It doesn’t, though. Facebook is grabbing more and more of the content making it less and less necessary to actually go to the news site. As a result, Facebook gets to profit from ads instead of the news site.
This is a well-intentioned but horrible law. There are a couple of things they could do instead.
Ban large scale data collection on end users without the combination of oversight and properly informed consent that happens in medical research. That still allows for some of the things that are actually beneficial to individuals and society while stripping the power to use the data for such frivolous things as ads. Doing micro-targeted ads requires a level of surveillance and data processing that is beyond the means of any company that has anything else as it’s core competency. That would put ads back a few decades to when an advertiser did not choose a customer via surveillance, but chose a market based on interest (context ads). This would put the original creators and publishers of content back in charge. This would have the added benefit of increasing privacy online.
They could ban any practice that interferes with the end-to-end principal of communications. This is the principal that says “the stuff I specifically request is the stuff that is most visible.” Right now, Facebook et al are poisoning feeds with “pay to promote” crap so extensively that I’m likely to see something from a bunch of right wing nut jobs at the top of my feed instead of the Marxist outlet I’ve actually subscribed to. Worse, I might never see the people and organizations that I explicitly follow unless those people and organizations pay up. That could have the side effect of pouring water on the dumpster fire that passes for discourse, because fringe movements would have to actually gain traction through the quality of their ideas and arguments instead of by just throwing money around.
It doesn’t, though. Facebook is grabbing more and more of the content making it less and less necessary to actually go to the news site. As a result, Facebook gets to profit from ads instead of the news site.
This is a well-intentioned but horrible law. There are a couple of things they could do instead.
Ban large scale data collection on end users without the combination of oversight and properly informed consent that happens in medical research. That still allows for some of the things that are actually beneficial to individuals and society while stripping the power to use the data for such frivolous things as ads. Doing micro-targeted ads requires a level of surveillance and data processing that is beyond the means of any company that has anything else as it’s core competency. That would put ads back a few decades to when an advertiser did not choose a customer via surveillance, but chose a market based on interest (context ads). This would put the original creators and publishers of content back in charge. This would have the added benefit of increasing privacy online.
They could ban any practice that interferes with the end-to-end principal of communications. This is the principal that says “the stuff I specifically request is the stuff that is most visible.” Right now, Facebook et al are poisoning feeds with “pay to promote” crap so extensively that I’m likely to see something from a bunch of right wing nut jobs at the top of my feed instead of the Marxist outlet I’ve actually subscribed to. Worse, I might never see the people and organizations that I explicitly follow unless those people and organizations pay up. That could have the side effect of pouring water on the dumpster fire that passes for discourse, because fringe movements would have to actually gain traction through the quality of their ideas and arguments instead of by just throwing money around.