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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Yesterday's discussion on this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24337269

The only update is the (predictable) response from Australian lawmakers and lobbyists.

While this law is idiotic at all levels, I'm secretly hoping that Facebook & Google do implement a complete news blackout for a significant amount of time just so we can see how it affects Australian society.

Another angle people don't seem to be mentioning enough is just how scarily easily a major government effectively banned its citizens from discussing any news online. How hard would it be for them to include Reddit (or HN), for example, in the list of entities that are subject to this law? If they did, this post likely wouldn't be allowed in Australia.

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One thing we can get out of it, out of curiosity is how it may affect people's perception of the news and whether the absence of algorithmic trending may result in less click-bait and inflammatory headlines in the news. I won't hold my breath, but I am curious to see if there is any perceptible change.

I'm not sure what law you're talking about here, because requiring Google and Facebook to pay news sites for reposting their content is very different from "banning its citizens from discussing any news online".

There's nothing stopping them from just turning it into a hyperlink like it would've been in the old days. Sites grab excerpts and thumbnails of the target URL in order to keep you on their site longer and minimize the number of clicks away.

>requiring Google and Facebook to pay news sites for reposting their content is very different from "banning its citizens from discussing any news online".

Part of the law says that Facebook has to grant access to News Corp. so they (and they alone) can moderate any and all comments posted on Facebook about any of their articles.

So, actually, yes, it's exactly that.

Do you have a link to the text of the law? Curious to read what it requires and not the scaremongering of FB or Murdoch PR orgs.

https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Exposure%20Draft%20Bill.... From a quick read, FB/Google are largely correct. There are lots of places where the draft is extremely vague (e.g. it doesn't really define what kinds of content sharing it covers), and Facebook is going by the broadest possible interpretation.

This may be what you are looking for:

https://www.australiancompetitionlaw.info/report/digital-med...

I believe this question has been addressed and clarified as limiting the moderation of content to the news organisations' own Facebook pages only, not a general ability to moderate discussion of their articles posted elsewhere by private citizens.

52S User comments

(1) Subsection (2) applies if the registered news business corporation for the registered news business makes a request, in writing, to the responsible digital platform corporation for the digital platform service to do any of the following:

(a) ensure that the registered news business corporation is provided with flexible content moderation tools that allow the registered news business corporation to remove or filter comments on the registered news business’ covered news content that:

(i) are made using the digital platform service; and

(ii) are made on a part of the digital platform service that is set up and able to be edited by the registered news business;

(b) ensure that the registered news business corporation can disable the making of such comments;

(i) by particular persons; or

(ii) in particular circumstances.

(2) The responsible digital platform corporation for the digital platform service must comply with the request.

Exactly, “on a part of the digital platform service that is set up and able to be edited by the registered news business“, i.e. on the news site’s own personal page, which is already possible.

> limiting the moderation of content to the news organisations' own Facebook pages only

I have a Facebook page for my business, and I can already do that today.

The law makes no distinction between URLs, thumbnails, titles etc., just mentions news content as a whole. In fact, if a news site posted an article on Facebook themselves, Facebook would still need to pay them for it.

How can one reasonably argue that a URL is "news"? This has definitely not held in other countries.

What if I (a user) post the URL, title and first few lines of an article to my Facebook feed? That qualifies as covered news content under any interpretation.

Or what if the URL itself contains the full title (like it does in a lot of cases)?

You as the user manually pasting the content in is tangibly different from an automated system doing it, which is what we have now. Whether the courts would hold them liable to pay for your personal actions is a separate question. It is currently the case that individuals can violate copyright by reposting someone else's content unattributed, and when that happens there are existing processes for dealing with it.

If the URL has the title in it, that means the news site put that information in the URL to share it. Should I be able to charge money for my phone number because it happens to spell out a word? Again, maybe a court would hold that both are true, but it's absolutely a different thing from scripts automatically scraping and reposting content.

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