Meta to Wind Down Its News Feature in the US and Australia

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&quot;Lawmakers around the world have pushed Meta to compensate publishers for the stories that appear on the social network.&quot; Can somebody fill me in on what this means? Publishers want to get paid for people on facebook reposting their news stories? Or is it the embedding info you get from links?

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].<p>Fortunately I&#x27;ve since deleted my account but the whole posturing around ownership of people&#x27;s posts and shares is just wild to me.<p>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&#x27;t allowed. Can&#x27;t remember what it was as it was a long time ago. But the Facebook censorship situarion has been dire for some time...<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2022&#x2F;may&#x2F;29&#x2F;deliberate-ploy-whistleblowers-reveal-why-facebooks-australia-news-ban-included-non-news-sites" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2022&#x2F;may&#x2F;29&#x2F;deliberat...</a>

As an Australian that flicks through Facebook every so often...<p>Australian news on Facebook every day is from a small list of headlines: &quot;Shoppers flock to amazing new item at Kmart&quot;, &quot;Australians can&#x27;t believe new amazing item at Woolworths&quot;.<p>I don&#x27;t believe I&#x27;ve ever seen a &quot;news article&quot; on Facebook that wasn&#x27;t a thinly veiled advertisement, which these shops are quite capable of buying direct from Facebook without pretending it&#x27;s &quot;Journalism&quot;.

It&#x27;s fair that Meta does not have to pay the legacy big media racket the protection fee, but unfortunately this hurts the players that were not asking for the protection fee in the first place. Maybe small players will hurt from the reduced exposure, to the advantage of the big players.

It should be fairly simple to come up with some standard to block social media sharing i.e some .nosocial file in your root dir = don&#x27;t share this site on social media.<p>Of course, if the news companies don&#x27;t implement such a standard and they keep their social media meta tags to encourage sharing, surely that means that they don&#x27;t mind their content being shared and shouldn&#x27;t be trying to charge some fee for the privilege?

Honestly, great move by Meta.<p>1. Regulators: We&#x27;re going to require you do X on your product Y.<p>2. Facebook: That literally makes no sense. If you pass this law we will simply stop offering Y in your country.<p>3. Regulators: We&#x27;re going to pass the law anyway.<p>4. Facebook: Does exactly as they warned.<p>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.