Facebook and Instagram owner Meta threatens to cut off news in California | Hacker News Reader

Facebook and Instagram owner Meta threatens to cut off news in California

npr.org

21 pointsisaacfrond27 comments

Genuinely don't understand Meta's angle here. "We will make ourselves less relevant and reduce our own revenue if you do this." OK go for it. Why does anyone care? Reactions to news and politics on Meta's platforms are generally crappy anyway. Who's crying out in fear at the loss of clickbait political outrage posts on Facebook?

I (and HN) may not have the average person's view on this, I mean I'd love to see less news on Facebook. So I'm biased here. But the average person probably just doesn't care whether there's news on Facebook. If they want news and it disappears from FB, they will get it somewhere else. There's no shortage of recycled news posts on the 'net.

Maybe they think they’re so big and important that their bluff can’t be called. That would make sense.

the design goal is to keep humans on the platform. If they can find an excuse to remove the exits they will go for it.

The angle is presumably that links to news articles don't actually generate significant value (whether revenue or "relevance") for Meta; it just creates massive amounts of free traffic for the media companies.

Paying for something that generates no value is a bad deal. Why is it surprising that they're not planning on doing that?

I'm sure they've run A/B tests on this in other places, and have a good idea on just how unimportant news articles are to them. If it turns out that California is different, and users and advertisers start leaving in droves, it'll be easy enough for them to reverse course.

That still sounds like an angle that no one outside of Criminal Meta would give a shit about, so why would they make it public

> They aren't empty threats; Facebook briefly blocked news articles in Australia over a similar measure that required tech companies to pay publishers for news content. Google said it would pull its search engine from the country before a compromise was struck.

. . . and then they caved and paid Australian publishers in the face of typically Australian "don't let the door hit you on the way out" response.

Not quite, the government introduced laws to force them to pay, a perhaps even better call of their bluff, much as it was really a bit of a silly law.

Watch and see local news outlets migrate to twitter and use the subscription functionality to generate income.

Twitter has like a tenth of FB's users, in case you weren't aware.

Why would any organization migrate to twitter in 2023?

Go on do it, I dare you

facebook "news", lol.

This would actually benefit California IMHO.

OT but the Meta company name change stands out like a sore thumb after the Metaverse project failure.

Oh no, no more manipulative fake news? What will people do with themselves?

Sadly these days people don't know real from fake, so they'll probably just go find a new source of bad information anyways, but anything that makes them stop using fakebook is good.

> we will be forced to remove news from Facebook and Instagram, rather than pay into a slush fund

a little gaslighty, since it’s a choice and not an operational issue to comply with an onerous regulation, it’s just a tax

Can you not use gaslight in place of dishonest? I know it's popular, but the behavior really needs it's own word. Also, nothing about a corp stretching the truth is hard to understand for people, I hope.

I'm cautious of diluting that word too. in this case I'm looking at it more as a future distortion of reality where they continue to say they were forced to do something that they were not forced to do.

all gaslighting is a subset of dishonesty.

Gaslighting is: "a specific type of manipulation where the manipulator is trying to get someone else (or a group of people) to question their own reality, memory or perceptions. "

Is that what you intended to say? Is someone manipulating your memories? Are you questioning your own reality after parent's comments?

"they were running a business but they were forced to change that business due to onerous laws"

is how I imagine the perception would be, but that perception is false because they only said they were forced but instead just chose to try to hold the democracy for ransom

Don't threaten me with a good time.

I wonder why their PR department hasn't yet figured out anything beyond blackmailing? The same story has been going on throughout the globe for about ten years.

a) they can't?

b) it works

And it's not like PR are on their own there, somebody dictates what they would pursue.

Probably (a), but the point being that I would have expected them to come up with some more constructive lobbying strategy.

nice, I had considered a chrome extension to do that

why couldn't they learn from history? communisum will only bring misery. Let the market decide. If people don't want to pay for news , then let them die. Eventually,there will be new media companies who learn to be lean and make content that is profitable.

These people seem like they would have taxed smartphone companies so they can keep payphones alive. What is wrong with government in California? I don't understand how they can come to these conclusions after a lot of deliberation. It almost seems to me like they are only trying to find ways to line their pockets and then leave.

Good idea. Having public payphones allows the poor and homeless to make calls

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