Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with a comment about how Murdoch-pushed social media news taxes in some countries have made Facebook lose interest in news:

Appeasement doesn’t work? What a surprise

Give an inch and they demanded a mile, who could have seen that coming from an industry that thinks they are owed money from the people sending traffic to them for free?

Nice that Facebook at lease might have caught on that no amount of money will ever be enough for the parasitic publishers, I look forward to future articles where they’ll be screaming about how Facebook removing any links to their stuff is an abuse of power and the government needs to step in and force them to carry and pay for news.

In second place, it’s Keroberos with a comment about the moral panic study showing Instagram makes some teenagers feel worse about themselves:

That chart is meaningless. Instagram makes some teens feel worse about themselves. Compared to what? I’d be willing to bet that if you asked that same question of teens (or anyone, for that matter), but changed the word “Instagram” with any other place where they might interact with others (school, home, work, the mall, a party, just about anywhere), you’d get almost identical numbers. About half would say it had no effect, about a quarter would say it had a positive effect, and about a quarter would say it was negative. That chart has some variation, but for the most part looks like an almost normal distribution and actually skewed towards the positive instead of the negative.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ve got two more comments about the social media news taxes. First, it’s one more from That One Guy, raising a key point about these schemes:

And that is why the larger publishers have tried to make it legally impossible to not charge money for links with laws like this, because they know the smaller outlets will make clear that people can link to them for nothing and completely undermine the parasites trying to demand money.

Next, it’s That Anonymous Coward with a general comment about the situation:

You needed us more than we needed you…

(shamelessly stolen I forget where and when but this sort of proves this idea has always been with us)

Hey, this golden egg is awesome.
But I bet if we cut the goose open, we could get a second golden egg, and we wouldn’t have to wait for tomorrow.
Frankly, I can’t see any downsides to this plan, and I suggest we implement it immediately.
Gentlemen, sharpen your axes.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is jojo_36 with another comment about the social media moral panic and the Texas rep who has promised a bill to ban teens from the services:

Texas proposes another Social Media Law:

Techdirt: “Ah shit, here we go again.”

In second place, it’s z! with a comment about Elon Musk trying to get out of the Twitter deal:

What happens next?
We all get a double popcorn and set back to watch.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with kvh and one more comment about the social media panic:

I assume when Texans here one of their politicians planning on banning minors from social media they think he’s planning on banning minorities from social media.

Finally, it’s an anonymous comment about Ben Smith’s Semafor launch event and his disastrous interview with Tucker Carlson:

Glad we got to hear Tucker’s perspective. He just doesn’t have a platform of his own where he gets to say whatever bullshit comes to his mind.

That’s all for this week, folks!