Meta to Wind Down Its News Feature in the US and Australia
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I have no idea how true that is though.
See also https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2019/01/10/rupe...
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/mar/01/faceb...
Edit: the article has apparently been edited and the specific quote has vanished, but there is more along the same lines.
I don't think this person quite understands that if Meta blocks all news, there's no "providing" at all! So it's fair enough that Meta makes this move. People might even venture outside the Facebook bubble, which would be a net positive.
The piss poor words of "Rod Sims" demonstrates it all in that article.
Glad Meta is leaving, maybe news publishers can demonstrate their value to the people to naturally bring them to their platform. I doubt it though. They want all the eyes to look at them and will pay Meta + Google top dollar for it, but then demand they get paid back for a bad bet, then get in bed with the government to enforce their terms.
Sickening. All the more reason to never visit, turn ad-block on to its most aggressive if I ever am forced to interact with these news sites.
Of course, this didn't mean they were repealing the law and they still expected Meta to pay whatever rate per link the media orgs wanted for the privilege.
Facebook (I refuse to call them Meta) is obligated to pay NewsCorp for articles posted
Facebook then writes this off as a tax deduction
Meanwhile Facebook pays effectively $0 in tax as-is because of all the various loopholes they exploit
As a result the Australian tax payer effectively is paying Newscorp to continue existing
Caveat here, I'm neither a fan of Facebook or tax loop holes. In my opinion tax law should be exceedingly simple and easy to calculate. I don't want to defend Facebook here, but saying the public is paying for this feels like a slight of hand.
At some point you say "this is your tax", that doesn't mean that all other profit is money out of the public coffer. Governments do not tax all money.
No one said they did. I said all private money is money not available to the public. If Facebook bribes legislators to carve out tax loopholes for them, that money stays private, therefore it's denied to the public coffers.
Aside from any offended libertarian sensibilities, what part of that do you disagree with?
According to you, all money belonging to everyone is really tax money that has been stolen from the people.
There are some people who think like that but it's definitely an unusual approach. I'm sure you know what that form of society is called.
I'm responding to a thread about Facebook "lobbying" legislators for tax carve outs. I choose to call it what it is - a bribe.
> According to you, all money belonging to everyone is really tax money that has been stolen from the people.
Im not going to argue for a position I never took. I said that taxes avoided is money denied to the public. You called it theft, because thats your libertarian ideology poking through.
Yah, that's not what the thread said. Facebook is simply deducting a business expense, there was no carve out.
> I choose to call it what it is - a bribe.
Except there was no bribe, you just made something up.
> You called it theft, because thats your libertarian ideology poking through.
I did not call it theft and I'm not a libertarian.
> I said that taxes avoided is money denied to the public.
I said that there is no such concept as "taxes avoided". That not something that exists. You can't "avoid" taxes, either you need to pay them or you don't.
It's not a thing to be able to just "avoid" them.
You are arguing imaginary thing that never happened, and using concepts that don't exist to make your point.
Our system is much too complicated and corruptible today. It shouldn't be so easy to effectively buy legislation, but as long as it is legal we can't really fault anyone with the means from taking advantage.
If Facebook bribes legislators in an illegal way they should be held to account, otherwise laws should be changed and legislators should be resigned in through both elections and checks and balances.
Like, a donation is voluntary, taxes aren't and you think that makes them theft, I get all that. If I choose not to donate my house to the state, it is literally money denied to the public coffers.
In the case of my home, the state has no expectation or entitlement to receive it. One could argue the same in the case of Facebook bribing legislators to get tax carve outs. I wouldn't (because it's very corrupt), but one could.
I don't agree with this model and would much prefer a simple tax code. But as-is, its disingenuous to say that taxes unpaid because one finds a legal way to avoid owing them is taking out of the public coffers. One can't take money that was never owed in the first place.
I'm not sure you know what a write off is. If Facebook is paying fees for licensing content then that is an expense, which is deducted from overall gross revenue in calculating profit, and businesses are taxed on the profit they make.
That's how business expenses work. Tax revenue goes down as a percentage of the expense.
How else would you want it to work?
And for 30% tax rate, for every $30 in reduced taxes facebook is paying $100, so they still lose $70.
And all else equal that money becomes profit for the news companies so the taxes still get paid.
> but given they pay no tax to begin with, the "cost of doing business complying with the regulation" is effectively passed on to the tax payer
If they pay no tax even before this law, then what's the problem? If they go from $0 to $0 then the tax payer isn't losing out on anything. And in that situation, even a single dollar of news company profit means a reduction in tax payer burden.
I don’t really agree with Canadas “link sharing” payment (people have only told me it is the case that links alone cause payment. I have not read the law. I don’t care enough to look). I do agree with Facebook having to pay for scraping and/or summarizing articles when links are posted, however.
First of all it's not a tax deduction, it's a business expense which reduces profit.
Second when you have a tax deduction only a portion (around 20%) of the amount actually reduces taxes, the rest is simply a loss for the business.
> As a result the Australian tax payer effectively is paying Newscorp to continue existing
By that logic the tax payer is paying the electric bill and janitorial services.
That's really not how accounting works.
It's not surprising that users will do that to me. We see plenty of people commenting on HN without reading the article, and that's just based on a text only headline.
It's this imbalance in bargaining power that the Australian law at least aims to change (and it's why it's administered by the competition and consumer commission).
I hate Facebook, but I think laws to reduce competition are pretty stupid and do not benefit public.
And naturally people will just copy paste the content of the report anyway.
I guess that "we provide the description ourselves and want to be paid for it" didn't sound good enough to the public.
Fortunately I've since deleted my account but the whole posturing around ownership of people's posts and shares is just wild to me.
On a semi-related note I once had a message in FB Messenger that was blocked - it refused to send and gave me an error that the link wasn't allowed. Can't remember what it was as it was a long time ago. But the Facebook censorship situarion has been dire for some time...
1: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/may/29/deliberat...
I wouldn't call this censorship since the news companies are just trying to use the law to squeeze revenue for their dying business model. (Hardly anyone subscribes to newspapers anymore)
It's hard to feel bad for Facebook because they're worth hundreds of billions of dollars and monetise news headlines in user feeds. It's really not huge money for Meta, it's really peanuts for them ($20M from recollection?). I work at a small institution that pays 1/20th of that in Oracle licensing.
The money goes to various news outlets (not just News Corp - Fairfax/Nine, ABC and many smaller outlets) and helps diversify their funding.
Australian news on Facebook every day is from a small list of headlines: "Shoppers flock to amazing new item at Kmart", "Australians can't believe new amazing item at Woolworths".
I don't believe I've ever seen a "news article" on Facebook that wasn't a thinly veiled advertisement, which these shops are quite capable of buying direct from Facebook without pretending it's "Journalism".
I don't believe I've ever seen a "news article" anywhere that wasn't a thinly veiled advertisement.
Of course, if the news companies don't implement such a standard and they keep their social media meta tags to encourage sharing, surely that means that they don't mind their content being shared and shouldn't be trying to charge some fee for the privilege?
Of course, news companies would rather throw a fit and call big tech evil rather than trying to figure out how to provide news to users in the most efficient way possible.
So I think this is all some ploy by old media to try to claw back some of that revenue, which they legitimately lost to better performing technology.
They could form a coalition and run their own ad network, if they are so concerned against Google taking a slice of their ad revenue.
1. Regulators: We're going to require you do X on your product Y.
2. Facebook: That literally makes no sense. If you pass this law we will simply stop offering Y in your country.
3. Regulators: We're going to pass the law anyway.
4. Facebook: Does exactly as they warned.
5. Ultimately, the regulators and the citizens lose. Hopefully the citizens are vocal enough about it to make regulators understand just how braindead they are behaving.
Facebook News is toxic, the market chose something else partially because of their representatives’ attention showing what it is, Facebook exited the market. Deprecated, specifically, until their existing agreements expire.
Nothing of value for humanity was lost. Based on past form, not having a facebook dopamine targeting news feed is considered a huge gain for the entire human race (even for the facebook execs who have (a little bit) less money and less problems).
Those jobs are now at risk. (This is all according to the ABC coverage on this topic.)