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Meta blocking news links in Canada

399 points| mmphosis | 2 years ago |michaelgeist.ca

425 comments

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[+] tomComb|2 years ago|reply
It’s weird to be cheering on Facebook, but good for them for standing up to this gross (and incompetent) political corruption.

Our governments are constantly looking for new ways to shovel money to the big telecom companies (and to protect them from competition), and it needs to be meet more resistance. For those not aware, the PBO analysis showed that the primary beneficiaries of this bill were to be Bell, Rogers, Shaw, and some CBC.

But even if that were not the case, this bill simply makes no sense, and could do a lot of harm.

[+] ysavir|2 years ago|reply
Are we cheering on Facebook? It feels like a situation where all the foul players--the platforms, the government, and the media--are all losing.

The article author tries to say "Individual Canadians who use the platforms to find links to news are losers since news links will be blocked from the platform" but doesn't actually support that with a reason as to why that's a loss. Feels like a win to individual Canadians to me, even if some are upset at their inability to easily and immediately share clickbait and ragebait articles. I think those are the people we're really cheering on.

[+] ChumpGPT|2 years ago|reply
Rogers, Bell and Telus run Canada. It's why Canadians have the highest mobile rates in the world. Trudeau offered to protect them for ever during NAFTA II and let them become Canadian Media Companies protecting them from any competition insuring Canadians will have less choice and higher rates for everything and basically letting Telco's control over all media, etc.
[+] jtode|2 years ago|reply
Canadian here. I'm cheering on the insane government. Crazy like a fox.

I listened to a statement on Front Burner the other day where some facebook homunculus said they are "ending access to news in Canada," which brought forth a real guffaw. I listened to the news yesterday while working in the yard on an AM radio. The only delusion here is on Facebook's part, where they think they are punishing us by removing their heavily-filtered hate machine from our media pool.

They believe they have "captured" our ability to find the news. Anyone who pays attention knows what kind of crap they've been pulling on media outlets since the start, and I frankly don't care that it's Rupert Murdoch benefitting here - better him than Zuck, because we have had Murdoch for half my life and things didn't get really bad till Facebook.

ANYTHING that gets their hands off the media is a good thing.

[+] Waterluvian|2 years ago|reply
I don't necessarily think the government is right, but I can't help but feel like it might be a very good thing that people affected by this will have to leave the Facebook garden and seek out news elsewhere.

I'm really quite fine with this experiment happening.

[+] sandworm101|2 years ago|reply
>> (and incompetent) political corruption.

Hyperbolic and self defeating. If the corruption is incompetent then I guess there isn't much effective corruption. Canada ranks well above even the US on most indexes of corruption. Not liking the current government is a totally different thing than a country being corrupt.

Canada=14th, which is nothing to be embarrassed about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

[+] bushbaba|2 years ago|reply
Disagree. The law ensures there are Canadian media, which can be used to push media to the betterment of Canadians.

Many countries have protectionist laws and this isn’t much different.

[+] teunispeters|2 years ago|reply
One of the nice things about Canada is a requirement to be honest within reason, and to always fact check - and handle if things don't match later.

For the news source I go to, this means they're pretty reliable and honest - and not so prone to lying or deception. I mean at the end of the day people are people, and different agencies will have some bias, so I check across a bunch. And I avoid anything owned by Rupert Murdoch, as that drives down the quality by a lot. APTN for instance is good, and honestly so is Al Jazeera USA. I've liked CBC, and between the different programs they're pretty good at calling out political bias - especially about their own. (the actual news news on CBC has some center-right bias towards either Liberal or Conservative parties - and will occasionally even air "official lies". Their long form shows on the other hand are much better and will catch out those "official lies". Canada is complicated in its own way).

[+] JacobThreeThree|2 years ago|reply
You can include Post Media, TorStar, Quebecor and other media in the list of those lobbying for this.

It's part Canadian protectionism and part desperate ploy to prop up a few large failed media business models.

Canada has a long history of protectionist measures. The shocking part of the bill is the way it exposes the complete technical incompetence of the government. There are many ways to extract a pound of flesh, implementing your tax in a way that is fundamentally incompatible with the web is inexcusable. It will hurt Canada's efforts to be a tech leader.

[+] firecall|2 years ago|reply
They did this in Australia.

It all seemed like it was to prop up Murdoch owned media.

The Australian Gov must have cut an acceptable deal with Google and Facebook though, as both threatened to do what FB has done in Canada.

There are more details to it all, I'm sure. I'd have to go research more as I dont recall them all :-)

[+] barbariangrunge|2 years ago|reply
The rule is because of American monopolies and oligopolies. To have your news seen at all, you need to use major social media platforms or google. These platforms benefit from the news links, and the news has to fight to compete on those platforms, earning less and less revenue every year because the news is less engaging than flamebait. So the news gradually becomes flamebait to try to garner enough engagement to compete, otherwise the news stops existing, and next thing you know, investigative journalism is almost extinct.

This isn’t an ideal solution, it’s basically a subsidy that big tech is supposed to pay for, but there is a massive, massive! power imbalance where the platforms are the only winners, so it’s also not the worst rule ever. I don’t know. The overwhelming power imbalance of oligopoly platforms is a thing, I’m not sure what to do about it. The issue is bigger than just news, and this law only partially addresses one aspect of the situation

[+] aprdm|2 years ago|reply
Why should the government of Canada be on Facebook's team instead of the Canadian Telecom's team?
[+] j45|2 years ago|reply
In Canada it will mean news from other places, including the US will likely directly or indirectly influence those feeds.

UGC (User Generated Content) could remain commentary about these news articles when shared in, but it would require consumers to become creators.

[+] sneak|2 years ago|reply
Both sides of this argument are bad. The choices on the menu are "Facebook chooses what links (published by users) to censor" or "the legislature chooses what links (published by users) to censor".

The dispute is just which authority decides what you get to share with your friends and contacts - not that you should be allowed to do so freely.

[+] jacquesm|2 years ago|reply
Funny, for once I find myself on the side of Bell, Roger ands Shaw (the CBC was in my good book anyway). That normally wouldn't happen but if FB news feeds are exchanged by those of Bell, Rogers, Shaw and the CBC that could well be a net positive.
[+] osigurdson|2 years ago|reply
Fully agree. If the electorate can’t manage to get rid of this freedom constraining government in the next election then the country is probably a write off. At least it is hard to imagine how we can recover from another government like this.
[+] great_psy|2 years ago|reply
A bit off topic, bye does anyone know why those monopolistic companies (bell Rogers) stocks are doing relatively poorly compared to even the US index?
[+] epgui|2 years ago|reply
Who says anything about corruption? This seems much more likely to be a result of technological incompetence.
[+] heresie-dabord|2 years ago|reply
> the primary beneficiaries of this bill were to be Bell, Rogers, Shaw, and some CBC.

Yes, owners and creators of Canadian media content. For Canadians.

From TFA:

> The Internet platforms are losers as they comply with an unreasonable law by removing links and making their services objectively worse in order to do so. Individual Canadians who use the platforms to find links to news are losers since news links will be blocked from the platform. And the government is a loser, as having dismissed critics and ignored repeated warnings about the risks associated with its bill, it has now left Canada as the global example of digital policy disastrously gone wrong.

i) I accept what Geist asserts, that the US social media business will be worse without Canadian news. Having Canadian news content in these billion-dollar US companies' products should not be free for these companies.

ii) Canadian media must do better for Canadians. Canadian news is not US news.

iii) US media companies don't want to start paying US journalism either. Rich US companies are fighting to resist the precedent that this law set in Australia and will set in Canada.

[+] bparsons|2 years ago|reply
The entire Canadian media ecosystem is collapsing. This is a desperate last shot at salvaging a few newspapers. This is a rounding error of a rounding error for Meta.

The Canadian media is almost universally right wing. Helping these outlets survive is almost certainly against the governing parties interest.

[+] matheusmoreira|2 years ago|reply
In my country they tried to sneak in similar laws into a "fake news" censorship law. There were provisions to preempt this exact move: it would have made it illegal for social media companies to block the links.

I guess Canada's politicians weren't sociopathic enough to think of such a thing.

[+] winddude|2 years ago|reply
huh? What? This has nothing to do with telecom.
[+] flangola7|2 years ago|reply
Who is cheering on Facebook here?

Facebook needs content to survive, as it does not produce anything itself.

News agencies have THEIR content posted on Facebook, giving it value, not the other way around.

[+] onlypositive|2 years ago|reply
Governments are for the people by the people.

Cheering on Facebook is cheering against your own interests.

Companies need to learn that they play in and extract resources from our sandbox.

If they want to continue to play in our sandbox, they need to play by our rules. They need to act in a socially responsible way. There are even laws about corporate governance pertaining to this.

You don't have to agree with Canada's laws (I don't), but you do need to recognise that they are their laws. Being hostile like this is a good way to make enemies.

[+] Transpire7487|2 years ago|reply
As a Canadian, I’m glad that Meta is doing this. Google is going to be doing it soon as well from what I’ve heard.

The irony is the government says their intent was to “protect Canadian media by getting big tech to pay their fair share” and it is backfiring spectacularly. Having the opposite effect where there is less traffic going to these media sites, and will have a big impact on their bottom line from their innability to run ads on their own domains and make revenue that way.

Of course, this will just lead to another media bailout making them even more reliant on government subsidy - which the Liberal party will use as a wedge issue come election time because the opposition (which is leading and gaining in the polls right now) will want to defund them. Wether this would be successful as an election issue is yet to be seen, but there’s one thing that the Liberal party is good at is demonizing the opposition and if their gravy train is on the line I’m sure e media corps will gladly indulge him.

And of course this completely neuters independent media which is much more likely to actually be critical of the establishment. Leaving only pro establishment agencies in place to do the bidding of the hand that feeds them.

So the big players take a hit to revenue (and get bailed out), and every one else gets completely wiped out.

It’s absolutely sinister what Justin Trudeau’s government is doing. I used to think they were just stupid but it’s scandal after corruption scandal after corruption scandal with him. At some point you stop giving them the benefit of the doubt.

[+] zmmmmm|2 years ago|reply
The problem with all of these laws is the lack of integrity in the underlying logic. The laws are written because ad revenue is no longer supporting news. But the laws are written as if somehow this is connected to social media and search linking to news media content. It just isn't. You can take away all the news media content (as Facebook is) and you will still have no ad business left for news media. The ads are going where the eyeballs are and it's just a brutal fact that the eyeballs want much more than news media - they want a lot of other things that the news media aren't providing. So they go where they can get what they want.

Trying to fix any complex problem without addressing the root cause is nearly always going to be futile. The root cause here is something important to society (news media) is intrinsically / structurally impossible to fund organically. The people who need it most either can't or won't pay for it (and many are in the "can't" bucket).

Guess what, there are many things like that. We structurally can't fund hospitals, roads, defense either based on organic funding methods. When we want or need something that can't be funded like that, there is one party that is supposed to step up to the table - designed by intent for that purpose.

Which is all to say that to me, a lot of what is happening here is theatrics because governments want to avoid doing the actual hard thing which is convincing taxpayers that this should be part of what we support through broad based support as societies.

[+] kredd|2 years ago|reply
This actually made our neighbourhood and local politics Facebook groups more tolerable (which is the only reason I still use it once a week). It was basically 24/7 ragebait articles being shared around anyways, since that’s the only way of gathering large-scale engagement.
[+] codedokode|2 years ago|reply
Note that the law intentionally has a backdoor that allows to exclude any digital platform from having to bargain with media outlets by decision of Governor [1]:

> The Commission must make an exemption order in relation to a digital news intermediary if ... the following conditions are met:

> ...

> (b) any condition set out in regulations made by the Governor in Council.

So instead of treating every digital platform equally and clearly writing the rules they have reserved an option to make arbitrary exemptions. I wonder, who will get an exemption? Canadian search engine? Or maybe a company managed by a friend of the Governor?

The definition of "eligible news business" (who is supposed to receive money) is also written unclearly, for example in article 27:

> 27 (1) At the request of a news business, the Commission must, by order, designate the business as eligible if it ...

> ...

> produces news content that is not primarily focused on a particular topic such as industry-specific news, sports, recreation, arts, lifestyle or entertainment, and

This rule allows to exclude anyone, because you can always say that this newspaper is too focused on politics, that one is too focused on the war etc.

[1] http://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-as...

[+] gumby|2 years ago|reply
This has happened in every other places such a plan has been tried like Spain or Australia. What did they expect?

And really, what else could goog/fb etc do -- what other company or person for that matter would pay someone in order to provide them a service? Governments tax things they want less of (e.g. smoking) so this should be no surprise.

[+] gxt|2 years ago|reply
Good. If journalists had been doing their job for the last 15 years they would not need federal intervention to force other businesses to fund them, they would not need subsidies, and we would not have these incompetent politicians and these repeated failures on almost every level of government.

Journalists need to do their job for subscribers and the public:

* Keep an updated profile on every elected official, judge, journalists, high level clerk, private entities and their owners who work for government and who get money from government.

* Keep track of the MONEY by providing analysis and correlations of potential misbehaving officials.

* Who voted for what and how it conflicts with their promises for the term.

* Every statement from elected official and how it conflicts with previous statements, corresponding retractions or post mortems.

* Previous and future employment history of elected officials to root out ethicsless individuals.

* There's a very long list of accountability measures journalists should be providing to make them worth their weight but they do only the above with extreme ideological selectiveness which nullifies it all. It needs to be done in full for them all of them to be objective and to get Canadians to subscribe to them.

[+] kevingadd|2 years ago|reply
Journalists aren't the ones who make decisions about how a news site monetizes its content, and they aren't the ones responsible for the consolidation of the media. This whole dispute is 100% about monetization and has nothing to do with the idea that journalists somehow completely abandoned their responsibilities.
[+] knallfrosch|2 years ago|reply
Sorry, but that's simply not true. The ICIJ (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists) released things like the Panama Papers and Football Leaks. Those were massive investigations, and yet the yielded little attention.

Simply do opinion pieces about migration, climate or gender and you'll get a hundred times the attention (and ads.)

Newspapers no longer have the news alone, they don't have a used-item market (ebay) or real estate ads. Those were cross-funding the real journalism.

Look no further than Trump to see how much "the people" care about the truth.

[+] granzymes|2 years ago|reply
I hope Google follows through, too. The government forcing two companies to pay for links to news is pretty disgusting rent seeking by media companies.
[+] pmontra|2 years ago|reply
> Canadian media is a loser, particularly the small and independent media outlets that are more reliant on social media to develop community and build their audience.

So, regulatory capture by the largest media companies?

[+] blindriver|2 years ago|reply
Stupid, stupid, stupid politicians and media companies. I'm glad to see tech companies show some backbone to the sheer hubris and greed that they were being subjected to.

There is no other way that news companies will be shared except via social media. I hope within weeks they are on their knees, begging for the law to be repealed. Too bad you can't recall politicians in Canada the same way you can in the US.

[+] nonethewiser|2 years ago|reply
> For months, supporters of Bill C-18, the Online News Act, assured the government that Meta and Google were bluffing when they warned that a bill based on mandated payments for links was unworkable and they would comply with it by removing links to news from their platforms.

So its already moved from “Facebook removing news is bad and not going to happen as a consequence of this law” (the quote) to “the Canadian government’s ban on news is good for Canada ( the comments here).

The intention was never to ban news. It was to take a cut. If they wanted to ban news that would have been the law. Regardless of whether you think the effect is good or not, the laws purpose has failed. It was a blunder.

[+] ddtaylor|2 years ago|reply
Good. Cut them off and avoid supporting these terrible attempts by old and entrenched actors that have failed business models.
[+] some-human|2 years ago|reply
Trying to get the billboard to pay for the ad it's displaying. How was that ever going to work?
[+] ipcress_file|2 years ago|reply
I'm Canadian and I'm not upset by this. If you can't find the local news websites, it's probably best that you don't get the news. Incompetence and (dis)information are a bad combination.
[+] steebo|2 years ago|reply
As a Canadian, I applaud this. And I hope the government sticks to its guns. This is not just about "big Canadian media", it affects a lot of small outlets who draw from the journalism fund as well.

It was stupid to allow media business models to depend on monopolistic search engines and social media platforms in the first place. This stuff is like hard drugs. For everybody.

And getting off the smack is painful.

The Canadians who care about this are going to find other ways to get their news. And the ones who don't weren't part of the real readership in the first place.

[+] tekla|2 years ago|reply
Hell of a bluff to try and call, especially when a bad call causes you to punch yourself in the groin, hard.
[+] rfrey|2 years ago|reply
Seems like a best case scenario to me.

- Less outrage farming in Canada

- Meta/Facebook suffers a bit

- Canadian media oligopolies suffer a lot

- Government gets a black eye for doing Rogers' dirty work

[+] Eumenes|2 years ago|reply
Less fake news, less engagement on platforms, less polarization. Why can't Canadians open their browsers and type in www.news-site.com if they want news? The Canadian government is obviously putting forward some really dumb policy, but the unintended consequences seem like a win-win to me. Hopefully neither side backs down and we'll get a juicy experiment to watch.
[+] theadamp|2 years ago|reply
These media companies who want Meta to pay them for content sure seem to post an awful lot of content on Meta properties for free, seemingly on purpose.