‘Disaster’: warning for democracy as experts condemn Meta over Canada news ban
‘Disaster’: warning for democracy as experts condemn Meta over Canada news ban
Retaliatory move against Online News Act is ‘epic miscalculation’ that will promote spread of misinformation, analysts say
Crazy thought, wild idea, hear me out..
What if people stopped getting their news from Facebook
Only people who are mad are the lazy people who seriously cant be assed to actually read the news and want it spoon fed to them in the form of clickbait headlines shared by anti-vax aunt suzy
This is the best possible outcome. The less misinformation coming from meta the better.
I would like to think so, but wouldn't this just make those who rely on facebook for news only hear from Jim the pogo anarchist and his constant rants about how the Jovian lizards are making everybody stupid drones with their vaxx rays?
I agree completely. Warning for democracy is total click bait, so long as we all make the bare minimum effort to find news elsewhere; its really not that hard for most people.
It's not us that I'm worried about
Is getting news from Facebook any different from getting news from reddit? Does reddit need to pay the same tax?
Not yet, but probably. Meta makes money hands over fist, so the government and their friends in the media were hoping to pump them for cash first. They'll keep looking around for new sources of cash and their attention might eventually land on Reddit.
It sounds like any link aggregator could be cut off from posting Canadian news links
This. Good riddance, I say
Create a law that singles out specific players in a monopoly to pay other players in a falling monopoly (look who owns nearly all news media in Canada).
Make the law NOT about summarizing and ad funding but about linking which is fundamental to how the internet works and how all sites get found.
Facebook / Google links to Canadian news isn't valuable enough to them for the hassle so they turn them off, it really was the expected outcome.
I'm no big fan of the tech monopolies but this whole Liberal thing has been so fucking Liberal, it's like a parable.
Facebook et al want the advertising dollars without any of the costs of reportage. This is a ham-fisted attempt to rectify the situation. I'm fine with it.
The government should up the ante by making Facebook "publishers" under the law. Make them responsible for all of the libel, slander and defamation posted to their sites. Make them responsible for their lack of moderation, and the fallout it's been causing.
Yeah and so do the companies that are lining up at the feeding trough. Look at the pathetic state of the Canadian newspaper and TV news empires. They shouldn't be entitled to advertising dollars if they don't have a sufficiently enticing product to sell to advertisers.
Plenty of small-scale and digital independent news companies were doing fine. It's the Postmedias and the Torstars that are complaining, as they cannibalize journalism to feed their corporate acquisitions and stock buybacks.
Boycott Zuckerberg. Boycott Billionaires.
The most watched/heard Canadian media has a number of billionaires behind it, though. By extension, we should boycott the biggest corporate media conglomerates as well.
One single anti-democracy RW US billionaire having control over what Canadians see is unacceptable. Do whatever else you want.
I am no fan of Meta.
But..
This is maybe 10% meta's fault, but 90% the government's.
The law they passed was completely ridiculous in that it would force meta and others to pay Canadian news companies for each link posted. A concept that anyone with an understanding of either the internet or economics could have told you would lead to the situation we are in now.
Any business would react the same way and the have publicly been saying this is what they would do since the law was in the planning/proposal phase. Experts have likewise predicted this. But the government here seemed to think that nobody would dare defy the 'mighty' Canadian government. The fact is we have a smaller population than California alone, and it's not worth it for meta or other companies to comply with this law.
It's almost like the feds here watched the "Canada wants some of that internet money" episode of South Park and thought "great idea!!"
Reminder that Canadian media actually lobbied for this. They spent like two years calling Zuckerberg a thief for displaying news articles on Facebook.
This isn't the result of the government just doing a random thing. They did what they were asked to do by the media outlets.
The media outlets aren't going to get what they want, but this still seems like a potentially good thing for users. After all, it's not just Canadian media sites that are being black listed.
Sensational news articles like this are also expected in the fallout. Most news companies in Canada lobbied for the change and simply hoped that big players would cave right away. But now that Meta and Alphabet have announced that they'll block news in Canada (a predictable response), news companies are realizing the impact it'll actually have on them and the amount of lossed revenue it'll entail if things don't work out the way the want them to. They're basically crapping their pants and writing up these types of headlines to pressure Meta/Alphabet as a last-ditch effort.
Indeed. The world is rife with situations where people go "I don't care if it makes sense, I just want money" and this was clearly one of them.
If news companies want to make money off of the content they've posted, it behooves them to find ways to do that themselves. Paywall it, put advertising on it, use it as a loss leader for other paid services. Putting it up on a billboard and then running around demanding cash from anyone that looks at it is just dumb. I fully support telling them no.
It's like, 0% metas fault (and it's not even that I'm not a fan... I viscerally hate them as a company. I do not have a Facebook account)
They're a company and they're obligated to maximize the return on investment of their shareholders. That's it. Full stop.
They crunched the numbers and the cost of compensating for the links outweighs the value of the links. They are obligated to make this decision.
Western governments are absolutely reaping what they've sown. Pathetic anti-trust enforcement and the evisceration of ACTUAL public services (who are instead of shareholders, are obligated to serve the public interest) have put us here.
In a healthy country, "Meta no longer posting news links" would be met with a "so what?". The fact that anyone gives a shit is evidence of a failure of the government to protect the social infrastructure of this nation.
And, it's not the just the liberals fault. They're just the ones still standing when the music stopped.
But it's not what happened in Australia when they did this. So saying it is the expected outcome after the fact fact is a little easy.
The money would go to the news companies, NOT the government.
Australia went through a similar thing. Facebook got what they wanted after a few days.
They didn't cave Facebook reached an agreement with the News outlets. It says to a total of 200 million AUD to various news outlets. And Facebooks problem with the bill is there was no limit to how much they could pay.
There's been too many articles about how bad it is that Meta and Google are going to stop carrying news, and not nearly enough on how to find news without Meta and Google. And, really, C-18 kind of disincentivizes news sites bringing up alternatives since the point was to get news sites paid, and Meta's and Google's competitors won't have to pay them.
How exactly did our democracy manage, between 1867 and whenever the fuck Facebook came by?
If you can't find the news without an algorithm you won't understand it anyway and I don't mind if don't take part in any elections.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The policy came in retaliation for a new law, the Online News Act, created in an effort to help shore up revenue at Canadian journalism outlets by forcing intermediaries such as Meta and Google’s parent company Alphabet to chip in.
The company has described the legislation, Bill C-18 – passed on 18 June – as “unworkable” and argued that the only way to comply with the law is to “end news availability for people in Canada”.
Timothy Caulfield, a University of Alberta professor who researches health and science misinformation, said that even before the passage of the new law, social media and online forums were a dominant force in spreading unproven therapies and conspiracy theories about conventional medicine.
But Ahmed Al-Rawi, the head of the Disinformation Project at Simon Fraser University, said limiting news access on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram compromises those investments.
Al-Rawi also said the inability to link to news could lead more people to share screenshots, which are easy to doctor using image-editing software or AI technologies.
Al-Rawi also noted that Canada’s federal parties – including the ruling Liberals, the architects of C-18 – are still spending on Facebook ads, even after the bill’s passage.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Canadian here. I think the law is stupid. It's literally free advertising. I use Google News to see a bunch of local and national news sources in one spot. I only see the article headlines. If I want to see anything, I have to click and go to the full article. The news companies aren't paying anything to get aggregated and they get free traffic to their site.
In regards to the quoting pieces of the article they're linking to in search results, the brief snippets they provide often have barely any information at all or cut off before the information you want to see, so you have to click on the results anyway.
Our government is just inept when it comes to the internet.
Indeed. The hyper-consolidated legacy media empires were unsatisfied with the free advertising they were getting and convinced Pablo Rodriguez and the Liberals that they should in fact be paid for visibility they were being given.
They want what Australia has. Sure the law in Australia might not have worked exactly as written but the News outlets still got paid and have deals with Facebook. And that's all that they wanted. I'm guessing they'll take a harder stance on Canada to stop other countries from trying it.
The question of who gets to decide and what is and isn't a "News outlet" is seriously problematic. I also think that journalists ought to maintain an adversarial posture towards government and now we're creating a system in which "approved" journalists are dependent upon official recognition to receive legislated funding.
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