Facebook owner Meta to remove news from platform if Congress passes media bill

[kmlx]

i still can’t believe facebook and alphabet folded when it came to news in australia. they should have stayed the course. and predictably they opened up a can of worms: https://www.euronews.com/2022/03/03/neighbouring-rights-goog...

the best way forward is to go back and ban news orgs from google, facebook, etc in countries where governments are captured by these media conglomerates. if the laws forbid this course of action then these companies should close down their local offices. google/fb can afford to make less money, and in this case they should.

[chownie]

Google displaying story snippets on the search pages obviate the need to actually visit the site itself (and load ads, content, etc) and by doing so materially harm news sites. If Google want to use the content rather than just link to it then I think compensation is fair.

[braingenious]

I don’t follow what you’re saying. Can you elaborate on the “shoulds” here? What principles are so important that giant corporations should leave money on the table to rightfully uphold them?

[seanhunter]

Who would be banning the news orgs in countries where the government is captured by them? That captive government?

Why is the public interest best served by the government siding with google/facebook etc over the news orgs themselves?

[animitronix]

I fail to see any problem here. A newsless Facebook 100% sounds like a win.

[specialist]

Yup. Their news feed is just an algorithmic hate machine. Facebook was almost ideal (conceptually) beforehand.

My future perfect social media is persistent chat for friends and family. I just want to see babies, puppies, weddings, funerals, holidays, and all the other important life events of my nearest and dearest.

[yrgulation]

Funny but this might save facebook. Going back to pictures of food and cats might make people return to that platform.

[toomuchtodo]

> A similar Australian law, which took effect in March 2021 after talks with the big tech firms led to a brief shutdown of Facebook news feeds in the country, has largely worked, a government report said.

[shapefrog]

> led to a brief shutdown of Facebook news feeds

> the country, has largely worked, a government report said

nothing of value was lost

[hatenberg]

They are bluffing. Despite fake metrics to the contrary, news drives vast amount of secondary engagement on their platform and removing the news tab would not remove the regulatory effect (news still happen in feed)

Worse for them it would harm republicans who rely on the radicalization engine and will respond to it in a hostile way. they are bluffing.

[mkoryak]

Next can they remove ads that look like posts and have taken over 80% of the feed

[j33zusjuice]

Gonna be a hard no on that one. Sorry, champ.

[anjel]

Google and Facebook have incrementally destryed the fourth estate for decades so that's quite the flex claiming newspapers actually are grateful for Meta's "beneficence."