Hacker News Reader

Comment by linuxandrew | Hacker News Reader

Last time Facebook decided to censor the news in Australia they ended up censoring links a bunch of government pages like links to emergency services[1].

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...

View on HN

it's basically australia's censorship, not fb's. Australia forced fb to pay news providers for each link _each user_ does share on it's platforms, which means huge money for meta for something they don't make money back, so they decided to comply with australian law

That's a cost of doing business, much like paying tax. It's entirely on Facebook for censoring users in Australia. They could choose... not to do business in Australia, shut down their office and stop taking ad dollars from Australian companies.

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.

It's not cost of doing business. This law basically made this business (of news distribution if we can call it that way) unprofitable. The choice is to either lose money or not lose money and to not provide the service. What you say about meta's revenue/cash is a completely different thing and can be tackled in other ways like increasing general tax for a company that made x amount of revenue per year or fixing tax avoidance schemes. Imposing an arbitrary tax related to news distribution is solving(killing a business model) a completely different problem. The news outlets problem could also be solved by imposing a news tax on all citizens like how it's done in some countries. The current situation is completely caused by this law. Meta just followed this law by removing something made unprofitable by this law and I find very strange blaming meta for it and not authorities. Meta can be accused of other things like radicalization, shady algorihms or others but this precise situation is not caused by it but by Australia's (and Canada's if we extend the concept) govts

This is a legal issue due to Australia forcing Facebook to pay news companies for links to their websites.

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)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com