when they first started being plagiarised
But they’re not being plagiarised. They’re being linked to. If you start saying “no, people can’t post links to us”, that breaks the entire foundation of the Web.
I agree completely that they’ve been far too reliant on Google and especially Facebook lately, and that investing in their own platforms that they control would have been a much smarter strategy. I just view this as a tangential concern to the one of link taxes.