Canada's Heritage Minister redoubled her calls for Meta to end its ban on Canadian news content on Facebook and Instagram on Saturday as thousands of Canadians continued their rush to escape wildfires ravaging British Columbia and the Northwest Territories.
I honestly don’t get this thing about FB blocking news - it’s because they are being forced to pay the news organisations, right? But why are they being forced to pay them - isn’t it good for the news organisations to have their links appear on FB, so that people click those links, read their articles and see their ads?
I’m probably missing something, but I don’t get it.
The Candian media wanted money. Thus a news link tax. (Australia tried the same thing, failed too.) But FB and Google called their bluff. Turns out FB and Google don’t make money by linking to Canadian media, so they’re happy to just delist those URLs.
The Canadian conservative politicians wanted the PR for attacking the evil US liberal tech giants. So they were willing to gamble, because they don’t actually care about the media companies they claim to have been protecting.
Everything you wrote is true, but also traditional media is largely dying off these days. They’re desperate for cash from anywhere.
It’s a shame, because I really don’t like FB much, and I would consider myself a supporter of traditional news media (quality stuff at least) - but here, I just can’t see how they think they have a case.
I don’t know enough about the issue to firmly take a side. It’s possible that the folks at Meta are just being dicks, because Meta doesn’t have a great track record. They might be callously using this emergency to make their point.
It’s also possible that the Canadian law was poorly thought out, because governments are really bad at regulating Silicon Valley. Pride and/or distrust are preventing them from finding an effective solution.
It sorta seems like both sides need a FIRM reality check, and quick.
I think it’s a bit of both. The law has good objectives (making sure news organizations can have some revenue), but the way they implemented it is terrible (paying to post a link). Meta just complied in the most dick-move way they found.
EDIT: I think a better way they could’ve done this is to tax the hell out of ad revenue from Canadian users. Then just subsidize the news with this money.
Why should we subsidize failing media companies? Why not let the fair market decide, just as we do with other industries? Modernize or go bankrupt is the norm, at least usually.
That’s obviously something we need to decide as a society, I just took it as a given since that’s what our government is trying to do.
As to why, well I think the issue is that the social media companies inserted themselves as middlemen through monopolistic behaviours and captured all the ad revenue the news organizations used to get. The fair market isn’t always fair, and monopolies are one of its failure modes. Market failure is one good example of situations where government intervention is warranted.
Google doesn’t get much ad revenue from a news hyperlink. If they did, they would have caved. I believe you assume money exists where it doesn’t.
Neither Google nor FB is monopolizing sharing news online. They are certainly shady companies, and we should be concerned with lock-in behavior, but linking to websites is not monopolistic in any way.
I never said they got revenue from a link. They make their revenue by showing you ads, and they use various strategies to make you stay longer on their website so they can show you more ads. One of these strategies is to include news articles in your feed, either shared by your friends, shared by the news organizations themselves (in a desperate bid to get you to visit their website), or just as suggested stuff.
They captured a huge chunk of the advertising market, and it’s happening at the expense of other businesses who provide a useful service to the people. I won’t pretend that they aren’t useful themselves, but I think they reached a point where they’ve stopped seeing that as a goal, and are instead focused on antisocial objectives (showing you more ads).
Meta is just acting in the way that all big businesses act. Canada wants them to pay for thing, so they just stop using thing. It’s all about money. Canada is the one trying to play the morality card here and basically guilt trip Meta into paying for thing.
To be clear, I do support Canada here, even though the way they implemented this was broken.
But Meta is just doing business (or choosing not to do business in this case).
Are they not sending out emergency messages via the cell network? Is it not on local news and the radio? Doesn’t YouTube have the ability to inject regional advertising? Are they not even putting up road signs mentioning the evacuation?
I don’t get how it’s Facebook’s problem when not everyone has a Facebook account and there are many other (better) avenues.
Maybe I’m missing something about the infrastructure in more remote areas?
These are the real questions that need to be asked. Using a social media platform from a company based in another country as your country’s emergency news outlet is a big problem. Citizens using social media for news is another.
The Canadian government required that Facebook pay to link to news when they passed the Online News Act. Are they walking that back now? Or are they offering to pay those fees?
Of course not, it's clearly Meta's fault that Meta is obeying that law. Why would the negative consequences of that law be the fault of the people who passed the law in the first place?
I'm certainly not happy about all these wildfires, but I do have to admit to a certain amount of schadenfreude aimed at the government over how they so quickly illustrated just how dumb this law is.
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