Louis Ingenthron @LouisIngenthron@social.cleverlibre.org

@Lazarou "Washed their hands"? Last I checked Facebook was an entertainment website, not a weather service or news outlet.

Has Pixar also "washed their hands" on the situation?

@UncivilServant Close, but not quite. The law makes social media have to pay traditional media any time someone posts a link to that traditional media on social media. So, the law doesn't "prevent" them from linking to news, but it does make it prohibitively expensive to the point where social media blocking the news was an expected and inevitable outcome.

@tod @grumpygamer Yes, they *chose* that because Canada *chose* to make it prohibitively expensive to continue to welcome the news on their platform.

When we place a tax on gasoline, we expect to see a lower volume of sales on gasoline, and we don't blame the consumers for buying less. Why wouldn't the same be true of news or anything else?

@tomcrinstam @petrichor7020 The news companies themselves post their own stories to Facebook. They can hardly cry theft after giving their own content away.

@AmatAnand If they're making so much money off of them, then why did they just shut off their access? That sounds like it would be bad for business.

@KilKerrin @Yup_Its_Holly Not quite. Facebook shut down news in the country before the law took place. This sent legislators into a scramble to put last minute changes into the law. These changes allowed social media to come up with their own private deals with the media companies. As long as they had such a deal on record, the law didn't apply.
So, are they paying something? Yeah, probably. But "did they agree to pay it"? Not so much.

@reneestephen The fact that they're so willing and eager to part ways shows where the value proposition truly lies in the relationship.

If social media were really ripping off traditional media, traditional media would have parted ways with social media. But it's simply not true, no matter how much the old media wishes it was.

@reneestephen Given that Facebook chose to turn them away in reaction to the law, it's demonstrably true.

@reneestephen No, I'm referring to the Canadian law they lobbied for that forces social media companies to pay the old media companies for content they never solicited.

@reneestephen The user interface literally allows you to click any part of the headline or graphic and be taken directly to the source article. I'd hardly consider that a wall.

If I recall correctly, lede lines and bullet points existed long before the internet. And more importantly, they're written by the very companies looking to extort the social media companies... not the social media companies themselves. Those companies chose to rely on free social media to drive revenue and then they chose to adapt to maximize that revenue stream. They're responsible for their choices.

To me, it just seems like the old media has repeatedly shot themselves in the foot and now they're looking to pass the blame and costs onto the new media.

@reneestephen Do you think Facebook is responsible for people only reading headlines?

@reneestephen @cazabon @tod The media companies chose to create accounts and publish their stories on social media because it was good for them, not because it benefited social media. Social media drives clicks and views, and therefore money, into these traditional media companies just by allowing them to share their content for free. If anything, the social media companies should be charging the traditional media companies for the advertising space they currently offer for free. The idea that the traditional media companies could charge the social media companies for a service provided by the latter is ludicrous. It's no wonder they chose to simply block the old news instead.

@funcrunch @emilygorcenski Of course. Context always matters, which is why full raw originals are better than the sanitized short clips we so often see on social media.

But in terms of the historical record, I'd like to think those full raw videos are what's being preserved (i.e. as evidence in the J6 case).

Although the interesting thing to me is that we seek to preserve these things knowing that most humans in our generation will never seek them out, and even fewer in future generations will.... it will primarily be limited to historians who then summarize the events for their generation through their own personal/societal biases.

@funcrunch @emilygorcenski Yeah, I agree with that. I suppose to some degree they serve different purposes; i.e. recording objective facts vs subjective experiences.

@bibliolater @rm4@mstdn.social QOTO is on a separate branch package of Mastodon, not the trunk package released by the core devs, and the server is a little out of date at the moment, from what I understand (needs some work to get compatible with the latest features). So, the missing stuff should come eventually.

But we have quote toots, whereas almost nobody else does, so that's nice at least.

@emilygorcenski Who needs writing when we have endless video of the events from the ground level? We can watch the BLM protests unfold before our very eyes. We don't have to rely on secondhand accounts. That seems like a big step up to me.

@guardeddon @BBCRadio4 That just means they have the option checked to approve follow requests.