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Heritage Minister says Meta news block endangers lives as Canadians flee wildfires (www.thecanadianpressnews.ca)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] TheAgeOfSuperboredom 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

And I think that Club Penguin's block on news is keeping word from getting out

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] ebc 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[+] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] ebc 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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).