The biggest question the news media blackout in Facebook that I can see is …
How did we arrive at a point where we rely on one billion dollar corporately controlled foreign company that does not benefit us have a near monopoly on how we share, intake, gather and read news media?
The problem is not Facebook
The problem is in how we use the internet and social media systems
The technology should be serving us
We shouldn’t be giving so much power to corporate entities to spoon feed us the technology and control the information that makes our democracy possible.
The problem is people are lazy and uneducated about virtually all technology. If you are lucky you get taught how to us MS office in high school but that’s it.
The entirety of human knowledge is out there and anyone can just look up anything they want but that is an active process, Facebook/X/Instagram/Tiktok lets them passively consume an infinite stream of entertainment. So why would 30M user with little to no understanding of digital privacy, digital security, copyright, or even how a browser and webpage works, ever choose not to use the endless stream? As far as they know there is no alternative because they were never taught otherwise.
Teach your kids, teach your family, teach your friends. Be the annoying pedantic prick who points out that FireFox is the better browser an that ‘smart’ devices are actively spying on everything you do. No one will like it but MAYBE they will think about it.
How did we arrive at a point where we think a single company has a near monopoly on how we share, intake, gather, and read news?
Has anyone actually noticed any change with the blackout in effect? I suspect not.
This paragraph here is probably the real meat of the question:
Gizmodo spoke to half a dozen student journalists and station managers who say the ban on news links, intended to hurt big-name publishers, has instead hamstrung their vital ability to fundraise, recruit volunteers, or engage in community outreach. (…) And the Online News Act, intended to boost Canada’s local news, seems instead to have increased the hardships of the nation’s most local outlets.
I can see this going in one of two ways:
1- The numerous small companies push the government into giving in to Meta 2- The small companies are ignored by both sides and, sooner or later, migrate to new platforms to stay in touch with their communities.
My dream is that 2 happens, because that’d lead to zuckerbot having less power in Canada, as less people would rely on meta stuff, but I’m afraid 1 is more likely to happen. A very harsh wakeup call to what a lot of privacy-minded people were preaching for years, to not “depend so much on social media” (which was always easier said than done for smaller companies who needed reach) and something I wish could’ve been avoided
I wish the govt went a step further and deleted its facebook and instagram presences.
I do not have twitter or facebook but I still read the news every day. The news is not facebook or twitter. Both these companies could shut down tomorrow and I could still read the news like I always have.
This is a good thing. People will need to find alternative sources for news. I don’t see a problem.
Meta’s policy is only against linking to off-site news publications, not textual/graphical content. The latter is all that is needed to present the news. There is no issue here for student journalists outside of them thinking that they should be able to use Meta properties to build their own personal brand, but that’s what paid advertising is for.
On the broadcasting side, community radio stations, a category that includes college stations, are required by law to dedicate 15% of their airtime to spoken work content.
…
She posted a screenshot of what she saw: a message from Facebook reading, “We reviewed your Page and determined it is a news outlet. In response to Canadian government legislation, content from news outlets can’t be shared in Canada… If you believe we got this wrong, you can request another review in 6 months.”So, Canadian law allows Facebook/Meta and web publishers to remove news content, while regulating local radio stations to help customers get news content? Sounds like Facebook needs much more regulation so it will stop skirting the law and be forced to either simply abandon Canadian operations or perform in its function as a communications platform in a faithful manner.
You seem to have it the wrong way around. It’s the regulations that are forcing Facebook to remove news content.
No regulation is forcing Facebook to remove news content. They’re removing it because they don’t want to pay for having it.
Stop being pedantic. It was very clear what the effect of the regulations would be. We’ve seen the same scenario play out previously. The media industry decided to push for it anyway, and pikachusurprisedface when it turned out to bite them on the ass.
Sure, it was predictable and self inflicted.
But I think saying “Facebook was forced” is factually wrong in a meaningful way, hence to me deserving of correction.
There’s a difference between scraping news organizations, summarizing it, and then presenting it on your site (which is what Google/Meta do, and what the regulation was meant to make them pay for), and having to pay for user shared content.
Forcing Meta/Google to pay for the first case I don’t have an issue with, the second one though seems rather silly.
which is what Google/Meta do
No. Meta created Open Graph so that they don’t have to do that. It lets the publications define the summary (among a long list of other attributes). All of the major Canadian publications are using Open Graph.
If they don’t want to give so much information, they can… stop providing the information. Classic case of management spending too much time in Ottawa and not enough time talking to the workers.
Maybe it’s silly, but that’s beside the point. Facebook is not being forced to remove news, they decided to not pay for it.
This whole thing was 100% predictable. Meta doesn’t need news to populate users’ feeds. Why the fuck would Meta pay $60MM/y for content they don’t need and that doesn’t materially benefit them?
This whole plan was ass-backwards to begin with. C-18 is terrible legislation.
If they wanted to fund news publishing with tech company profits, then they need to introduce decoupled taxes and grants. Add a (digital) advertising tax, then put in local news grants where any journalist who can prove they’ve created a minimum amount of local/Canadian news content that meets whatever standards they set gets a grant. Restrict it to small non-profits and registered new agencies (or whatever).
I must be missing something, because this all seemed obvious to me since this was introduced, and I’ve seen lots of other people saying the same things. Maybe there’s some legal reason why a straight advertising tax wouldn’t work? Surely, there must be some reason they went down this path over the more obvious and simpler one?