1) Social media is created. Traditional media excitedly jump aboard because they're thrilled about the opportunity to drive revenue with free advertising.
2) Traditional media rework their entire business model around social media. "Share on Facebook!" they cry to their customers, as they let their direct-to-consumer infrastructure crumble.
3) Traditional media loses revenue share and spends money they can't afford on lobbying the government.
4) The government passes a law that says social media has to pay traditional media for hosting the very links that traditional media was so eager to have on social media.
5) Social media bans news rather than pay the extortion.
6) Traditional media blames social media for not providing the news during dangerous events, like the #Yellowknife fire. They run clickbait stories about how many people don't know there's an evacuation order because they get their news from social media.
@alexwild Since when is running a profitable business a crime?
@LouisIngenthron I never said it was a crime. I think social media's rent-seeking on the distribution channels is not sustainable as a matter of basic economics. Someone has to pay for news, or it will disappear.
@alexwild Right, but those news sites (by and large) have chosen advertisements as their revenue sources. And social media drives more people to click on the links which causes more ads to be shown, which means more profit for the traditional media.
If anything, social media should be charging the newspapers for spreading their links, not the other way around.
>"The government passes a law that says social media has to pay traditional media for hosting the very links that traditional media was so eager to have on social media."
I don't understand this. What law are you talking about? What links are you talking about?
@Pat Canada, not US.
Canada passed a law that says you can't link to a site without paying them a fee?
@Pat Pretty much, yeah. Due to pressure from old-media lobbyists.
In response, Google & Meta were just like "ok whatever, we'll just ban those links then."
https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/7/14/23794623/meta-google-canada-c-18-online-news-act-fight
Hyperlinking is pretty much what the web is all about. It you can't link, then that kills the web. What were those Canadian politicians thinking?
Also, I thought Canada was a democracy with free speech. The times they are a-changing...
@Pat To be clear, it doesn't apply to all links on the internet, though. Just links on digital platforms that point at Canadian news organization websites.
Basically, the news orgs were hemorrhaging money and decided to use what little they had left to lobby the government to help them extort Facebook.
@LouisIngenthron I dunno. You can't act like social media is blameless here, though. Not when they're sitting on top of billions in profit.