took more than a month to retract. In one case, the inaccuracy affected the entire premise of the article.
ABC's standards are that it's okay to lie as long as you retract it a month later in a tiny 10pt foot note.
On the other hand, I've personally reported a similar article inaccuracy to a News Corp writer and he replied in 10 minutes, issuing a retraction.
Similarly, I reported an article inaccuracy in a Fairfax website and they retracted in less than 2 days. No reply but as long as it's corrected I don't mind.
SBS is even worse, they actually have zero accountability for online operations.
I've had retractions printed in nearly every Australian news website, and among the 3 times I've contacted the ABC about inaccurate reporting the average response time is 1.5 months. 100% of my reports resulted in retractions (extremely delayed ones).
This is not an organisation that cares about journalistic integrity. In fact they actively eschew ethics while their private sector counterparts reply in 1/50th the time or less.
Also, you're using an ABC-produced show as evidence that the ABC isn't ethically compromised? "We investigated ourselves and found we we did nothing wrong"?
Before you accuse me of being a shill, remember I've had retractions printed in News Corp outlets, too.
I live in Australia and while I'm excited to see less Facebook use, I see a lot of comments saying things like, "good, Facebook monetized an addiction model and this curbs that". While true, the proposed law that has pushed them to do this is incredibly dangerous. The law doesn't just apply to Facebook, it applies to whoever the Treasurer of Australia[0] says it applies to - it isn't metrics/rules based: https://i.imgur.com/7RSqXDJ.png
This means you as a business owner may wake up one day to find that you are now classified as a designated digital platform corporation and are on the hook to now negotiate contracts with every registered news business corporation, AND provide each of them with the secret sauce behind your ranking algos. The only thing that needs to be done to do this is for the Treasurer to file a decision in the Federal Register of Legislation[1]. It's a shocking amount of overreach, lack of visibility to the process, and a single point of failure in the system.
Overall I'm very curious to see how this plays out. Facebook took the nuclear option here, and I highly suspect that news corporations will feel quite a sting from the loss of traffic / platform. I truly feel like Facebook "winning" here and having the law dropped is the lesser of two evils.
While that is probably technically true, in reality the Australian government is unlikely to make Australian businesses comply, giving them a competitive advantage - I think this is a protectionist policy, but the right won't admit to that because it goes against their "free market" ideals.
What's probably going to happen, however, is that small times bloggers will take over the news scene in Facebook. It won't bother me, since major news outlet have become crap already.
I don't believe we do, but I think the government may be thinking that now would be an excellent opportunity for someone to give it a go (our prime minister has a funny saying "if you have a go, you will get a go")
I haven't read the legislation so I don't know for sure, but from what I understand about it, it might be an even better time to start a news media company.
Just by publishing, Google are compelled to negotiate with you on the price to license something that they are being forced to license? I can only imagine that there is or will be some mechanism that allows them off the hook, otherwise it's only a matter of time until they have to leave Australia.
Yes, if you assume that both parts refer to the same “go.” But “have a go” here means something like “work hard and contribute to the economy.” It doesn’t refer to possessing the thing you “get” in exchange, ie. money.
"I live in Australia and while I'm excited to see less Facebook use, I see a lot of comments saying things like, "good, Facebook monetized an addiction model and this curbs that". While true, the proposed law that has pushed them to do this is incredibly dangerous."
You're absolutely right and I'm also horrified by the implications, and I would be even more so if the circumstances were more normal. The trouble is that Facebook is anything but a normal player and so is Google. These corporations are not normal given that they've usurped normal business practices when both governments and normal ethical businesses weren't looking and they have deliberately and opportunistically profiteered off the backs of millions—billions—of unsuspecting people who haven't a clue what has happened to their data, let alone their privacy!
This is NOT a normal situation, as these carpetbagger corporations have essentially declared 'war' on us by raiding our data without permission—and no one believes all that malarkey stuff about EULAs actually authorizing them to do so. Instead, they did do by sleight-of-hand and deceit alone, everyone knows that. This means we've little choice but to respond the best we can and in kind—and that means we have to play as dirty as them. We not only have to grovel in the ethical dirt and mud but also play by their rules or they'll retaliate and 'mincemeat' us—no questions asked.
Let's not be fooled: any corporation that can not only rival the two most dreadful corporations in all of history—The Dutch East India Company and the [British] East India Company—in its enormous stock value but also that it make profits even more quickly than they did is more than suspect, for their growth as has far, far exceeded the expectations of any normal lawful business—even the most brilliant of them by orders of magnitude! These companies are either engaged in unethical practices, or they are working in a lawless and unregulated domain, and or it's both of these. I'd contend that it's both.
Moreover, Facebook is now threatening us with blackmail, and without compunction they'll play off users as disposable pawns in this dirty war, as we can clearly see here:
"In response to Australia’s proposed new Media Bargaining law, Facebook will restrict publishers and people in Australia from sharing or viewing Australian and international news content."
It's time we acted, and the Australian Government has taken the first step. I grit my teeth to say it, but it needs our support this time around.
I agree that Facebook and Google need reigning in on their data and privacy invasiveness, as well as their offshore business structures that avoid Australian taxes. But this law is not that.
This law is sponsored by dying dinosaur media company News Corp because they have lots of mates in, and power over, Australian Government.
There's also a danger that, if this fight ends up being essentially lost by the Australian Government, it will vaporise any and all political will to go after Facebook and Google for anything else (eg. Data privacy, tax avoidance).
Don't support stupid laws that don't do the thing you want it to. Just because you (and I) don't like Facebook and Google doesn't mean they're wrong (in this particular case).
Edited to add: News Corp has fucked Australia throughout its history, if you support this Government action then you're tacitly supporting News Corp.
There are no good guys in this fight, so all that's left is the logic (or lack thereof) of the proposed laws. That's the key issue in this case.
Sorry, my post has absolutely nothing to do with the dying dinosaur media company News Corp (and whilst I'm at it I'll throw in a few more media dinosaurs including most television, free-to-air and otherwise (they're all pretty much dinosaurs).
See, I'm actually agreeing with you, it's just a shame you didn't read what I actually wrote.
"Don't support stupid laws that don't do the thing you want it to."
Seems you didn't read my bit about gritted teeth, I made it clear that this was a horrible option but it's not the worst one.
OK, now give me your workable alternative. Think like an out-flanked general on a battlefield, your army is cornered and you are up against a wall. Now tell me exactly what you are going to do to extract yourself.
Make no mistake about it, for that scenario is the current situation we're in here (don't ask me to do another three-page post, I've already explained why many times, and anyway you don't have to take my word for it, hundreds of others have essentially said what I have. If you want to start somewhere then start with the EFF) .
BTW, if you want my opinion about Australian government communications 'fuck-ups', then I'm very, very familiar with them, I'll list you a whole litany of them if you want! How far would you like me to go back? I know of no other country that so comprehensively fucks everything it touches when it comes to communications—from the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1905 to the NBN and beyond. And the reason specifically is that the media and other vested interests have such an incredible lobby in Canberra; and the damn politicians are gutless lilies, they'll swing whatever way the vested-interest wind blows.
Let me give you a starting point. How about in 1946 when Keith Murdoch—Rupert's father and war corespondent at Gallipoli—used his political power to put the kibosh on the development of FM Radio in Australia? In fact, he very effectively killed it off for 28 years (until 1974) even though he was long since dead (d. 1952). Did you know that? Anyway, the Chifley Labor Government was about to overrule the bastard but they lost the '49 election to another first-class bastard, Pig-Iron Ming Menzies (a mate of Murdoch senior), so it was curtains for a very long while.
Right, I'm fully agreeing with you here, we all know how seedy Canberra is.
>> Just because you (and I) don't like Facebook and Google doesn't mean they're wrong (in this particular case).
Have you ever considered that your dislike of this law stems from your dislike of News Corp?
If you hold the belief that our government is a puppet for News Corp, I could say to you: "Just because you and I don't like News Corp, doesn't mean they're wrong in this instance"
Respectfully, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Since about 1995, eyeballs have been shifting from all forms of media to the web. Newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, books, etc. have all been disrupted by the web.
Rupert Murdoch has been particularly salty about this and has worked with the coalition government for years to undermine the internet in Australia. News Ltd, with the help of the coalition, fucked the National Broadband Network and now they’re shaking down the most successful internet companies. I have zero sympathy for them.
The proposed law is crafted in such a way that Facebook’s only viable option is to block all news content in Australia and all Australian news content internationally.
News Ltd has failed to innovate on the web for 25+ years while internet startups have gone from idea to almost trillion dollar market caps. News bought MySpace for $580m then sold it for $35m because they are clueless idiots.
It makes me sick that people would side with our overtly corrupt federal government.
Calling this blackmail seems hyperbolic. Australia is imposing a tax on serving links to Australians, so Facebook is no longer serving those links. If the US imposes a tariff on BMWs and BMW stops selling cars in the US is it blackmail? This is the same deal with Google News in Spain. Spain imposed a tax, so Google stopped doing business there (at least insofar as Google News is concerned).
This isn't blackmail any more than I'm blackmailing my local coffee shop when I go elsewhere when they jack up the prices. Increase the cost of doing business and people are less likely to want to do business. What is surprising or nefarious about this?
It's interesting to note that none of the key points I made about these corporations' very dubious place in history penetrated. Therefore I'll have to assume their behavior is acceptable with you.
It seems you also missed the point that Australian users like everyone else were cajoled from an open web to a closed system. The fact is they had no choice whatsoever and that Facebook knows it. If it's not blackmail then perhaps extortion is a better word.
To say users were not cajoled when they had no other choice, I suggest you refer to my point in the nearby post about the fact that everyone's telephone, like it or not, went from an inviolable private service on a government utility to 'ownership' by Facebook and Google. If you say this never happened then I've nothing more to say to you.
What is their dubious place in history? Google created the first effective programmatically curated search engine. Facebook created en extremely popular social network. These companies were founded when the internet was still relatively nascent, and norms over privacy were yet to be established and that led to subsequent controversy. But to compare these to the Dutch and British East India Companies is laughable. Those companies literally had standing armies and conducted colonial wars. Some even go as far as to say that they perpetrated genocide. The British East India company starved 2-10 million Bengalis. Facebook chat was used to coordinate the killing of 25,000 to 100,000 Rohyngi, by virtue of ineffectual moderation and lack of tooling and personnel to police Burmese language content. The notion that this has any level of equivalency of a company that actually had soldiers shooting people is absurd.
And users do indeed have a choice. I don't use Facebook, and I use duck duck go for search (and Bing for video search). These are not utilities. Alternatives exist, and the use of these services aren't even necessary in the first place.
I'm really not seeing justification for your characterization of the situation. A website is being charged for links to news articles. They don't want to pay for this content, so they aren't going to host this content.
The comparison with those trading companies was not initially done by me, it's been around the net for a while now.
The comparison is obvious but if you want it spelled out then that is the trading companies were the richest and most profitable companies in history and their money was made by nefarious means. The Big Tech companies are the closest thing that rivals them in 350+ years - the math alone tells you that.
The values of Big Tech companies are a matter of public record so are the values of those trading companies. The records show that Big Tech's exponential growth is the closest in this 350+ year period. You may not like your favorite company being equated with the these traders but the stats alone show that there are remarkable parallels between them.
If you cannot draw a comparison between them then I can't help you. Others before me have pointed out that there is a parallel between the obscene and outrageous profits of Big Tech companies and the various exploitation done by the trading companies. For starters, Big Tech pays stuff-all tax anywhere, second, and as has been pointed out often, their rise in profits outstrips any known method of legitimate trading over this 350+ timeframe.
Re privacy, clearly you are not old enough to remember the laws that governed the POTS phone system. They were essentially almost uniform worldwide, the law was phones were strictly private and severe penalties - with long jail terms for anyone who violated privacy.
Moreover, there were extremely strict rules about third parties listening in without the full permission of both parties - for instance, if I were talking to you and someone at either my place or yours secretly listened to our conversation on an extension without explicit permission from both of us then technically that was unlawful and a long jail sentence could be imposed.
What Google did was to penetrate the telephone networks of the world in multiple ways, the most obvious one was to embed its spyware, Android OS, directly into the phone itself - the fucking unmitigated hide of them to do that.
If you don't understand the true significance of that and what has actually happened then it's perhaps because you don't want to. Right, I know it hurts when one's told your favorite thing - whatever that may be - actually stinks.
You may never feel violated by what has happened but many millions actually do so. And, unfortunately, there are millions still unaware that Google is snooping on them and stealing their data. The fact that governments haven't advised them of the threat is simply atrocious.
Anyone with a modicum of respect should accept the fact that many, many people feel genuinely violated and uneasy by what's happened, They should also accept the fact that smartphones are ubiquitous and people feel trapped, as they cannot avoid them. In practice, they've precious little alternative, either because they can't get Google-free phones, or they're forced to use them because they have family members who use Google or Facebook apps (this is perhaps the most nasty and insidious thing Big Tech has done - forcing users to use Google apps against their will in this way is about as bad and ethically low as it can get. Many now feel annoyed and letdown by the fact that their governments have left them stranded. No wonder there's rage over Facebook, Google and the other Big Techs.
Hovever, the fact is that this is now changing, it's the start of a new beginning. We're on a roll to eventually straightjacket them whether they like it or not, tough regulation is starting afoot everywhere across the world and it's not before time.
The question many ask is what is the motive for supporting shonky exploitive mobs like Google and Facebook when there's overwhelming evidence of their wrongdoing.
Of course, seeing justification or otherwise for such action depends on which quadrant of the political compass one's in. And most very large US companies are inevatibly in the top right hand quadrant. People like me who believe in the need for a much fairer and more equitable world will have an almost diametrically opposite political philosophy.
BTW, there were excellent search engines around before Google's monopolistic practices put them out of business. I know, I lost my favorite one, Northern Lights search engine, that way.
So the law is horrifying, but you really hate these companies so it's OK. Even if I agree with you about these companies isn't this an excess of 'ends justify the means'?
No. So it's fine to raped and not doing any about it? That's appeasement, and we saw where that led us last time.
Did you actually comprehend the extent of want I said? That's the real problem no one believes what's actually happening and when it does then no one notices it. That incident in Washington wouldn't have happened if Google and Facebook didn't exist.
So if you want to sit on the fence and wash your hands of the matter like Pontius Pilate that's fine but it's not fine with many of us. Unfortunately, the biggest problem with democracy is that too many sit by and do nothing whilst living in ethical zombie land. If that weren't so, the problems I'm discussing wouldn't exist either, as Google and Facebook et al would have been straightjacketed by legislation years ago.
The fact is that others and I want our old phone system back that we had 20 years ago. If you're too young to know what that was then it's simple. I could phone anyone anywhere and be sure that my calls were private. Now if I telephone anyone who has a smartphone then Google automatically that I'm a contact of the person I phoned - even if I have a Google-phone.
Do you really understand the true implications of what's happened? Unfortunately, I don't think so, nor many do - especially if they are not old enough to have gone through the change - from the time of sacrosanct inviolable communications run by a government utility to 'ownership' by Google and Facebook. Right, that's what's actually happened because governments were lobbied and also they were asleep at the wheel. Why? Because democracy failed to stop it—again because half the population were in a state somnolence and couldn't care less.
Blackmail is an exaggeration. The government is asking them to pay for news articles (that have been voluntarily shared) and what Facebook simply says is "we liked the articles when they were free, but thanks, we don't want to buy them".
We liked the articles when they were free and we could push ads alongside them and we don't want to share the profits we make from this ad-pushing, sorry.
That's a much more true summary of their position I think. Facebook, exactly like Google, is an ad-pushing company. I don't have any sympathy for ad-pushing companies in the first instance and then even less for those who want to push ads against work they haven't commissioned themselves.
Fb may have overshot. They've not only blocked news pages but gov pages as well. Most people I know in aus have been getting covid updates purely through government body social media posts. These are now blocked.
I guess these sites aren't news organizations that would be covered by the proposed media law. Facebook is probably just trying to emphasise its point. Likewise, in restricting the availability of non-Australian news sites to users in Australia.
>> They've not only blocked news pages but gov pages as well.
Couldn't this be a viewed as a criminal act by the Australian government? Could they arrest FB employees in Australia for FB HQ blocking their pages, especially with the vital COVID-19 information?
I agree 100%
The tech community gives solid and reasoned warnings against the law, and they are ignored.
Google warns against the law, and caves.
Facebook warns against the law and stands up. I think FB and Google and Twitter are the only companies that can really win this.
Facebook didn't back down. Good on them.
I have not been following this closely, but if I understand correctly google would have to leave australia altogther if they didn't strike deals. It sounds like facebook had the option of just removing news.
Potentially, but under this law these are likely to also encounter the same issues that Facebook and Google are facing right now. Facebook and Google are only the first named companies affected by this, though the rules are far reaching. I highly suspect things like Apple News would be next on the block to be classified as a "designated digital platform".
I think going after all aggregators would have weakened the government position. The current approach forces Facebook to weigh the likelihood of other orgs getting onto FBs turf, once FB is onboard, the government can go after the others, one at a time. It works better via divide and rule vs having all providers presenting a united front and dropping Australia _en masse_ (which would have a high political cost, vs FB alone which doesn't have a lot of political capital)
I can't believe I'm about to say this, but I think I'm going to side with FB on this. The Australian government is once again showing absolute disregard when it comes to understanding technology, and its signature heavy handed approach to regulation.
Laws of economics are pretty clear on this. News, especially international news, is a commodity. Government can impose monopoly ruls to try to allow distribution channels to extract more, but technology (and users) will find ways to route around this as damage to the network.
People don't want to pay for news. They don't like ads, but will tolerate them to a point, and most definitely don't want to pay for subscriptions. Laws can change behavior short term but long term the better product and platform will win.
> People don't want to pay for news. They don't like ads, but will tolerate them to a point, and most definitely don't want to pay for subscriptions
I'm sure I'm not the only person here who subscribes to LWN. People with a special interest in a particular topic are willing to pay subscriptions to specialist news outfits covering that topic. Not enough for them to grow rich but enough for many of them to survive. The real struggle is retaining subscribers to mass-market generalist news as opposed to niche speciality news sources.
Yeah, I think this is why GP said "especially international news". The more producers capable of producing the content, the lower value the content is.
The problem isn't so much that people don't want to pay for news. But if the competition is giving away news for free, news now has a price of zero.
You have a global network of individuals and companies producing news. If you offer good news for $5 but someone else is offering acceptable news for $0 that acceptable news is going to win every time.
> Hence, the key effect of commoditization is that the pricing power of the manufacturer or brand owner is weakened: when products become more similar from a buyer's point of view, they will tend to buy the cheapest.
I'm willing to pay for news that treats me as a relatively intelligent person who needs well-sourced information to make decisions, not as an unprincipled sucker who should be convinced of what the author thinks is true by any rhetoric possible.
The two I'm looking at paying for in the near future are https://thebrowser.com/ and https://www.slow-journalism.com/, but I'd pay a lot more than that for some kind of Realpolitik executive summary which gave overviews of the most important trends, including the most common mainstream opinions and an analysis of any available evidence.
> Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.
I think this describes other commonwealth countries, like here in Canada, as well. Likely an outcrop of former-colonial mentality. The history of leadership here when we still had a mother country was one of governorship and colonial administration. The towns and streets are named after them. Frankly the attitude towards politics has persisted. It has its positives (stability and a relative lack of dysfunction) and its problems.
In Ontario as well we have this kind of problem with state-capture by industries all over. Regulations and land zoning are in many ways geared for the already-haves rather than a level playing field. An example being the wine industry regulation here.
The same Prime Minister who promoted an innovation economy at the same time as switching out fiber-backboned network upgrade plans for the existing rotting copper network.
How Labor haven't turned that into a win is beyond me. The Libs are lying sacks of burning, corrupt garbage, and Labor are, seemingly, totally politically inept.
Heh, this reminds me of the Indiana Pi Bill[0] which tried to legislate the value of Pi. The Indiana bill at least happened a long time ago, unlike the prime minister's statement.
Have you ever thought that the 'News' actually meant something?
Like, what you see on television or gets printed in a newspaper needs to go through an editorial cycle, fact checked etc?
The legislation is effectively giving actual journalists the ability to continue creating what we've historically considered news and protecting that form of occupation.
There's a lot of misinformation going on on the web and things can spread like wildfire.
No-one seems to care about this fact and instead focus on the wrong bits of this legislation.
>>The legislation is effectively giving actual journalists the ability to continue creating what we've historically considered news and protecting that form of occupation.
Would you mind explaining how exactly does it do that? Maybe I am focusing on the wrong thing, but I haven't seen the side you've mentioned at all.
By compensating media companies for their news content.
It gives them more bargaining rights when dealing with tech companies as to what a 'fair' portion of revenue they should receive for having their stories presented on these sites.
What is the Australian government misunderstanding? They wanted a better deal for domestic news media, they are getting a better deal for domestic news media:
No, it targets any digital platform at the discretion of a single elected Member of Parliament.
If /r/australia got too influential or troublesome to this politician, in the lead up to an election perhaps, then there is no need to get anything through parliament - this individual can essentially add reddit.com to a list and then send Condé Nast the bill.
No, it would be more like saying Nest owns Google because they have the same parent company. If anything, reddit is the larger of the two. And the parent company that own Conde Nast (Advance publications) does not own all of reddit, unlike how Alphabet owns all of Google.
First, Cloudrover's link has nothing to do with the law, nor on linking to news content. It's about showing news content inline in some new app that nobody has heard of, nor will use.
Second, the Australian law does not apply to all companies. It just applies to the companies the current government decides it applies to. (It's not that it will even be selectively enforced. It literally only applies to a specific set of companies, which is currently FB and Google.)
It applies to any company the Gov wishes. If company XYZ is a news aggregator, then the gov could target them on a whim.
It's not about the monopoly that FB has. If company XYZ started getting fined, we'd hear nothing about it. That garage based company would just go away.
Yes. It was of no value to them anyway. That's what the legislation is about: preventing platforms with market dominance capturing most of the advertising revenue with no real return to the organizations producing the content.
We have something of a natural experiment here on how much FB traffic is worth to news sites. We'll learn the results in a year if Australia repeals or maintains the law.
This is probably the only reason why as an Australian resident, I’m not in a rush to get the law changed.
I’m not sure how discoverability is going to be effected and that may take a while to see the effects given how locals probably know the locals news sources.
Facebook showed in their release the monetary value of they provided the news companies.
I can't see how you could possible argue they do not provide value to the classic media companies by allowing them to be linked and discussed freely on their feeds.
They could have blocked Google and Facebook at any time. They didn't because they know the value is important if not existential.
What they want is for Facebook and Google to be forced to list them, but also forced to pay for the privilege. If they failed to craft or pay for legislation to that end, it was nothing more than a mistake.
> What they want is for Facebook and Google to be forced to list them, but also forced to pay for the privilege. If they failed to craft or pay for legislation to that end, it was nothing more than a mistake.
Such legislation is impossible given that Google/Facebook are not Australian companies. At the end of the day, if the legislation makes their involvement in those countries a net negative for their bottom lines, they can and will take their ball and go home.
How would you craft legislation that force Google and Facebook to do business with you under terms that you dictate? Ultimately how can you prevent said companies from pulling out of your country entirely if that's the better option for them?
Australia and Facebook did exactly what you described in your "impossible" hypothetical. I suspect the government's thinking was the Australia is too big a market for the victim companies to drop, i.e. they thought this was a deal they could not refuse.
No they didn't. Google isn't being forced to operate there; there's simply an additional cost of doing business being imposed. Clearly it's not in excess of income from Australia if they're continuing to choose to do business in the country.
I couldn't; I believe I originally thought you were suggesting these companies can't be expected to exert political will/make consequential decisions for some bizarre reason
Traditional media companies have been cutting off their noses to spite their faces for a long time now. I dont see why this will be any different.
Besides, this is obviously a good deal if facebook folds. Publishers seem to be overestimating their position so fb is calling their bluff. Both sides have stuff to lose, but im pretty sure the publishers have a lot more than fb does.
You understand that publishers control the distribution of their content, right? Facebook users merely pass around links. Publishers can block page loads from Facebook or put up a paywall anytime they want to. Some (like WSJ) chose to do so and others do not. This is basically a decision as to whether they receive more in value from those links than they do from blocking the links.
Thus the publishers have already revealed whether they benefit or not, by choosing to allow or disallow the traffic. There is no rational argument that they were being "hurt" by the traffic.
Of course Tech is now politically unpopular, and if you are Australian then it is foreign tech -- even more unpopular -- so why not use this political environment to try to extract some cash payments? Everyone wants to receive cash payments, and I can understand why a for-profit Industry would want cash payments, but what is harder to understand is why the public would view them as victims if they didn't get those payments, as they have already made it clear that they are benefitting from the tech traffic by allowing it and by setting up marketing accounts in Facebook and promoting/ sharing links to their stories there. Yet in addition to that they want to receive cash from Facebook. Well, that's a bit of a fantasy, now, isn't it?
I am not Australian or defending this move. I am just saying that these large corporations won’t shoot themselves on the foot without doing some analysis.
Demanding a law requiring negotiations merely gives them more options and legal leverage to try to demand cash payments. It doesn't shoot them in the foot. In the worst case, they can "grant" a free license to the tech companies and we have status quo ante. But the threat of making it illegal for the tech companies to operate unless they give some money to them certainly gives them more bargaining power. This requires zero analysis (except of the political climate).
I can't see how you could possibly take Facebook's self-serving claims at face value. How does it compare to the revenue that has shifted away from news organizations to Facebook? How can you verify Facebook's claims when Facebook controls the platform and the data?
The market dominance of a couple platforms is exactly the problem here. No organization is in a good bargaining position against them and so soon there will be regulation.
It's already working. Google is busy making deals. Facebook will do the same eventually.
Any publisher already had the option of blocking their content from being linked on Facebook and Google, they chose not to do so because the traffic they get from F/G was valuable.
I'd say the only time I ever read SMH is when there's a link in my FB. When mates or groups I'm a part of drop a link in. To be honest, I don't remember the last time I read general news that wasn't in my feed.
Apart from a few other aggregators (hackers news included)
Sure, but now no one is getting the advertising revenue. So the domestic news companies are not better off, the best case scenario is that they are exactly as they were, but most likely they are worse off since they simply don't even get the traffic.
They weren't getting it anyway. Both Google and Facebook represented poor deals for news media and their market power made it impossible to get a better deal.
Miraculously, after the Australian government gets involved, Google is now making deals with news media. Facebook will do the same eventually.
I'm kinda excited to see how this pans out. I don't use FB for news, that's not what a "social network" is for. It's for keeping in touch with friends, sharing photos, etc etc.
Because I don't interact with news on FB, I already see very little of it, but I'm hoping this change makes FB the place for sharing our lives again, as opposed to just sharing links to media that I can find through other sources.
I somewhat wonder if FB is looking at this as a test subject of what happens if they were to block links to external content? What if FB only shared stuff from FB. Would that be so bad?
FB has worked hard to make itself the walled garden of “internet”. It tries to encourage people to use the FB search box to find news agencies, brands, etc. rather than the URL box.
The monopoly positions of tech giants and their efforts to build walled gardens is the real problem. The fact that they’re where everyone consumes news media is a byproduct of that. We’ve seen the harmful damage it does to democracy and to society in general.
This legislation is stupid, and attempts to place stupid demands on the tech giants such as sharing algorithms. It’s a blatant attempt to kowtow to Uncle Rupert, with some funds also regrettably going to those dirty socialists at the government-owned news media organisations on the side to make it a little less obviously on the nose.
However, I think FB was more stupid to not just follow the Google approach and negotiate it down to a dilute bother, in effect paying a chump change tax to retain that monopoly position. Aussies are notoriously apathetic about any issue which doesn’t directly affect them. FB has made a tactical misstep here by making the issue affect everyone.
I hope this is a step towards smashing that walled garden. I hope it just ends up teaching Aussies to go to the actual websites of organisations whose content they want to view. I hope FB withers back down to being the place you check a few times a day max to see what your friends are doing and to see some memes, rather than where people endlessly doomscroll and never leave.
The Aussie government does not have the clout to challenge these monopolies directly, but but this legislation starts that process then they will have Steven Bradburyed [1] their way to a fantastic outcome.
The reduction of these all-encompassing walled gardens will be to the betterment of society as a whole.
Now we have to start dismantling the NewsCorp behemoth as well.
Facebook claims that news makes up only 4% of its content, which would seem to be in line with your statement that you hardly see any news. I see a lot more news – something like 50% of my feed.
If removing news reduces Facebook’s revenue by 4%, it would be reasonable to wonder why they didn’t remove news globally years ago, given all the time, money and effort they invest in it and all the drama and existential threats that come with it.
The reality is that news is a massive driver of engagement on Facebook. Their 4% stat is grossly misleading. I’m 100% against this proposed law, but it’s hard to maintain this position in the face of lies and gross misrepresentations by Facebook and Google.
Facebook would finally be valuable again if all of the content farm news garbage was kicked off.
Unfortunately, the people who like that stuff also buy stuff from online ads. It’s the same reason why TLC and The History Channel now only show reality TV; because people who watch those shows buy the things they see advertised.
As an Australian this morning my Facebook feed is a bit of a wasteland. None of my friends were really sharing anything so the only content in my feed is now ads and posts from groups I'm members of.
All of the "news" has been removed, with them the manufactured outrage, toxic comments and political rants. It actually feels far closer to the Facebook of 2008 that I actually enjoyed rather than the "engagement" machine of 2020.
Obviously the publishers will be hurt by this, particularly smaller ones without organic traffic. But it also feels like a lot of the "engagement" Facebook had been pursuing has been removed too. I wonder how this will affect usage as currently there's little in my feed that would encourage me to open the app every day.
This is a fairly important stand Facebook is taking - I'm glad they are doing it. The precedent set here is uncomfortably close to creating a liability simply for linking to content - something that would quite literally destroy the very fabric of the internet if it was applied generally. In Facebook's case it is even worse because they are not the ones creating the links - their users are. If internet services have to assume liability for not just actual content people post but content within things they link to it will create a situation that is simply untenable.
The fact that this law is applied only to two cherry picked companies selected at the pleasure of a government minister does not change the nature of the precedent created, and creates an enormous risk that this will now be lobbied to apply to numerous other industries and circumstances. I would fully expect that to follow in short order if Facebook folded on this - and it probably will happen anyway.
Yes, it is particularly egregious that someone can go to Facebook, create a link to their own content, and then claim monetary compensation for use of their content from Facebook.
No, no, you have to cross a certain revenue / profit threshold before you can claim money. We can't have any Tom, Dick, or Harry eating into News Corps profits.
The original legislation proposal didn't even include the SBS and the ABC news services. They got added in to make it look less like News Corp wrote the legislation (which they pretty much did).
I actually don't see a problem with this in the context of an ad-pushing platform. Facebook gets all its engagement from 1) users' feeds and 2) imported 3rd party content. Why should they receive all the profits from pushing ads against content others have created? I think it's a grossly unfair "business model" and am happy to see it challenged.
The messaging on this tech vs news publishers in Australia is pretty intense.
Any site that doesn't want google to index a page can add:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex"/>
to the page and it will not be listed when someone searches Google (as far as I know), thereby preventing all the alleged stealing/siphoning/etc of revenue/profits from news sites. Am I wrong here?
If the above is true, what's really going on here is that content producers got together and said, "if you don't pay all of us, we'll stop you from linking to all of us," and it was worth it to Google to pay. Clearly it wasn't worth it to Facebook.
> Any site that doesn't want google to index a page...
They want to be indexed, they just also want to get paid.
The root issue is that media companies no longer make $$$ from ads, instead google does and they want that money back. This is "silly" law to accomplish that goal.
> The root issue is that media companies no longer make $$$ from ads
Ding ding ding. This has always been about newspapers no longer being the best place to advertise. It's old media trying to hold onto the little power they have, and honestly the only reason they haven't been dismissed entirely is because as a society, we still value journalism, but the likes of Murdoch are now abusing that fact that entrench by lobbying for these outlandish laws.
> The root issue is that media companies no longer make $$$ from ads, instead google does and they want that money back. This is "silly" law to accomplish that goal.
The problem is that Media companies didn't lose their revenue to Google. They lost it to other more specalised websites i.e. Seek, Craiglists, Gumtree and so on.
Any single site doesn’t have the power to change Facebook. Your suggestion is equivalent to “no child is forced to work in the mines. If they don’t need the money, they can choose to go to school instead”
It seems to me that Facebook putting an anchor link to a website on a facebook page is materially different from child labor.
Should sites be allowed to link to other sites?
Also, every website has the power to change Google: just put the noindex tag on your pages and you'll effectively prevent links from Google to your website.
For facebook, it's trickier. One thing that might work is sharing something from your website on Facebook and then reporting it as against community standards. It seems like there are a zillion pages of people trying to get their sites UNblocked from Facebook- the cause of which frequently seems to be people flagging content.
No, of course I’m not saying whatever silly extrapolation you put into my mouth.
I‘m saying there is a complex interaction between content creators and aggregators, and a power imbalance currently favoring the aggregator. I’m also saying that high-quality journalism is a necessary condition for a functioning democracy.
Combining these thoughts leads to the conclusion that it may not actually be the worst idea to reverse some of the changes the market for news has seen in the last few years.
I have no idea if Australia’s policy will end up working. But the collective pearl clutching and either pretend or real ignorance with regard to the motivation for this law in the comments here is just breathtaking.
It's a law that's either written by media lobbyists or people unfamiliar with technology. Potentially both at the same time.
If the news organisations want people to pay for news, they can change to a subscription model and put their content behind a pay wall. Many companies already to this: I myself pay over a hundred pounds a year for the Economist for their excellent reporting. The old establishment needs to understand they're not special, and if they want people to pay for news they need to provide content that's worth paying for, just like everyone else.
Its not bizarre. Its protectionism, the government has strong relations with people whos business models are failing and rather than help them on a path to being successful organically, they chose to simply suck money from other successful businesses.
I beg to differ. If you read the wording was designed to affect only two companies, not an industry neither a concept. This is illegal or legally null in most democracies, hence bizarre.
I found it bizarre that the Treasurer gets to (arbitrarily?) pick which platforms this applies to and that only 2 platforms, Facebook and Google, were chosen. Maybe I'm just missing the information, but why isn't there just a definition of a platform this should apply to? I'm pretty far removed from this issues, but it smells like some large news organization decided they wanted to get some free money from Facebook and Google so they lobbied for this law.
The law is not bizarre in essence (there are details that are bizarre though): You are free to ask money for your content. On the other hand, Facebook is free to not buy your it.
No, with this law Facebook is not free to not buy the content. They are specifically forbidden from excluding those media companies from results, and lets not forget the cherry on top of the shit sandwich which is being forced to share their algorithm with the media companies, and even having to give advance notice of changes to their algorithm, something which is probably not even possible.
On top of all this, the definition of "core news" in the bill is ridiculously broad.
It's completely untenable, and IMO Facebook would surely (and predictably) have to leave the Australian market under those conditions.
In all seriousness I hope this drives the less informed in Australia to seek out actual news sources and break out of the echo chamber that is Facebook. And I hope it forces Facebook to actually support journalism instead of leeching off of it. You can't have a robust democracy without a robust fourth estate.
Are these less informed people numerous enough to cause a problem to others, perhaps by voting badly? How would you know?
Are you one of them? How would you know? If you are, then aren't any opinions you share on the internet just making things worse?
I ask these questions because I keep seeing the news exaggerating some bogeyman and people believing that it's more significant than it really is. For example, you expressed concern for democracy in your post here, which seems like a pretty big danger! Is that really at risk for Australia or are you misinformed about the significance of this particular bogeyman?
I also see people complaining about misinformation while never identifying themselves as victims of it. Why aren't the victims complaining? Because part of being a victim of misinformation includes not knowing that you are. So maybe it's yourself, in which case, better to address that problem before trying to "correct" others. Also, this idea of there being a huge underclass of misinformed people damaging democracy is divisive. It classifies people into good (always ourselves) and bad (always someone else), giving moral justification to the self-declared "good" people to correct the "bad" people.
> the Federal government is ignoring their constitutional responsibility to enact a quarantine for international travelers
I assume your claim is true even though a quick Google doesn't show how. So doesn't Australia have any process to compel the government to comply with the constitution? It's entirely up to the whim of voters? Then it's fair enough that they don't comply since it's optional. Democracy is the general population choosing the government, not a self-declared group of "right" people.
So far, your claim about less informed people is essentially just "other people voted for a government I don't like so they must have been less informed than me".
> So doesn't Australia have any process to compel the government to comply with the constitution?
Australia has the most volatile politics of any English speaking country. The two ways for a government to be forced to follow the constitution is for the Queen to fire them, or for a military coup.
>So far, your claim about less informed people is essentially just "other people voted for a government I don't like so they must have been less informed than me".
My claim is that an Australian government is acting outside the constitution and responsible for the deaths of thousands. Not sure what you're trying to do with your strawman argument.
OK, so the constitution's optional. No problem violating it then.
If you don't like what the government did, I don't mind you sharing your opinion. But how does it logically connect with my comment that you replied to? I thought you were giving an example showing that voters are not well informed and I pointed out that it's not objectively wrong, just different from what you want.
So just wait for that to happen then elect a new one and repeat until he/she stops violating it. Voters can still vote for a prime minister who violates the constitution if they want. That's their right, and it's a good part of democracy. Hopefully the country has other institutions to prevent that but it sounds like Australia doesn't because the queen isn't doing her job, so it ends up de-facto allowed if the voters want it.
If FB thought that would happen they wouldn't have done.
And have you seen the types of 'information' people share on Facebook when they are not sharing links to news? I think users will stay in Facebook but share lower quality stuff.
I can guarantee that the exact opposite of that is gonna happen. There's a reason why we are in the current state of misinformation. Quality journalism stays behind paywalls, while misinformation is free. In the age of constant information, anything that has more barriers to access, keeps losing its position in the ecosystem.
I hope so too. Though I have a different theory on how the public would react. Australian users of FB/Instagram can't share links to any news website. But they can share screenshots and memes about the news. Even videos. The other thing - many summary accounts just popup who would give their version of the news in text or video. Why? because the news is paywalled and not everyone pays.
This is a rabbit hole, and Australian govt wont let it go easily. They will next complain about screenshots being shared - tough to monitor but they are literally taking away the traffic from news sites. People move away from a website if it can't fulfill their needs. But, if they have all the needs (wants?) fulfilled except the part about news, they won't go to another site, they will just find a hack to fulfill the news bit. How far can the content moderation go? Given the motives of publishers are not noble here, asking for money for something they should be paying, not having traffic would hurt them badly. This is what Facebook is betting on, but given the size of the issue, it would be embarrassment for the govt to walk back the proposals after FB has withdrawn. Give it a year, they will come to an agreement where both parties win.
Australia doesn't really have a robust fourth estate. It has a Murdoch-ruled empire which is pretty much the propaganda arm of the rightwing Liberal government, though it's hard to say who wags who's tail.
FB is an insane echo chamber for sure but at least you can pick your chamber. Any exposure to the news in Australia is tainted by the Murdoch's foul agenda.
I haven't read the bill, but this looks like a huge win.
FB has abused our brain chemistry with addictive content. Their platform makes discussions more impulsive, passionate and careless not unlike any other addictive substance. People crave "the goods" ie browsing their bite sized feeds, and neglect the responsibility of actually learning about the news. Not unlike how if you're addicted to sugar/unhealthy foods you don't want your veggies.
This affects not only customers but news organizations. News orgs are forced to twist the truth to make their content more addictive in order to survive.
FB's double think comes out in this article. They attribute people's interest in the news to their platform. When in reality they almost certainly would have reached the news independently, and FB is an addictive and unnecessary additive to people's life.
I draw two conclusions from this:
1. FB is scared. The Australian government has found a weak point that causes FB to take a major hit to the breadth of their platform.
2. FB can no longer weaponize headlines. People will still discuss news in their own words or using fake sources, instead of impulse sharing actual news headlines. Headline quality will improve, meanwhile FB will remain a challenging place to discuss. People will now have the time to recognize headline quality and may even read the news without having the impulsive and addictive sharing option.
This is a hit to FB's reality bending brand. FB offers addictive and impulsive options for communicating, but they want us to think FB is an essential part of communicating. By not being allowed to share on FB, the addictive option is removed, and we can better experience the reality of how great the healthier options are.
Maybe we can live without sugar/FB. Maybe life will be better that way.
The 4% number is a cover. This announcement represents a new fundamental limitation to FB's capabilities. Normal people can no longer share anything on FB.
Previously FB sharing was limited with regards to specific taboo movements and it was called censorship. Now it's all news, even good news and great content. It's not censorship this time because FB is no longer "the place" where you share and connect.
FB is no longer a universal platform. Now it's just a website. This is a good thing.
> Facebook's statement says that news is only 4% of what is shared on their platform.
Would be interesting to know how much of the remaining content roots in those 4%. How many of the remaining posts are in reaction to news, or reactions to reactions to news. Also do the 4% include screenshots of news articles and headlines, a very common practice on Facebook.
Indeed. It would also be interesting to understand how much engagement is around that 4% versus 4% worth of family photos, for example. I'm not a FB user but I understand there is an audience for fighting about news stories on FB a'd that's got to keep at least some people coming back to the platform for more.
>FB has abused our brain chemistry with addictive content. Their platform makes discussions more impulsive, passionate and careless not unlike any other addictive substance. People crave "the goods" ie browsing their bite sized feeds, and neglect the responsibility of actually learning about the news. Not unlike how if you're addicted to sugar/unhealthy foods you don't want your veggies.
Is Facebook the bad guy here? Where is examination of the person doing the scrolling?
(The following applies to adults):
Ostensibly, the person should be allowed to spend their time as they like if they're engaging in legal activity. If people thought that engaging in social media was bad for them, they would stop. Are we really saying that people cannot stop using social media? Are we saying that people don't think it's bad for them?
If people can't stop doing an activity that is definitely hurting them, don't they need professional help? Do all these social media users need professional help?
What amount of time on social media is sufficient for it to have a negative effect? Is it anything besides zero?
To be meta: if hackernews is social media and social media is bad, are we all hurting ourselves?
> Are we really saying that people cannot stop using social media? Are we saying that people don't think it's bad for them?
Yes, that’s part of the definition of ‘addictive.’ Internet and social media addiction is well documented, even though not all users are addicted. Like gambling.
Many countries, including Australia, do in fact regulate various aspects of casinos and gambling facilities in order to protect the vulnerable. Things like not allowing ATMs in particular areas, lots of signage about addiction and help, mandatory (and audited) return rates etc.
I’m not saying I agree with my government’s approach to this particular problem (tbh it seems like curbing social media addiction, if it happens, will be more of an accident than the intent of this legislation), but the suggestion that we do not regulate other predatory industries is rather misguided.
Casinos are highly regulated and must follow a number of restrictions on how they market their products and handle troubled players. So yes, our society has indeed already decided that casinos should be forced to be less predatory.
Certainly. My question was aimed at the current state of regulation: should casinos be further restricted? (people are still getting addicted, as far as I know).
In most states, as far as I know, it's illegal not to wear a seatbelt. So from the point of view of the law, it's not optional. Pragmatically, it's somewhat optional because it's unlikely that violations of the law are detected and prosecuted.
From a "should this actually be the law" point of view: I don't know.
I think that in US society, our championing the rights of the individual has led to a failure to protect the individual from themselves.
Wow they've blocked the Bureau of Meteorology page, no more weather warnings on fb. All of ABC too (our BBC equivalent), though they were not required to pay for ABC content, so it seems pretty bitchy.
Good good. I'm all for making fb a barren content free wasteland. It was a mistake for public sector to build engagement on a platform where they were tenants without rights. They could have put the rights in with legislation first, but were always at mercy of the algorithm and having to pay for placement.
Also I believe that to stay within the bounds of the law they have to prevent _any_ news site from being linked and block all Australia news sites from being shown internationally
It seems such a broad interpretation that they block satire of events too (Betoota, Chaser), but strangely not dis/mis information crackpots like Friendly J##dies, even though he claims to be independent media.
I would check if you can 'like us on Facebook' but I can't find any buttons! What happened, they used to be everywhere?
They're banning emergency services as well ("by mistake").
They probably just want to increase the backlash. The emergency services Facebook pages will obviously be back within hours.
I live in Australia but I don't have a Facebook account and I don't read the fake news media, so I actually don't have a horse in this race. I hope they both mutually destruct each other.
Pretty much the same, deleted the apps years ago, I log on with an isolated browser profile every few months to see what madness the crazy uncle posts.
FB Messenger is hard to dislodge though, for so many people it is their main comms system. Likewise WhatsApp. Luckily I have a burner phone for those, location features turned off.
Govt will probably come crawling back to fb on its belly. If they don't the ALP will.
Uuugh we all know that media is undoubtedly biased, and a lot is quite skewed to match an agenda.. But can we please refrain from regurgitating that Trump campaign catchphrase?
I think both sides are in the wrong here. One of them is Mark Zuckerberg and the other is the Morrison government, for a start. But not only because of that.
The Murdoch family's claim ... I mean, Australia's ... is ridiculous. Facebook are totally within their rights to stop using Australian content and not pay for it. If the law is so sloppily worded that it arguably defines the Health Department website as news, well, it wasn't Facebook who drafted it.
On the other hand, this does stuff around a lot of innocent bystanders, and Facebook could easily have given a month's notice that they were going to do it. Which is, ironically, one of the things that the law would require them to do. What ever else Facebook might have demonstrated by their irresponsible reaction, they have shown that this law isn't all wrong, rather some parts of it are urgently necessary.
Could someone summarize both positions? It seems pretty reasonable to me - my understanding is that Australia wants Google and Facebook to pay lump sums to have their content on their platforms (as opposed to per-click). Google and Facebook can basically say yes or no. How is this different than, say, The New York Times saying the same thing about their content?
Awesome summary. It seems to me that this is a bit of a failure of the fair use doctrine. Making one preview of an image or article does not impact the author's monetisation ability. Making a business out of systematically producing previews (and adding your own ads around them) should no longer quality as fair use.
The stated rationale for the law is not copyright infringement, so fair use is not relevant. It’s an attempt by Australia’s competition (antitrust) regulator to address an alleged market failure: “The proposed bargaining code is intended to address bargaining power imbalances between Australian news media businesses and digital platforms in order to ensure that commercial arrangements between these parties do not undermine the ability and incentives for news media businesses to produce news for Australians.” https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/ACCC%20-%20Mandatory%20...
I'm reading between the lines, but my understanding of the (fixed) new law is that "plain linking" would still be okay, "previewing" would require sitting at the table. What's the difference between the two?
Plain linking does not keep people on FB. Automated previewing does. Can't this be interpreted as raising the bar for fair use?
The bill says “the responsible digital platform corporation must ensure that the supply of the digital service does not, in relation to crawling, indexing, making available and distributing news businesses’ covered news content ... differentiate between registered news businesses and news businesses that are not registered news businesses ...” I don’t see any distinction between linking and previewing here. I think both involve “making the content available,” and since Facebook legally can’t “differentiate between” news content that is and isn’t covered by the mandatory bargaining code, they are choosing not to make news content available at all to Australian users.
Fair use (or i guess fair dealing in australia) isn't totally about not negatively impacting other people's businesses. It helps your fair use argument if you don't impact, but there are plenty of clear cases where its fair use despite negative business impact. For example writing a scathing negative review of something that has quotes for context.
You are right. By "business impact" I was rather thinking that the aggregator simply diverts ad revenue, without adding any value. If I made a business which summaries other books without sharing revenue, I would likely get busted.
I don't know the legal status but I've always been uneasy about rich snippets and other things on Google search. It is common that I get my answer and never have to visit the site, meaning Google gets their ad money and the site gets nothing more than a name drop.
But you have to play that silly game, because otherwise your competitor might get featured instead and we learn about them and not you.
I wonder if FB ever offered or considered letting users link without previews (e.g., choose a word or words of their post to become the link text). It would defuse the way users scan headline/preview/image on the feed (instead of going to the publisher and reading the content). Not sure Australia would have accepted this but I believe it addresses some of their concerns.
You can, unless I am misunderstanding you. When I paste a link the preview pops up and I can hit the traditional (X) in the top right to remove it before posting. It will display the URL in text as a link without a preview.
The Australian Government for ages has been trying to get the news organisations and the social media giants to come together and establish a voluntary media code that addresses concerns of multiple parties in a reasonable way. I’m sure each of you will be shocked to hear that Google & FB each have been hostile to the process form the start and have missed meetings and general behaved poorly and arrogantly in their dealings. This is a cynical late stage comms from Fb.
The government literally stated that with a heavy heart they were putting in a crude approach towards forcing both giants to finally step up and start to discuss this. That oblique reference to the new “Facebook news tool and their announcement of it in the last month or so” is part of this, and will be rolled out depending how their hand is forced from here.
The essence of the case against the social media giants is that journalism is dying. Not just newsprint but paid journalism itself. The profession is under massive attack and papers worldwide are being affected and it’s clear there is a value extraction occurring with the social media giants, who are in one framing benefiting from the content produced by news outlets and show it in their “listings” (feeds/search results) and further compete directly with the news organisations for advertising dollars all without having to include any remuneration to the content creator, in this case professional news outlets who still have an important social function to provide and are providing less and less due to the market dominance of these two ‘aggregation advertising companies’.
The Australian government is firstly fighting around this principle of ensuring fair competition in the advertising space, two large companies are exploiting newspapers due to their market dominance, ok excuse me, you folks need to adjust your market practices so that everyone can play. Their dominance is like a duopoply and is being criticised as such even though this economoic language has become foreign in recent times where dominance of American mega corporations is assumed as somewhow right and therefore fair. Google & Fb know they are very powerful with limited obligations to Australians and so they are acting arrogantly and oppressively in their approach.
The other side of this humerously is that while in principle it’s important to have an open and fair press and to ensure healthy competition and a healthy media space in the digital era, Australian media is largely owned by two major media moguls. I’m sorry to say that Rupert Murdock began his life right here in Australia. These moguls having done very poorly with their own digital strategies over the years are also pressuring the government to take action in this space, and while no-one loves these companies either, the prospect of the total breakdown of the local newspaper and media landscape and the related loss of local journalism jobs drives the government to get involved.
There’s more nuisance and moves and details on this but that’s the gist as best I can capture it.
I’m in support of the social media giants being forced to the negotiation table and working out platform options that do provide a content producers fee to media companies both big and small that might be a great model to help us move back away from crap spam content back towards a modern from journalism. Facebooks new newstool is headed this direction if they feel pressured in the right way to have to roll it out and create a Spotify of news redirecting some of the insane advertising revenue the receive.
> Google & Fb know they are very powerful with limited obligations to Australians and so they are acting arrogantly and oppressively in their approach.
I don't see what's arrogant about Facebook's approach here. They say they do not derive much value from this content, and the government is proposing to charge them much more than the value they do derive. So they are left with the only rational choice: to not have the content. That's not a threat, a punishment, an attack, or anything else. It's just a decision that needs to be made in light of the tradeoffs facing their business.
The proof will be in the pudding, but I suspect Facebook will suffer minimal economic harm from blocking the news. That will be clear evidence as to who was the economic beneficiary of their relationship with the news media.
If FB allows any news content (e.g. from news orgs that want their content to be listd for free), they must allow all news content (e.g. from news orgs that will want to be paid unrealistic amounts for it).
One also wonders whether Google would have put a termination clause in their contract with the news orgs in the event the law is repealed. And is Google really going to provide them notice of algorithm changes? Very interesting to see how that's going to be done if so.
(Assuming all of this is a matter of Google and Facebook not "playing fair")
I think it's very likely Facebook would still find profit in this arrangement, just less profit than before, but since they do business with other countries as well they don't want to give in. "OK we'll start playing fair and reduce profit in your market" = "OK we'll start playing fair and reduce profit in all markets"
If they don't derive much value from the content, then it shouldn't be terribly awful they have blocked the content. But I suspect that's not the truth. Not by a long shot.
In the link they said it’s only 4% of their content but on the radio this morning (national Australian station Triple J), they stated that it’s a big deal as “many people rely on Facebook as their source of news”.
It won't be bad for them. And I believe that's the case, otherwise they wouldn't have blocked it. As to their users and especially the media: we'll see.
> I’m sure each of you will be shocked to hear that Google & FB each have been hostile to the process form the start and have missed meetings
A powerful company resisting a process from which they have nothing to gain. Shocking!
If you want people to come together, you need to give both sides something to gain (or put a (metaphorical) gun to one sides head). Of course fb is going to resist a process where they only stand to lose something and the best outcome possible for them is the status quo. Wouldn't you also resist such a meeting?
You're allowed to tell people what to do, but you can't make them do it, they can always choose not to. Worst case you get millions of people starving rather than doing what you try to make them do, like in communist Russia/China.
This comment should be pinned to the top of every comment thread on the matter, and required reading before anyone else comments.
The Australian law is the first one with teeth, after many years of Google and Facebook smothering any reasonable measures any country anywhere has proposed. So yeah, it "feels unfair" at this point, because that's the only thing that'll work at this point, to use sovereign national power to order Google and Facebook to comply.
There are a lot of comments in here slamming the Australian government for somehow "not understanding the Internet" or whatever and I thank you for this detailed background.
There are good and bad sides to this law and this situation, I personally commend Australia for /at the very least/ running this experiment for the rest of the world that probably doesn't have much downside and might very well lead to some real collaboration, changes and/or innovations going forward. At least they are giving something a try.
I haven't been able to find a source for this (apologies), but my recollection is that before threatening to leave Australia, Google threatened to simply stop linking to news sites in Australia. I believe they were told this would be illegal.
> before threatening to leave Australia, Google threatened to simply stop linking to news sites in Australia. I believe they were told this would be illegal.
This is the most unacceptable aspect of this policy. If you want to say "you must pay to link", that's bad policy that's been bought and paid for, but it at least can be worked around and doesn't compel linking or other association. But "you must pay to link and you must link" is incredibly dangerous policy for which a scorched-earth response is entirely appropriate.
I think there's something to the idea that given google should pay to link, they should not be able to sidestep the regulation through monopoly power.
That said, I strongly disagree with the premise.
I guess Google decided market share was worth more than the cost. I have to admit, I think it would be satisfying to see Australia face consequences for what seems like a pattern of hostility to the open digital world.
It doesn't take monopoly power to sidestep it, just the ability to choose who you do business with. You don't have to be a monopoly to exercise freedom of association.
"Here are the rules for doing business here" with a set of unreasonable rules can be an annoyance, but there's always the choice of not doing business there. "Here are the rules for doing business here, and you must do business here" is absolutely unacceptable, no matter who it targets.
Please don't take HN threads further into nationalistic or ideological flamewar. It makes discussion less curious, more tedious, and nastier. Instead, please make your substantive points thoughtfully and without that.
Substantively, this is a battle between a US media powerhouse and a sovereign nation over control of its local media. This isn't "ideological flamewar", it is an inescapable reality underpinning the case.
There's the underlying issue and then there's the separate question of whether you posted a thoughtful comment or a flamewar comment about it. You posted a flamewar comment. We don't want those here.
Any substantive point you have to make can be made thoughtfully, and will have a better impact in favor of your argument. It's actually not in your interest to make a point like this snarkily and provocatively. People do that for a little temporary venting relief, but it harms their own view in other people's eyes, in addition to harming the commons. So please don't do that.
Good on Facebook for actually calling the Government’s bluff, with a straightforward explanation of the economics, instead of pretending to and posting strange and confusing things like Google. I tend to believe them that the impact will be minimal, but will be huge to publishers (which is why the law was so ridiculous in the first place).
If linking to Australian news content is not in the financial interests of the company, why would they continue to do it? It shouldn’t be surprising that they choose not to.
And so the law just pushes the service out of existence, like a high minimum wage just leaves the people who couldn't generate more than $5/day jobless (otherwise Africa could just set the minimum wage to $20/hour and eliminate proverty. The world doesn't work that way.).
Am I missing a detail or does it seem retributive for Facebook to block Australian news sources globally? Isn't the issue with the Australian market alone?
The cynical streak in me would suggest that now is a popular time to criticize major tech organs for their relationship to news, and the Australian government is hoping to use that to funnel money from US companies to Australian ones.
You could argue that taxes were designed before the "you are the product" age. If Apple sells a phone in Australia to a local customer, they pay Australian sales tax and possibly import dues to get the phone into the country. When Facebook sells data from an Australian user to a random advertiser, all tax is due in Ireland/Netherlands or some other tax haven and Australia makes nothing.
So while this approach with news media is a strange one, I think there is an argument to be made for taxing things differently. Make Facebook/Google pay a fair tax in all countries they're active in. Then each country can decide how they want to use that, if a democratically elected government in Australia wants to subsidize news using taxes they should be able to do so.
While you're right that there's a reasonable argument, I can't say it's one I agree with. I already strongly dislike the change in US tax law that now requires all e-commerce companies to adjust their sales tax based on the location of the consumer. It added a bunch of new bureaucratic overhead for us on top of negating one of the competitive fringe benefits of having a business in a small state instead of California. And it mostly just seems arbitrary to me which way that tax swings, rather than intrinsically fair.
True, the US sales tax thing is a great case-study on how it doesn't work. Taxing revenue probably also doesn't work due to large differences in margin. If you tax 1% on the revenue of a 1.5% margin kind of business it sounds rather unfair, charging a 1% revenue tax on a business with 90% margin sounds low.
So indeed there is no clear simple implementation strategy for this yet.
Those ads you see in FB and next to google results generate money for them, not for the websites whose content you're looking at. Basically the portal collects money from helping the advertiser match closely to people who will buy, but the content platforms don't have that info on the user and can't influence their decision making process as much.
Australia thinks they can extract value from news aggregators.
There is the argument that showing news snippets next to the link is what you bare paying for. But otherwise it's a pure media money grab backed by the government.
The complaint is that many users just read the headline and never click to leave the Facebook walled garden, generating 0 income or traffic for the news media.
They complain that big tech gets the reward (content that drives user engagement) and further, it detracts from the potential traffic they would otherwise receive.
This is hilarious, because the impression to regular folks will simply be that "Facebook has implemented a news blackout on Australians, which is authoritarian and dangerous."
That is certainly a true sentiment, but in general as many other commenters have noted, it's better not to have "news" articles being force-fed to social media users via blackbox algorithms, emotional trigger-sharing, and over-enthusiastic ad buyers. This is a great first-step to help break the spell that accidental over-consumption of news media has on people's mental health.
Enjoy Australia, the rest of the world envies the peace and quiet in your news feed!
Will be interesting to see the social impact on this. I kind of wish sometimes there was a plug-in that could just block news postings on facebook, since I don't go to facebook to see what friends are saying about the news
There used to be, you could hide all from certain sources when you looked at the options on a given post but they sunset that feature. The sources I hid then still don't show up in my feed, though.
Who is deciding what laws are just? Hopefully not Google or Facebook, as they are amoral profit-motivated behemoths who will annex your home and life if they're allowed.
No, it's not. There is no "3rd party content", it's just links, the basis for the internet. Anyone can stop their site from being indexed with one line of code if they're not happy with the value proposition. Google offered to stop indexing all Australian news sites altogether but that was deemed illegal because this is nothing but a forcible cash grab by a dying media monopoly that has the Australian government by the balls.
This article [1] (which I found because someone else linked to it in this thread), explains the situation well. Google & FB do not just link.
> Part of the issue here is Google and Facebook don’t just collect a list of interesting links to news content. Rather the way they find, sort, curate and present news content adds value for their users.
> They don’t just link to news content, they reframe it. It is often in that reframing that advertisements appear, and this is where these platforms make money.
> For example, this link will take you to the original 1989 proposal for the World Wide Web. Right now, anyone can create such a link to any other page or object on the web, without having to pay anyone else.
> But what Facebook and Google do in curating news content is fundamentally different. They create compelling previews, usually by offering the headline of a news article, sometimes the first few lines, and often the first image extracted.
>Rather the way they find, sort, curate and present news content adds value for their users.
>They create compelling previews, usually by offering the headline of a news article, sometimes the first few lines, and often the first image extracted.
So not only do they link, but they make the links rich with media from the story to make them even more appealing to click on and drive more traffic to the news site than otherwise? Preposterous, I tell you!
If this had any semblance of credibility or logic, option #1 would be to remove snippets and images and option #2 would be to stop linking altogether. The fact that neither of those are acceptable options to the Australian government tells me everything I need to know about their intentions. And I gotta give credit where credit is due, they're good at being slimy bastards, because they have people like you fooled.
1) Your reply contains arrogance and a patronising sneer at myself. This is against this site's guidelines.
2) A quick perusal of your comment history shows more of the same attitude and also indications that you possibly work for Google.
3) You evidently didn't read the full article I linked to (only responded to the section I quoted) which is a very good analysis of this situation.
4) Preview links may drive some traffic to sites but most often ppl just respond to what's shown on FB (the headline, an image, and text snippet). So FB profits by mechanically condensing other parties' news stories on its site while posting ads against them, knowing that people most often won't go read the full story on the linked site and that they are driving an ever shallower take on the news.
I address only intellectual dishonesty. Misinformation and ignorance has gone on far too long and I'm going to do my part in making its distribution a little bit more annoying for its messengers.
P.S. How will you be paying The Conversation for the content you stole from them a few comments ago?
> Google Search is inextricably intertwined with news and publishers do not voluntarily provide their content. On the other hand, publishers willingly choose to post news on Facebook, as it allows them to sell more subscriptions, grow their audiences and increase advertising revenue.
This is technically not correct. Publishers can opt out from Google Search if they want to, so one may also argue that they willingly choose to be on Google as well.
Not to defend Facebook, but a failure to opt-out is not really the same as volunteering.
I find the argument made by Facebook to be sound. They're making a comparison between Google crawling the web and indexing content vs. a news site intentionally posting their content to Facebook.
The difference between getting your webpage crawled and explicitly posting on a public forum is significant. I read their comment as "users explicitly post contend on Facebook vs. passively having their content scraped by Google".
FB took the right decision. I wish Google and others will do the same. Like many others have said, I don't like some things that Google and Facebook does, but for this, I believe FB took the right decision. The bill is so vague, and it can be interpreted to say anything that the Government wants it to say. This isn't to protect journalism, it's a backdoor to funnel money to Newscorp.
That is good. And Facebook just shoot it's leg. No news sharing on FB will make people go out from this closed garden to look for news. And this is good, because a lot of people treat FB like the whole internet (they just don't understand what is a blog, home page, vortal)
From looking at my feed now I'd suggest its far more than 4%. All of the manufactured outrage and angry posting on news stories has disappeared leaving my feed with a few group posts and a bunch of ads.
A bold statement from a company that essentially seemed to gain from news and websites, until it seemed to reach a conclusion a user that reads trustworthy news outside Facebook, is a user that spends less time on Facebook. The very approach that seemed to conclude in lowering trustworthy news pages reach on the platform, and seem to boosted fake news.
Now the company tells it will not pay trustworthy publishers for the content. As far as it seems absurd, it just shows that any news in Australia on Facebook can be considered a fake news as default. The clarity is a benefit.
The DFES (Department of Fire and Emergency Services) page is down - i.e. no bushfire or flood alerts showing up. Their entire page is gutted.
There's some government run domestic violence and community service pages that are wiped.
Though hilariously, the local LNP candidate's page is gone, which in the midst of a state election campaign is probably pretty hard for them.
I get that facebook have a bone to pick with the government, but does a) blocking crucial emergency service pages have a benefit, and b) does wiping a campaign page have some worrying connotations?
The Bureau of Meteorology, a government department that provides forecasts has just tweeted that their Facebook page has been impacted by this change which is odd as this is not a media company and provides arguably vitally important information to mariners and other transport modes.
It looks like the blast radius from this decision is impacting organizations that is out of scope of this legislation.
Facebook has blocked any page that provides news, as defined by the code, rather than just organisations covered by the code:
core news content means content that reports, investigates or explains:
a) issues or events that are relevant in engaging Australians in public debate and in informing democratic decision-making; or
b) current issues or events of public significance for Australians at a local, regional or national level
Weather info & especially anything emergency-related is covered by that second definition.
The definition of organisation covered by the code is stupid & arbitrary anyway. It's heavily weighted towards existing incumbents (requiring $150K revenue), and makes things even harder for an independent trying to compete.
Honestly, I feel good about this (I'm Australian too).
It's causing pain to the government now, to put pressure on re-evaluating their ridiculous proposal.
Besides the obvious drawbacks of the proposal, there would also be side-effects that won't be seen until later, and I'm glad the side-effects are being shown right now to try and stop this whole mess.
I guess if you take Facebook's point of view: erring on one side of this is a violation of the law, erring on the other is just a piece of content missing. Which should they choose?
Why wouldn't people just visit news sites like normal? You go to cnn.com or nytimes.com or your local newspaper. Thats it, just don't allow it at FB.
People post so many fake stories from fakes sites, or outrage stories with headlines for clicks, stop incentivizing that behaviour. Just ban all politics/news and let people talk about other stuff.
> You go to cnn.com [...] "outrage stories with headlines for clicks, stop incentivizing that behaviour"
CNN is one of the example of news organization that lives on outrage. There's not that many news sites left that avoid clickbaity headlines and fueling outrage. Social media helped to advance that, but it's not now - cable news and just their websites discovered that it works before social media.
You might be underestimating the percentage of the population for whom the internet is Facebook. Just like AOL a few decades ago, there are still plenty of uneducated people who genuinely don't know how to navigate the internet on their own. Those people then go on to effectively get their news from Facebook or similar.
Because people want to use social media, and they're going to keep doing it. And people talk about news.
They're still going to talk about it with friends and family. Except, instead of at least linking to an article, now they'll have to share it via selected bits and pieces that FB can't censor (or via pure interpretation).
Perhaps there could be an unintended consequence that people will need to put some more effort into "sharing news" (i.e. writing or copying some words in order to begin a discussion)?
By having multiple origin sources for the story (rather than one widely shared post from an outlet) it might reduce the popularity bias of "everyone else liked that, I should too"?
Changing user behaviour is hard, but part of me wonders if this could be a really interesting experiment to see if it brings about any meaningful change on social media.
How is this for an idea - companies that provide links to a website that also can generate a preview, charge the linked site for the privilege of having a preview of the content shown. This shows that such things are valuable for the recipient. If Google had done that, then this proposed law wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Perhaps they should do this for other news sites now, that way it protects them from future laws like this being proposed in other countries. Being linked like this is clearly worth it to the publishers, as the law they support prohibits the delisting of the sites that the law applies to.
Second, how about having a way to add meta-information to web pages/articles saying what is okay to use as preview and what is not. This looks to me like the long term solution to all sites and services on the current web. As long as there is a single, non-specialized way for browsers to ignore attributes/tags/other info they do not use then it does not add complexity to browsers.
Sigh - another HN post/thread bashing the government and claiming they're basically puppets for Murdoch media.
The whole 'good on facebook for standing up to the government' is quite a funny stance, given how most people view facebook as a not-so-good entity on the web.
Fake news is a worse problem than Murdoch media and its sensationalist journalism.
This also blocks substacks and blogs btw. Hopefully, this just leads to more sources getting classified as "news media" and eventually stops any meaningful linking and thereby making Facebook useless in Australia at least. One can dream, but they'll probably capitulate before then.
Personally, I think it might actually make facebook enjoyable again in Australia. I don't want to go to facebook to see people sharing news. I 0% want to see anything news related on social media.
This unfortunately does nothing to stop disinformation actors with armies of bots and sockpuppet accounts. So the information content on fb has plunged even lower.
If might be a good thing overall though, because it might become clear that anything you see on fb isn't professionally developed news, whereas previously Breitbart/SkyNews/Pete fucking Evans got greater access to eyeballs than serious media like SMH/Guardian/ABC.
Normally I am against Facebook, but they are in the right here. This is totally Murdoch monopoly playing his political puppets to get this through.
I don’t know whether Australia will reverse this, but I really hope other countries don’t jump on the bandwagon. The reason why the Internet is the internet is because of free information sharing. Having laws that target specific companies for extortion is just dumb.
I'm glad that Facebook is standing its ground compared to Google, who ended up capitulating to Murdoch's sock-puppet government.
For those who are outside Australia, it bears mentioning that Murdoch-owned media in Australia by far and away dominates the media landscape, and has a blatant bias towards the current sitting government (the conservative liberal party), and the liberals have for decades now returned the favour by consistently legislating in favour of News Corp.
The only way that the government will back down is when they are confronted with a much bigger fish than News Corp, in which case, chances are better than none that the government will go scurrying back into their little holes.
Mostly because afaik the law prohibits Google as it is from delisting news content specifically like Facebook is doing now, so it was either efforts like this to last-ditch prevent the legislation from passing or face a complete shutdown in Australia.
I wonder if this is the start of a course-correction that recognises search/basic discovery of information is probably "infrastructure", and that (perhaps) large social media platforms are becoming "public places".
The way this is being brought about (the linking part) seems flawed, but perhaps if this goes ahead, it will be an interesting way to see how a future world might look where some of the damnage done by the "internet" (well, its business models) in recent years is forcibly reversed?
If you get your news from Facebook, you aren’t getting good news. This is a win for the world - less manufactured outrage getting pumped into the brains of the people. Maybe news publishers in Australia can go back to quality journalism and selling subscriptions.
I feel like this has the potential to damage the NewsCorp media here in Australia far more than it might damage FB. It would be fascinating to see what happens to their web traffic before & after this change.
Why would anyone want to use a filtered platform? Are there people who really want to restrict themselves from being exposed to ideas they would be challenged by? Or is this purely about restricting access to unauthorized ideas?
Facebook just blocked a bunch of government information pages (specifically health and fire departments), saying they are “news”. Stinks of retaliation.
If FB and Google are the only two on the naughty list, does this give opportunity for smaller startups to take advantage, or have they made it clear that startups can easily be added to the list as well?
bit.ly links (and I'm going to assume other shorteners) seem to work, just so long as you remove the preview before you post it.
Is that a bug, or a feature?
news media need to see more than ever how important it will be for them to publish directly to the ActivityPub ecosystem, and to cut out the gatekeepers in the way.
Does this law hit Reddit as well? I’m kind of curious what they’d do if they couldn’t link to news in some parts of the world. Especially because a lot of the time the comments will include full article text if there’s a paywall.
In my country media has learned a lesson: poor people are not your audience.
You can make low quality simple crap, put a bunch of ads on it and give it to the the masses. The soap operas and quiz shows of journalism.
And you can make longread investigative journalism and put it behind a paywall.
Undoing the damage the internet has done takes time but it can be down.
Facebook won't take any action when its product is used to facilitate genocide, but they absolutely will take drastic action when you threaten to regulate them or threaten their profits in any way:
i don't understand. FB claims that this law will hurt australian news outlets more than FB... Why not just let these companies protest themselves?? We saw something similar in facebooks campaign against apples new privacy law. There, too, they pretended to be representing the "small business". I find it pathetic that they are using this same tactic of casting themselves as the protector of smaller, weaker, companies again. It's like a toddler covering his eyes with his hands and hoping that no one can see him.
The gall of FB mentioning the importance of news in a democratic society. They have arguably done irreversible net bad for democracies. Let em bow out.
It benefits them by reducing their exposure to online echo chambers reinforced by fake or extremely biased news that are endemic to Facebook. It benefits them by forcing them to get their news directly from the source rather than wrapped in a context Facebook decides upon. It sounds as though you presuppose FB is or should be the only source of news.
And yes I did read it. And I thought critically about it :)
I'd say it's wishful thinking that you believe a majority of the population is going to visit all their news sources directly rather than simply ignore they exist.
News publishers were voluntarily posting on FB themselves to generate traffic to their own sites, it's some warped tough love view to think removing their ability to share content is somehow for their own benefit.
> It sounds as though you presuppose FB is or should be the only source of news.
Never stated anything remotely close to infer this false assumption, ironic that in the same breath you're lambasting FB for spreading misinformation.
People won't stop consuming news and they will go where they need to to get it. With FB out of the running I think that means they will likely end up on some mixed diet like a forum (like HN) and getting it from various sources (local,national,etc.) Essentially, I'm less worried about people being uninformed than I am about them being misinformed and I'm afraid that FB has shown to enable misinformation at unprecedented scale thus far. If we can't agree that FB has uniquely played a large role in that then our discussion is rather moot I'm afraid.
Also, that's why I said it "sounds like". I was inferring while being fully aware of your ability to clarify.
I use FB as an easy way to garner news from several locations at once. Of course FB uses that to litter my 'news feed' with junk (eg suggestions of all kinds). So I'm two minds about this being a problem for me (an Aussie).
However, when I read this sob story by FB :
> publishers willingly choose to post news on Facebook, as it allows them to sell more subscriptions, grow their audiences and increase advertising revenue.
...I know that's not the truth. A lot of the news I read is the same as the free-to-air news that I get across all tv channels (sbs, abc*), so this notion that they'll be losing money anyway is a bit of a misnomer.
Is that because they're legally forbidden from setting up their own website or is it because they're unwilling to spend money on some decent developers and build a homepage worth checking everyday?
Except its obvious that posting news articles drives readership towards the links. You get very detailed statistics from Facebook on clickthrough rates and its not hard to see who clicks through that already has an account for your site (and is likely already a regular reader).
Some simple business analysis would show that having a strong presence on Facebook drives value to the company.
Look at a company like the American Right Wing outlet DailyWire. They have a massive presence on Facebook and they do a good job of getting people to comment and share articles and it has caused the valuation of the company to explode. (see Now This for a left wing example).
Given the current Australian government's cosy relationship with a particular media company that currently dominates the media landscape here, I don't think it is coincidence.