I don't find it too absurd if you consider that many older people go to Facebook to read the news. And by now, the young crowd is moving on, which means those older people are Facebooks main user base.
And you don't think that's absurd?
FYI I work on catching image thieves in the US and we sadly see lots of cases where you feel that it should clearly be illegal that a company is using someone else's photo without permission, but oddly enough it turns out to be not legally pursuable.
Because let's be honest, most people only look at the image and read the headline. So for them, the preview on facebook is "good enough".