Sounds ridiculous, but yes. They earn "something" via their exclusive advertisement spots here.

I guess the daily active users are something else though.

Because you're doing it voluntarily.

They are in Australia, and it’s probably safe to assume this law would be pretty similar to ours. In our version, Part 52B explicitly renders these three things as being exactly the same for the purposes of the law:

(a) the content is reproduced on the service or is otherwise placed on the service; or

(b) a link to the content is provided on the service; or

(c) an extract of the content is provided on the service.

Which quite literally means that they consider a post that only contains hyperlink (b) or a link and only a title (even just the title would fall under (c)) to be as bad as a social media site ripping off the whole article!

This was the same conflation used by the supporters of the law and pretty much every news article about it before it was passed, basically all of which dishonestly claimed that social media sites were doing (a) when they were mostly only posting a title and sentence or two synopsis (that is supplied by the news site itself in its meta tags!!)

You are not protecting "normal people". These types of laws are nothing but attempts at rent seeking by dying legacy media companies that were too incompetent to figure out working digital strategies on their own. And they would already be dead without the traffic that big platforms like Meta and Google are sending their way.

If you send traffic to some e-commerce platform through an affiliate link, you are the one who gets paid. These companies are instead trying to rig the system in such a way that the affiliate would be forced to pay them. It's an absurd and desperate proposal that deserves to be rejected.

Canada passed a similar bill a few years ago causing meta to stop showing Canadian news content on their platforms. It didn’t really impact them financially or user wise. So the same thing will probably happen in Italy.

No, ads make them money. Users see the ads because they view their feeds.

It’s been proven in other markets that removing News from the feed doesn’t decrease engagement. Meta will continue to make money, and Italian news sites will see their traffic vanish.

Turns out they’re simply not valuable in the way they used to be, and country after country is learning this

Yes, meta took the salt-the-earth approach. Rather then allow users to post links and meta not summarize the content, meta is now destroying its own value for Canadians.

These hypercorps and their CEOs act like giant fucking children, and rather than abide by a ruling being told to play fair, they just decide to take their ball and go home.

Good riddance. The sooner social media dies, the better off humanity will be.

Yes, that was a great move. I wish Meta would do the same in all countries. I don't go to Facebook to read news.

I am not a facebook user, but going by that post they seem to go a step further and outright block any links pointing to news sites. The article mentions some provisions in the Italian law that prohibit restricting visiblity of the news sites, at least during negotiations, so that kind of salted earth move could backfire .

I'm also not happy that news organizations get special exceptions. It is very easy to construct cynical motives:

- Politicians need the news so journalists are protected.

- If news organizations get paid, they have no incentive to be AI critical.

The article says that "news are vital". So is open source, films, images, art, and the authors do not get paid by the thieves.

But there is real, broad competition between news outlets.