Intro:
> to restrict the availability of news
Outro:
> I hope in the future, we can include news for people in Australia once again
Not sure which I dislike more. Liars and thieves the lot of them. Can they both lose for our sakes?
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.
- To stop Australian publishers from sharing any content on FB
- Prevent International or Australian news from being viewed or shared by Australians
And yes I did read it. And I thought critically about it :)
They will hopefully stop using Facebook.
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.
*abc is the same as the US's pbs
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).
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.
Also, that's why I said it "sounds like". I was inferring while being fully aware of your ability to clarify.
This was another big one. User links a news article, the newspaper would get to moderate comments on Facebook, in the user's page
[0] https://about.fb.com/news/2021/02/changes-to-sharing-and-vie...
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?
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
DFES, BOM & other government services would fall under definition b. Candidate page would fall under definition a.
It looks like the blast radius from this decision is impacting organizations that is out of scope of this legislation.
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.
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.
If I want to read important disaster information from the BOM, I will go to the BOM site, not Facebook.
It won't be an improvement.
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.
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.
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.
Well, this is actually the case.
TBD what qualifies as 'news,' though.
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.
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.
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.
It’s pretty scary that a few people in parliament can sign a law that only serves a few rich and powerful people at the expense of its citizens.
What is the future of governance? Because 2021, it feels still like a drunken king doing what “feels good”
ACCC has addressed some of them here: https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/response-to-google-ope...
https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/google-nine-agree-...
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?
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/facebook-ban-hits-he...
Milk might only account for 4% of a supermarket's sales, but a supermarket that doesn't sell milk is at a huge disadvantage to one that does.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
See sections 52D and 52W of the bill: https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bi...
Guidelines intentionally kept vague so that some bureaucrat can slap a huge fine and collect the rent?
I wonder if that rent-seeking attitude will accelerate or curb the current brain drain Australia faces.
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.
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.
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.
To think of it - similar to crypto around WW2.
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?
What is this company, out of curiosity? My guess is ABC, but I don't know.
I'm not sure the exact online share.
On the other hand, the Liberal party is very hostile to the public service in general and the ABC in particular.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasurer_of_Australia
[1] https://www.legislation.gov.au/Browse/Results/ByRegDate/Legi...
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?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24337269 - "An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia", 2020-09-01, 158 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24347676 - "Facebook to block news on Australian sites after new law, riling lawmakers", 2020-09-01, 78 comments
The big threads about this issue include:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26111783 - "Australia to introduce Google, Facebook legislation to parliament next week", 2021-02-12, 269 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26030135 - "Google News Showcase Launches in Australia", 2021-02-04, 54 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25999799 - "Australia’s PM suggests Bing adequate if Google blocks searches", 2021-02-02, 175 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25987671 - "Communications Minister touts the opportunities of a Google-less Australia", 2021-02-01, 49 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903511 - "Australia’s Proposed “Fox News Tax”", 2021-01-25, 29 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25873001 - "Could Google Really Leave Australia?", 2021-01-22, 51 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25870571 - "The spat between Google and Australia, as reported on HN", 2021-01-22, 95 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25867547 - "Google Threatens to Remove Search in Australia as Spat Escalates", 2021-01-22, 33 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25867264 - "Google threatens to withdraw search engine from Australia", 2021-01-22, 135 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25866493 - "Google threatens to disable search in Australia if media code becomes law", 2021-01-22, 18 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25789773 - "Google looks at pulling all or part of its search engine from Australia", 2021-01-15, 71 comments
Others?
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.
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.
It is much worse than that. The publishers themselves often share the links on Facebook themselves.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex"/>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.
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.
It's a law written mostly by the ACCC.
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.
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.
(Hopefully YC doesn't have to pay for this link one day)
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 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.
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.
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.
Most of the times I visit newspapers websites I was sent there from social media.
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!
Reminds me of when Google pulled out of China over censorship and Microsoft took the opportunity to try to jump in and take their place (in search).
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.
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".
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
So, arguing that “these politicians don’t understand economics” is like saying “laws against theft don’t understand how easy it is to break a window”.
> "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia"
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/australian-pm-calls-en...
He was certainly one of the more forward-thinking, progressive PMs we've had. As just one example, he actually believes climate change is real.
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.
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.
https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/google-nine-agree-...
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56101859
The Australian government's approach is working.
Google can afford to pay for the right to link to publishers. New startups can't.
Australia has strengthened Google's monopoly, all in the guise of "taking on" big tech.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Not unreasonable arguments could be made that it's journalism that leeches off of FB. FB drives huge traffic and provides a massive platform.
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.
More likely is that users will stay on FB and consume each other’s insane conspiracy theories without even a hint of real reporting added in.
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.
All of those keyboard warriors in the comments will start summarizing news articles and sharing them on pages or in groups.
It will make the echo chamber effect worse, not better.
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.
On the other hand, they delivered 5.1 billion views to Australian media sites last year. That would seem to me to be a big hit to media sites.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
https://theconversation.com/webs-inventor-says-news-media-ba...
We have a joke:
A: How much is a drop of gas?
B: A drop of gas? Well, zero!
A: One million drops of gas, please.
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've also heard that, unlike Facebook, Google doesn't have the option to say no.
It'll be interesting to see if the newspapers start arguing that Facebook should be exempt, once all of their traffic from Facebook dries up.
What does that mean? Surely Google could remove their entire presence from Australia if they felt like it.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
An analogy might be to minimum wage laws: a laissez-faire market would result in an unfair distribution of benefits, so the government steps in.
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.
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.
Have you reference for that?
That is the first coherent argument, IMO, for their position. Coherent, but so wrong I think.
Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull are examples of what happens when you try and dictate terms with NewCorp and they turn on you with negative press.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/nov/18/kevin-rudd-and...
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.
Which is operated mostly by Murdoch cronies.
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).
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.
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"
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.
Update: OK, now read my latest posts (to this thread).
P.S. I'm not siding with the OZ Govt, read my words more carefully
> 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.
Those services are perfectly free to have their own websites that are not paid for or promoted by Facebook.
What criminal act do you think applies here?
He had the opportunity to act on Climate Change and he stuck to Tony Abbott's script. Weak as piss.
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.
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
This just proves how misguidedly sweeping the legislation is.
52A: https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bi...
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.
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.
What are these supposed inaccuracies??
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.
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.)
You could get rid of all their user data and it would still be a great search engine.
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.
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.
> 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.
[1] https://theconversation.com/webs-inventor-says-news-media-ba...
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.
But yeah, the product manager view / documentation of intent sounds generally reasonable.
I do wonder how useful that would be to the news orgs in practice.
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.
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.)
We were a large consumer of news before Facebook. We will be a large consumer of news after Facebook.
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.
So indeed there is no clear simple implementation strategy for this yet.
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.
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 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.
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.
I suppose it has worked in Russia and China though.
OT and I do understand the meaning, but as a matter of language isn’t this in the wrong order?
However if you're the guy who writes the laws in australia, you have less (but still some) power over american corporations.
- Donald Horne, 1964
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigneurial_system_of_New_Fran...
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.
Are you saying that laws should exist to disallow linking between two websites based on "allocation of benefits"?
If so, how does one determine what the balance of benefits are?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Australia's two choices.
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).
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"
>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.
P.S. How will you be paying The Conversation for the content you stole from them a few comments ago?
Not really sure why the politicians get the slack. Which measurement was highly effective that could also be done in a country with neighbors.
Ps. I'm not pro Facebook. Just curious
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.
Compare 477 to 16,000:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/01/su...
... All of them? I'm not sure why so many people seem to think water is required to make a border effective.
But politics responds much more to outcomes than causes
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.
[1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank#Manipulating_PageRank
[3] https://www.quora.com/What-does-the-Counter-Abuse-Technology...
[4] https://www.blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/meet-...
> 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.
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.
The law specifically only targets Google and Facebook due to their monopoly power. New startups are not affected.
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.
Just so you know, Conde Nast hasn't owned reddit for over a decade.
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 has everything to do with the new legislation. I can only suggest you read the article start to finish.
Facebook will be making similar deals soon enough.
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.
FB, just happens to have enough cash to say no.
There are no good politicians.
The only thing any of them have going is that some of them accidentally make reasonable policy choices occasionally.
Plain linking does not keep people on FB. Automated previewing does. Can't this be interpreted as raising the bar for fair use?
Straight up copying of course would be different.
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.
We already had a natural experiment, in which Australian publishers were free not to share their content on fb.
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.
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.
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.
Miraculously, after the Australian government gets involved, Google is now making deals with news media. Facebook will do the same eventually.
Ben Thompson has a nice analysis of the situation: https://stratechery.com/2020/australias-news-media-bargainin...
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.
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.
All you are doing here is convincing me that tech companies are just runaway trains with nobody at the controls!
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?
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.
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/style/disabled-fashion-fa...
Absolutely. If it can't be done responsibly and ethically, perhaps it should not be done.
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?
There's existing a term for people with this view:
An apt comparison.
This is quite a bizarre claim as there is famously an entire category of problems that are hard to solve but easy to verify: P vs NP
In other words the solution to this should be antitrust enforcement and decentralization of power.
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.
Most likely this deal benefits the biggest stakeholders only. Small players would cave into opening up to FB/Google.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.)
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...
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.
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.
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:
http://www.aquilaarts.com/bushmonkey.html
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.
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.
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..."
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
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.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-go...
Can you explain or understand the algorithms humans use to drive cars?
Explain to me step by step how you walk.
Believe it or not, your car is not that primitive when compared to a self-driving one in terms of the number of things it does autonomously.
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.
Patients don’t care how cancer is detected. Patients care if the diagnosis is correct.
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).
