Something has changed, on the news feed of the Zuckerberg social network. Since December 13th, if a user tries to share an article from a newspaper on his Facebook profile, this appears to have no image: the link in fact generates a preview without photos and summary, but only with the title and name of the newspaper.
This is the effect of the European copyright directive 790/2019, to which Mark Zuckerberg’s social network is adapting, which involves theelimination of images even for posts published in the past.
The provision, which modifies the previous directives on copyright and related rights in the information society, therefore updates the laws governing copyright in Europe in a context characterized by continuous technological developments that transform the way works and other materials are created, produced, distributed and exploited.
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However, the changes introduced by Meta only concern the contents of the publications shared by users on their personal account: in fact, the links published by the same newspapers on their official page continue to show the preview photo.
The change in the display of published content has now been introduced by Meta because the legislative decree 8 November 2021, n. 177, which implements the European directive. Now it will be up to the Communications Authority to fine-tune a regulation by 12 February 2022 to allow you to evaluate the economic value of the images and texts accompanying the previews of the links published on social networks or on Google.
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In other words, criteria are needed to establish how much you will have to pay for the publication of this content or part of it, and therefore how much publishers can earn from this operation.
As stated in the text of the legislative decree, for the definition of the criteria necessary to determine the fair remuneration to be paid to publishers, it will be necessary to take into account, among other things, the number of online consultations of the article, years of activity and relevance on the publisher market, of number of journalists employed, as well as the costs incurred for technological and infrastructural investments “by both parties, and the economic benefits deriving, to both parties, from the publication in terms of visibility and advertising revenues“.
Meanwhile, publishers may decide to give Facebook permission to publish full previews or alternatively, shared links will continue to contain only the title of the article (therefore without images). This is why the user experience may differ in the future depending on the decisions made by the various outlets.
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