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A lot of European media sees their content stolen and re-uploaded by anonymous users on YT, FB, etc... FB in particular have not responded to this and thus content creators lose a lot of views and money.

This video sums it up nicely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q

⬐ luiscleto

However, the fact that there is a problem, does not legitimize doing something regardless of what the something is.

I haven't seen any support for the articles which actually shows the effects of the policy will be good, rather than arguments saying "it's meant to be good". Which is a fallacy that affects many politics which later end up having adverse effects.

But ultimately bureaucrats are happy whenever there is an excuse to increase bureaucratic power.

Edit: spelling

Further edit:

For the particular point you're putting out, to justify the EU policy you have to at least show that 1) those media outlets would receive all that traffic that those FB posts generated if the FB posts didn't exist in the first place, 2) that this outweighs costs from abusing that policy (claims over fair use, e.g. youtube copyright system) and content that simply will not get reshared, even if fair use and linking to the source material, out of fear of triggering the safeguards mechanism

⬐ apexalpha

Oh I agree that this law is shit, and a huge overreach. Like shooting a mosquito with a cannon.

I was just trying to put in perspective WHY the politicians feel the need to do this. It's mostly backlash against Facebook for years of content stealing.

Youtube and itś content ID system are actually what this law wants to introduce everywhere. While not perfect, it's still better than Facebook, which seems to be lawless on copyright.

⬐ c3o

I work at the European Parliament, and in 3 years of debate about the law not a single person or organisation has brought up people putting content from other platforms on FB as something that this supposedly addresses.

In fact, it's all about the music industry wanting higher licensing payments from YouTube: At least as much per play as e.g. Apple Music pays. They call the fact that they're not getting that today the "value gap" – THAT'S the undisputed reason/justification for this law (just google the term).

(Facebook, by the way, also has a content filter: https://www.facebook.com/help/publisher/330407020882707)

⬐ pbhjpbhj

>and thus content creators lose a lot of views and money //

I think this sort of reasoning is largely fallacious. Just because people view your stuff doesn't mean that if you're successful in locking it down that they'll then pay to view it.

I feel the media companies know this and that's one reason they demand ever increasing copyright terms - to avoid older content eating in to current profits.

⬐ onlyrealcuzzo

Just to add: Just because people view your stuff for free doesn't mean that won't entice them to pay for it later, or that they haven't already paid for it.

⬐ apexalpha

This isn't even about paying. People viewing videos you made on Youtube is already lost revenue, since none of the ads FB shows go to you. They only go to the person who stole your videos.

And be definition this can be seen as a loss since the viewing itself is the revenue generator.

⬐ Natanael_L

This isn't even true with the copyright claim system, where the claimant gets all profits from youtube even if their content was only featured for 5 seconds in a 30 minute video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q&t=1s

This does a very good job of explaining how small content creators are practically powerless now on the web in terms of protecting their content being stolen.

Guys this is meant for platforms that continuously allow users to upload fully copyrighted stuff, offer no good takedown and just point to the users when asked. "We're a platform so the user is responsible".

Thousand, maybe millions, of Youtube videos by small channels are re-uploaded to FB everyday and essentially stolen.

Watch this, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q

This law just says: ehm no Facebook, you ARE responsible for this, and you can't just say 'talk to the user / page who stole it'.

The way Reddit and others interpret it is just because they don't want to be legally beholden to laws that protect people smaller than they are. And they're calling it a 'ban on memes' to get people online to protest it like useful idiots.

No one read the texts but everyone is angry.

⬐ pas

Reddit allows image and video uploads nowadays by users.

How is Reddit supposed to filter all of it?

It's also rich, considering video creators have been pissed at Facebook for doing nothing about people stealing their videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q

An overview of what’s going on: https://youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q

Here's a good example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q

⬐ madeofpalk

The irony of using Youtube, a platform that rose to fame after hosting pirated Viacom content, to highlight IP theft.

⬐ Buge

What percent of the top videos on Youtube were pirated from Viacom? Because according to the Kurzgesagt video, 73% of the top 1000 Facebook videos were pirated from Youtube.

⬐ kakarot

The real irony would be that if I found this video hosted anywhere else, it would be IP theft because the creators post it to Youtube. Your comment is unnecessary.

This is not new, and I've spoken about this here before. Facebook used fraudulent methods to artificially inflate their view counts, and pedelled those fake and grossly exagerrated #s for "eyeballs" to the unsuspecting advertizers.

"How Facebook is Stealing Billions of Views" - Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell exposed this with detailed analysis and evidence. Watch it here => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q

I contracted with their Ad team for a few months, and can't say more for NDA reasons, hence I am pointing you to publicly available media / expose.

⬐ tyre

I watched the video you linked to, which is mostly about people who rip content from YouTube and upload it to Facebook.

The people who view the pirated content are still viewing content on FB. That isn't "artificially inflat[ing] their view counts." Those are real views, which is what advertisers are paying for, even if what they are viewing is stolen.

The point about counting 3 seconds of auto-play as a view is problematic, unless advertisers know that is what they are paying for. Maybe 3 seconds is enough for someone to glance at it and at least read the brand name in their mind, which does seem to count as an "impression".

⬐ Ralfp

Bit into the video they mention explictly that "Facebook is cheating" and "they autoplay and count 3 seconds (even with no audio on) as view", meaning that if you are scrolling trough your feed slowly enough, you count as viewer, event if you don't.

⬐ sean_patel

> "they autoplay and count 3 seconds (even with no audio on) as view"

Yes. Exactly this. And a few more 'hacks' the 'Zuck' way ... :)

⬐ gthtjtkt

I'm guessing he meant to link to this one about paid promotions leading to mostly fake likes and views from click farms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag

> When I paid to promote my page I gained 80,000 followers in developing countries who didn't care about Veritasium (but I wasn't aware of this at the time). They drove my reach and engagement numbers down, basically rendering the page useless.

> I thought I would demonstrate that the same thing is still happening now by creating Virtual Cat (http://www.facebook.com/MyVirtualCat). I was surprised to discover something worse - false likes are coming from everywhere, including Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia. So even those carefully targeting their campaigns are likely being duped into spending real money on fake followers. Then when they try to reach their followers they have to pay again.

⬐ sean_patel

> I'm guessing he meant to link to this one about paid promotions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag

Yes, this one also. If anyone thinks this is a 'Conspiracy theory', you can confirm or refute it yourself for less than 50$, the way I did and the way the BBC reporter in this above video did.

After I left the Ad Team, and horrified at what I saw as widespread fraud, I registered a throwaway domain, put some viral videos from youtube, injected google analytics on the site / blog, bought a pre-paid visa card for 50$ (so facebook doesn't keep auto charging my card) and 'promoted' my blog posts shared on a Facebook page I set up.

Just like the BBC author, I noticed most of my 'Likes' on the FB page were from Indonesia, Pakistan, and many from Vietnam. And I checked some of the profiles, and they either appeared down right fake (i.e. no activity other than liking a 1000+ FB pages, or they weren't active since like 2011 or 12.

Worse still, for the pages I did promote - i.e. blog posts shared on FB wall for 5$ / day, I barely got 10 click-throughs to the actual post, but the Ad analytics said I "reached 600 / 700 something" viewers.

WTF does that mean??? ( I know what it means, that they "displayed" it in their feed) But how does this help any one, think small businesses, grow their brand or business??)

That reminds me, did they ever address the Click Farm problem that was essentially rendering likes and views worthless for many advertisers? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag

Or the rampant Freebooting? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q

⬐ forgetsusername

It's hard to imagine them doing so, because up until a certain point (advertisers leaving, which we ain't there yet) it's not in their interest.

It brings me back to something I complained about on these boards years ago. I was working with a fairly small social gaming company about 10 years ago, during which time Facebook was boasting about "300m, 400m, 500m users!". Meanwhile, we were learning that almost half the users in our game were "fake" accounts. It was a major issue, but wasn't in the interests of Facebook to disclose during their hyper-growth. In fact, they made a point to state that fake accounts was not an problem.

Clearly Facebook will use the metrics when they are convenient, despite their invalidity.

⬐ snomad

Thanks for mentioning this. It bothers me immensely that they report 1.79 billion MAU. Is that discounted for social game mining accounts / spam bots? If not, that seems like a material issue in their reporting.

⬐ hinkley

I had to learn the hard way that any number the development team gave the marketing group would be used in a way we would come to regret. It's a big part of my cynicism about the industry.

People remember numbers but lose the context. Especially people whose bonuses depend on misunderstanding them.

Yes. straight up fraud. "How Facebook is Stealing Billions of Views" - Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell exposed this with detailed analysis and evidence. Watch it here => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q

⬐ bbctol

That video is discussing a slightly different problem than the recently discovered issue the article's talking about.

"How Facebook is Stealing Billions of Views" - Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell exposed this with detailed analysis and evidence. Watch it here => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q

This is neither a bug nor a "mistake". It's straight up fraud. Fraud because Facebook uses these false #s to prove to their advertizing clients that they are getting a HUGE ROI, when they really aren't. Also the investors and analysts bump up their ratings and the stock goes higher and higher on false ad view #s.

By counting a view as a legitmate view after the video plays only for 3 seconds, their "algorithm" counted billions of views even when the user has not even seen it, because Auto-play is enabled by default and you have to opt-out / disable it and no-one does it. It takes a person roughly 4 seconds to scroll off their feed as they quickly "scan" their friends posts.

⬐ hanspeter

ROI from FB ads can only be calculated from tracking conversions on the advertiser's site or in their app. View count alone can never be attributed a ROI as there is no measurable return.

If you pay solely for video views on Facebook or Youtube without any tracking, you're not being a smart advertiser and it doesn't really matter if view counts are more or less correct - you're blindly throwing your money away.

If you do however track your ROI correctly it doesn't really matter how many true view counts you get.

⬐ le205

The main problem here is attribution - and with many ad platforms pushing the 'viewthrough conversion' metric, it becomes very messy when hundreds of millions of users start getting tagged as having 'viewed' a video too easily. Future purchases can then be tied back to that 'view', even if it was insignificant in the buying process.

This is where as an advertiser I would be very interested in the distribution of view lengths, to better understand the user's engagement and likelihood that the video made any impact on their behaviours at all.

Although being totally honest, you can't rule out the impact of even a passive 3 second peripheral glimpse of brand video content. Most traditional advertising - TV and outdoor, for example - is not actively viewed, but rather passively 'seen'.

Ultimately it comes back to being pragmatic in the way you assess advertising effectiveness - the promise of digital is perfect ROI analysis and measurement, but the reality is far trickier.

⬐ yladiz

Do you have a citation for the "4 seconds" figure? If it is 4 seconds, and it logs a view after 3 seconds, that's pretty damning.

⬐ AstralStorm

That it logs invisible videos at all would be a problem.

⬐ sean_patel

It's not publicly discussed for obvious reasons, but I worked closely with Mudd for a couple of months last year. Here's a related interview where he touches upon it.

http://digiday.com/platforms/advertisingweek2015-facebook-fi...

Facebook spend an awful lot of resources tracking all sorts of user behaviour inside it's "walled garden".

I got really sick of it after a while and decided to stop working for them (even as a contractor)

⬐ qmalzp

Your video is about how FB is viewed as lying to content creators because it counts a view as having the video play for 3 seconds, which content creators believe is too small a threshold.

The article here is about how the average view length is only calculated from exactly those impressions which lasted more than 3 seconds, where the outrage is that it should have been computed for all impressions. In other words, that the threshold was too high.

And a lot of the videos Facebook shows are stolen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q

Relevant explanation of the issue from In a Nutshell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q

⬐ felipesabino

Smarter Every Day has a good take on it as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6A1Lt0kvMA

While you're right that Google's implementation of Content ID doesn't handle fair use well, Content ID is critical for indie creators. Facebook's lack of protections lead to tons of lost revenue for them (and for indies, it matters!).

This video changed my opinion on Content ID when I saw it last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q

⬐ TazeTSchnitzel

Well, videos get plagiarised on YouTube anyway and nobody bats an eyelid. And Content ID can't do anything about Facebook.

What do people think of this video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q

IMO Content ID is essential for a healthy video creator ecosystem. Google's implementation may give the big media companies too much power, but for indie creators it is crucial. Facebook, on the other hand, seems to not care about video piracy at all and as a result small creators suffer.

⬐ jsnell

My primary reaction is that I'm not going to click on a link that you've posted three times in a 20 message comments section. Just posting it once will be quite sufficient, and less likely to cause the spam avoidance instinct of readers to kick in.

This video claims that Facebook's lack of a content ID system is harmful to individual / small content creators as their videos are copied and go viral with no compensation to the content creator.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q

The video paints Google and content ID in a very positive light.

If what you're saying is true, where does this video go wrong?

⬐ imtringued

Even a corrupt "police" is better than having no "police" at all.

Facebook is the biggest scam for most businesses.

1) They've pulled bait and switch when they decided to charge to reach users that have already liked your page. Most of those users liked your page because you've posted a link to FB on your site.

2) Click fraud is rampant [1]

3) They make money on copyrighted videos + ripping off YouTube content creators [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q

⬐ AJ007

You are wrong on #1. The biggest con was Facebook selling those "likes" to your competitors.

#2 addressed elsewhere

#3 YouTube started through copyright violations and continues to benefit from copyrighted content today (if the rightsholders do not try to enforce.)

⬐ adventured

If the rights holders do not want to enforce take-downs on their content (eg because they're getting promotional value from it or otherwise), then it's not in any way wrong to benefit from said copyrighted content. In fact it's smart and appropriate to use copyrighted content in that case.

Just because something is copyrighted doesn't mean it's inherently or by default illegal or improper to use without permission - it means it may be.

⬐ babuskov

You could repeat the exact same sentences for Facebook usage of videos as well.

Both FB and YT are benefiting from copyrighted content used illegally. The copyright owners don't have time to search and hunt down every last one of thousands of copies of their videos posted. Even when they do, the new ones just pop up a week later and people uploading are getting smarter with various tricks that prevent automatic detection.

⬐ mikekchar

Just want to say that it is default illegal to infringe copyright. It is a civil offence in most countries, but it is still illegal. You can be sued and "But you never complained" is not a valid defence. This is true of any country that signed the Berne convention. In many countries if you infringe copyright for profit, it becomes a criminal offence and you can actually go to jail.

I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. Read the copyright law in your area. You will undoubtedly be very surprised at how wrong you are.

⬐ tn13

People do not blindly spend on advertising. For most people there will always be alternatives and they will compare the eventual conversion.

Online advertising is remarkably free market sort of business where fraud does not last longer.

⬐ yeukhon

To say Facebook is the biggest scam is too extreme. Click fraud exists on every single platform. Pay a hundred mechanical turk and they can click for you all day long.

⬐ Mahn

I guess it depends on the industry but from my own personal experience, fraud is non-existent if your targeting decently specific (i.e. specific interests).

⬐ xiaoma

Facebook makes it really easy to track your cost per conversion (e.g. subscribe, signup or sale), and if you report revenue data back to them you can track and optimize for revenue.

The only excuse for loosing money on FB in the long-term is unsuccessful experimentation and that shouldn't be huge quantities.

⬐ arasmussen

Big spenders do a lot of due diligence to make sure that the money they spend is actually giving them a positive return. It's not like businesses just throw millions down the drain and hope it gives them results. Facebook is working great for them and it is not a scam otherwise businesses wouldn't be spending billions on advertising there every quarter.

⬐ ethanbond

Or, as pointed out in a comment above, everybody is lying to everybody and the only loser is the customer. The customer may still find advertising to be a net win, but they have no clue to what degree it is such.

Facebook has a history of fraud in their other services. Veritasium fell victim to FB's scams as a publisher a couple years ago[1].

    I know first-hand that Facebook's advertising model is deeply flawed. When I paid to
    promote my page I gained 80,000 followers in developing countries who didn't care about
    Veritasium (but I wasn't aware of this at the time). They drove my reach and engagement
    numbers down, basically rendering the page useless.

They also have a history of encouraging video fraud[2][3].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6A1Lt0kvMA

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q

Consider as well that Facebook steals money from content creators who really need the money. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6A1Lt0kvMA & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q

Also, the idea of having Facebook at the cost of giving up your privacy to this behemoth, and more importantly, at the cost of this company exploiting your cognitive biases to get you to buy things hardly seems conducive to a spirit of bettering the world.

⬐ None

None

⬐ bigbugbag

Not sure why the downvotes, your point is valid. Though it should not be a surprise, facebook business is designed as such (empty shell to be filled by the facebook used + everything shady and dirty trick in the book).

⬐ sidcool

This video is going quite viral since the past few days.

⬐ brokentone

We kinda all already know this, but this is very well stated.

How can we put some tech firepower to this?

⬐ gooseus

Kurzgesagt (In a Nutshell) video about how Facebook's policies are enabling people who steal their (and others) videos and inflating their # of video views.

This has the effect of hurting video creator profits in favor of increasing Facebook's advertising revenue.