Facebook's new policy in Australia is that links to known Australian and even established international news media outlets (via URL identification) will now be blocked. Apparently, links to half-baked, non-professional "news" sites will not be blocked. This means that established journalism is no longer allowed in Australian Facebook, but crackpots and amateurs will NOW RULE !!!
eek. That does not seem like an intended consequence. I suppose FB is going for the power play and hoping Australia will back down from requiring payment to news services? (If I am summoning the issue correctly here from my memory.)
ReplyDeleteGoogle ended up negotiating the creation of a "news showcase" where they pay major outlets for content presented there. That seems sort of like the deals they're making with major content providers in YouTube (that some of those content providers aren't happy with). My sense is a better route would be some sort of ad revenue sharing on content that actually gets viewed via Google/FB, but the devil's in the details.
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