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A comment on Facebook and Instagram owner Meta threatens to cut off news in California.

Re:Facebook and Instagram owner Meta threatens to cut off ne... by safety1st on Thursday June 01, 2023 @05:21AM (#36148967)
Genuinely don't understand Meta's angle here. "We will make ourselves less relevant and reduce our own revenue if you do this." OK go for it. Why does anyone care? Reactions to news and politics on Meta's platforms are generally crappy anyway. Who's crying out in fear at the loss of clickbait political outrage posts on Facebook?

I (and HN) may not have the average person's view on this, I mean I'd love to see less news on Facebook. So I'm biased here. But the average person probably just doesn't care whether there's news on Facebook. If they want news and it disappears from FB, they will get it somewhere else. There's no shortage of recycled news posts on the 'net.

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Re:Facebook and Instagram owner Meta threatens to cut off ne... by ssss11 on Thursday June 01, 2023 @05:45AM (#36149115)
Maybe they think they’re so big and important that their bluff can’t be called. That would make sense.
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Re:Facebook and Instagram owner Meta threatens to cut off ne... by throwaway14356 on Thursday June 01, 2023 @06:36AM (#36149420)
the design goal is to keep humans on the platform. If they can find an excuse to remove the exits they will go for it.
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Re:Facebook and Instagram owner Meta threatens to cut off ne... by jsnell on Thursday June 01, 2023 @05:48AM (#36149127)
The angle is presumably that links to news articles don't actually generate significant value (whether revenue or "relevance") for Meta; it just creates massive amounts of free traffic for the media companies.

Paying for something that generates no value is a bad deal. Why is it surprising that they're not planning on doing that?

I'm sure they've run A/B tests on this in other places, and have a good idea on just how unimportant news articles are to them. If it turns out that California is different, and users and advertisers start leaving in droves, it'll be easy enough for them to reverse course.

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Re:Facebook and Instagram owner Meta threatens to cut off ne... by safety1st on Friday June 02, 2023 @03:18PM (#36169551)
That still sounds like an angle that no one outside of Criminal Meta would give a shit about, so why would they make it public
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