She sent out an email:
Facebook has blocked Australian users from viewing or sharing news content on their platform. The mass-blocking is in response to new media laws proposed by the Australian Government which would mean that digital giants such as Facebook are required to pay for news content.
in resistance to the proposed laws, Facebook has now blocked Australian news sites, and Quillette has been included in the wide net that has been cast. Our Facebook page has been wiped and our links are blocked on the platform. If you would like to share a Quillette article on Facebook you will be unable to, even if you live outside of Australia.
I replied:
1. I consider Quillette the best of online magazines, and I link to its content often on my blog.
2. I see the Australia-Facebook imbroglio as a reason for hope. If they can ban content from Australian news sites, then they might someday ban content from all news sites. Then I could go back to using Facebook.
I know that we are still in pre-season mode, but please award two points to my team, The QAnon Shamans (mascot photo available upon request). One for the P and one for the W. Sorry Arnold that you have to associate with me and my silly team! You’d better hope that I draw a really bad lottery number during the real draft :).
1. Facebook is not going to get out of the monetizing-virality business voluntarily.
2. If having a “Quillette-USA” (or better, Quillette-non-14Eyes) would somehow get around the nonAus-to-nonAus Facebook sharing issue, I am willing to help.
3. For Australians, an easy circumvention could be a personal “Share Blog”. So, on your Facebook wall, you post, “Hey guys, really interesting thing I saw on the internet today. I just posted about it on my share blog, which you should open in a separate browser, not your Facebook app.” And by “posting about it” I mean, the post is the link.
Won’t Australians with a Share Blog be subject to the same link tax? And be easier to collect from than a U.S. company?
I’m not sure that’s how the Australian law works, but even assuming it is, to the extent one would owe a tax for sharing links, the point of a ShareBlog is not to avoid the tax. Obey the law and pay your taxes! Instead, it would be to get around Facebook’s policy of frustrating certain user-to-user(s) communications altogether and making it impossible for a user to choose to comply with the law on an individualized basis, for example, by having the option to pay for whatever costs Facebook would incur in consequence. “This message will cost you 40 cents, proceed?” Way back in the day people had to pay for each text message – ten cents was typical – or phone call minute, and they still did it a lot.
It may even be the case that Facebook would find it relatively easy and be happy to collect up these tolls and pass them along to where the law says they must go, but that the legal strategy of their current business model when facing cliff-like incentives requires them to have zero financial entanglement with users of the base platform service. If that’s the case, they may not even mind so much if people maneuver around their obstacles, so long as they stay locked-in to the platform and its user network, and their activities don’t create any liabilities for the company.
We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar,
And in the spirit of men there is no blood.
O, that we then could come by Caesar’s spirit
And not dismember Caesar!
– Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Anyone have ideas for building a better decentralized Facebook? Among the people I know, some people engage in political arguments which usually goes poorly, and most people want to avoid politics, and just want to see and share non-political friends+family pictures of babies + holidays.
I’d score fewer people relying on Facebooks pre-approved-sources-only scrubbed-for-your-convenience algorithms for their news as a win. Guessing that the SJWs at Facebook were already waiting for any opportunity to put Quillette on the blocked list for containing wrong think.
Easy for FB to do this; they most likely derive little revenues from these sources.
Media: no fair, facebook makes money linking to my story. Media also: no fair facebook doesn’t link to my story.
The Australian situation is essentially crony capitalism. The government wants Facebook to pay media (big, privately owned newspapers etc) after people click a link on Facebook and are redirected to the news site.
I.e. a newspaper could link to its own story for free on Facebook, but if someone clicks the link, Facebook must pay the newspaper. In essence, its comparable to newspapers asking the delivery boy to pay them for leaving their product on people’s front lawns.