[WarOnPrivacy]

Rephrased: Meta starts process to leave Canadian news sites alone (eg: stop scraping sites for content).

This has nothing to do with our access to news sites in Canada.

Longer version: Meta has been copying content from Canadian news sites, to republish on it's own sites. News sites liked this because it referred free eyeballs & traffic to their sites.

Canadian news biz got Gov to write a law. The law forces some platforms to pay cash if they scrape news (and send free traffic/users to the site). Meta is fine with sending free traffic but is opting out of sending free cash too.

[seanmcdirmid]

> Rephrased: Meta starts process to leave Canadian news sites alone (eg: stop scraping sites for content).

Not sure what your purpose here is but when you share an article on facebook, you usually get "the title", a leading picture, and occasionally a summary. Now you'll just get an unprocessed URL. It doesn't copy the article verbatim into feeds as you have described.

Now it will just push through links as links. That seems fine as well. I like the fact that you can present or not present content, for whatever terms are negotiated.

[WarOnPrivacy]

> Not sure what your purpose here is

To illustrate that a platform that withdraws from republishing news content doesn't end our news access.

> but when you share an article on facebook, you usually get "the title", a leading picture, and occasionally a summary. Now you'll just get an unprocessed URL

This doesn't seem transformative to my point. Could you expound a bit?

[seanmcdirmid]

They aren't inserting the bodies of the articles into the feed. It is like when I hit a paywall site and they tell me what I could get if I just paid for the subscription.

If they were scraping complete articles and re-publishing those, that would be a totally different thing.

[WarOnPrivacy]

>when you share an article on facebook, you usually get "the title", a leading picture, and occasionally a summary.

That's the content of news articles. They were scraping content for republication and now they're not.

From Meta: in order to comply with Bill C-18, passed today in Parliament, content from news outlets, including news publishers and broadcasters, will no longer be available to people accessing our platforms in Canada

> Now you'll just get an unprocessed URL. They aren't inserting the bodies of the articles into the feed.

That's how links are supposed to be and reflects what a well functioning internet looks like. I'm not saying that to be a techno-purist. I'm saying it's the most normal, usual and predicable way to handle a link. There's not a thing wrong with it.

> It is like when I hit a paywall site and they tell me what I could get if I just paid for the subscription.

I can't agree. Having 2% less choices isn't similar to having no choice at all.

If Facebook doesn't offer the 50th copy of a news story, you still have 49 other sites that do (as well as the source). If the story is paywalled, your options are ~none.

[s__s]

> That's the content of news articles. They were scraping content for republication and now they're not.

That content is provided by the publisher, via meta tags, specifically designed for that purpose. The publisher has full control.

It’s trivial for a publisher to even opt of search engine indexing entirely if they choose.

[s1artibartfast]

I'm not sure it is fair to characterize it as scraping. My understanding is that News sites voluntarily put together a little gift basket of title, image, and summary specifically because they want platforms to display it, and can turn it off with the click of a button.

My best guess is that this is actually a collective action problem/prisoners dilemma. News sites would rather not have the summary (and get more traffic), but any one news site that drops it will lose traffic to those that dont.

Because news sites can't organize and collaborate effectively, they were stuck. In this sense, the law was a win-win. Either a hail mary shakedown, or a ban on all summaries.

It is like grocery stores passing a national ban on coupons.