A couple things I found interesting today. Hope you didn’t start to think things were suddenly turning brighter for Facebook.
By now, we should know better than using a single metric to flatten the impact of one company, let alone that’s as big and wide as Facebook. Just like no high watermark on S&P 500 will bring back the hundreds of thousands killed by Covid-19, no amount of dividends paid by $FB will bring lessen the impact of Trump, or Q, or a genocide. The reality is not a two-dimensional spectrum from light to dark; the good in one axis does not make up for the bad in another.
Facebook, The PR Firm
What bothers me most, with all of the PR crises and issues at Facebook, is that it is so dominant, there are no real consequences or recourse. For individuals, there are no real alternatives at the same scale as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Worse, for advertisers, even those who just spend $100 a month, they are scaled so large you are forced to use them, and good luck getting any human support. There is no winning when you have to keep giving money and time to the hate machine.
Facebook plans to block the sharing of local and international news stories on its platforms if legislation requiring tech platforms to pay publishers for content becomes law, the company said in a blog post Monday.
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Easton wrote in his post that news represents a fraction of what Facebook users see in their news feeds, and is “not a significant source of revenue” for the company. In addition to investing “millions of dollars” in Australian news businesses, he added, “over the first five months of 2020 we sent 2.3 billion clicks from Facebook’s News Feed back to Australian news websites at no charge — additional traffic worth an estimated $200 million AUD to Australian publishers.”
Facebook may block news from being shared on its platforms in Australia
Facebook’s argument here is flimsy at best. Their entire argument is that people should post and share news links to free content, so that it keeps people using Facebook and earning ad revenue for Facebook. And who owns the ad networks? Facebook and Google. This reminds me of when Facebook told news and web publishers to “pivot to video” a few years back, only to inflate video view counts?
And what about Facebook posts that become news in and of themselves? We’ve seen plenty of posts do exactly that. Do they get ad revenue for the traffic and time they drive? Or do they get blocked at an arbitrary point that is unaccountable to anyone.
