We appear to be standing our ground!

Not my preferred choice of source but NatPo has more detail than some of the alternatives I saw. It includes some numbers as well as comments about the difference between Meta’s and Google’s approaches. Hint: they’re not the same, so there’s already cracks in the effort to make an example out of Canada.

  • dylaner
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    1 year ago

    We know that the platforms don’t do linking as in <a href=...>Click here</a>. They all embed titles, summaries, pictures and sometimes whole pages.

    There isn’t a trivial way to get those without media companies going out of their way to provide the information. If I go over to that article on nationalpost.com, I see multitudes of OpenGraph tags, such as <meta content="Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram" property="og:title"/><meta content="https://smartcdn.gprod.postmedia.digital/nationalpost/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Pablo-Rodriguez-1.jpg" property="og:image"/>. OpenGraph, to be clear, is a protocol created by Facebook to standardize how web pages appear on their platform. If National Post wants links to their content to look like your example, that is entirely in their hands. Heck, it’s less work.

    (Of course, they won’t do that, because that would be stupid. They’d rather make an embarrassing attempt to extort Facebook for free money because they have realized advertising is doomed and they don’t know what to do about it).

    • Avid AmoebaOP
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      1 year ago

      Advertising seems to be making tons of money for Facebook. Do you not have a guess why it no longer does for news?

      With all the talk about “they’re free to paywall”, are we going to consider market power imbalance here or are we pretending it doesn’t affect these actions?