Meta blocking news links in Canada
michaelgeist.ca
michaelgeist.ca
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.
UGC (User Generated Content) could remain commentary about these news articles when shared in, but it would require consumers to become creators.
I remember a facebook before any articles was posted there.
News articles were brought in explicitly to get the news crowd there, and keep them engaged.
I wonder how federated news delivery could work - anyone use anything like this.
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.
We can't let our impression of how things should play out be determined by asking which self-serving powerful player deserves the right of way in policy making.
Have you not just rephrased my "right" and "wrong" as "how things should play out". I'm not sure why someone would do that.
Just because right and wrong can imply the word "should" in a hypergeneric sense doesn't mean I was talking about right of way.
I think I was responding to the idea that because the government was acting in self-serving ways, that we were necessarily cheering on Facebook, and that what facebook is doing is "standing up to...corruption", when their own efforts are a corruption of a different kind. The phrasing there made me feel like I was being made to choose--that I was either cheering for facebook or for their rivals in this situation--and I didn't feel that that choice was accurate. It's possible to think that both parties are in the wrong, even if they are on opposite sides here.
Your follow up post reinforced that feeling as it maintained the idea that one party or the other was in the right, but that post was also a direct response to what I said, and not necessarily a continuation of what you had posted earlier. So by continuing that thread I reinforced my own misinterpretation.
I will try to better understand my own reactions to people's posts in the future, and be better in responding in the appropriate context, not with a shift.
If I was an American/Euro/South American news org I'd be staffing up my Canadian journos. Any org out of reach of the backroom dealing Ottawa private school clique can probably hire some local freelancers and fill the void by the end of the year.
Regardless, Canada isn’t protecting people from facebook. They didn’t ban news sharing, they just wanted to give their media companies a cut.
It's a casino with flashing lights, exciting noise, and free cocktails.
But those average people are the majority of "views" of said paper, that's why all these media outlets are desperate for that ad revenue. They already have subscriber bases that are actual real interest in reading content.
Welcome to the sad reality of our world, crack open a cold one and laugh with the rest of us.
- above average content
- more well-thought-out comments
- a more technical, intelligent, and successful userbase
than the average website.
Or are you really trying to imply that it (and it's users) are not much different from, say, Reddit or a Fox News's comment section or TikTok or Facebook?
Oh really? this one couldn't be bothered for a single complete sentence:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37030073
Don't kid yourself, this place is filled with karma farmers. Stop sniffing your own farts
Being better than average at a couple things is extremely common. It's not delusional to point those things out.
Most websites are good at something (excluding spam sites).
This is the 2020s equivalent of saying that there can’t possibly be legitimate news culture happening with Comedy Central viewers at the peak era of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It’s just out of touch with the common person.
By the way, Meta products are incredibly good at a UX and technical level. Fast loading, simple UI, and ads have a predictable layout where they don’t bloc site elements or interrupt you (much unlike a typical news website).
Are we using the same apps? My FB and Insta feeds were a steaming pile of ads and influencers and other garbage. I stopped using both because posts from people I follow were buried
I’m talking about the endless stream of content that is the bread and butter of social media. Your friends don’t have infinite content to post.
The endless stream of content product (think Reels and TikTok) is what captures 90% of users’ attention.
In that context, yes, you’ll get ads and influencers shilling sponsored stuff, but you can swipe them away instantly. And my argument is that this product is very good for very many people.
“Your feed will be mostly ads”
If that’s the way it’s supposed to work, I want none of it. There was a time I could check FB or Insta a few times/week and see mostly friends/family.
:old man yelling at clouds:
Also, elder Millenials. Snort. Gen-Xer here. I’m not even all that gray. Yet.
Incoming on-brand Gen X comment: it’s funny that they even skip over us when handing out pejoratives.
I mean, we can obviously see why the above is not a viable product no matter how ethical the company making it may be.
I'd note that this isn't even good at the UX/technical level.
I very rarely use FB, but opened it the other day and noticed that that the promo card for reels is always showing up despite me having clicked "Hide" on it several times before. I spent a minute or two clicking "Hide" on it probably 20 more times, and as far as I can tell, it has zero effect. Not good UX. Furthermore, if you click "Report this post" in the dialog after "Hide", you get a consistent "Sorry, something went wrong" popup. Not good technically.
AFAICT, most of what they really take issue with is intrinsic to allowing direct communication between anyone in the world. There seem to be severely anti-democratic implications for many of the critiques of Meta that I hear.
Truly the only place where the techies seem to diverge is that they care about privacy, whereas it is about “fake news” for everyone else.
A thing being "enjoyable" doesn't mean it's good, neither for society or the person(s) doing it.
Not every moment of life needs to be healthy or productive.
I dunno to what extent you use Facebook. But it's not technically great at all, and the UX is total trash.
Age isn't a reasonable excuse at this point. Common access to the Internet has been with us for ~30 years.
People subscribed with money to a newspaper. Which then delivered curated content right to their front door. They didn't go seek it out. Also, most of the newspapers are part of global corporations, even local ones.
I say to a degree vecause there are some distinct differences. At least in my neck of the woods, major newspapers were owned at a national level. Some of the stories came from international corporations (e.g. AP), but what was published tended to be local editorial decisions. You also got the same news as everyone else who subscribed to or purchased single copies of the paper.
Contrast that to online news through social media sites. Chances are the editorial decisions are made in a different country, and there may not even be direct human intervention in choosing what you (as an individual) sees.
[deleted stuff about internet rollout at UVA in the mid-90s]
Shit, that was 30 years ago. Thanks for making me feel old. ;)
To be clear, I'm not saying that boomers aren't smart enough to use technology. It's just that old, comfortable habits are hard to break. Facebook for many of them is a safe, walled garden compared to the wild west internet.
This is a major source of traffic for media, along with say sharing links via imessage.
Almost no one logs onto facebook with the goal of "checking the news". But they see news there and it adds up to a lot of traffic because Facebook and instagram are huge. (The media posts clips to Facebook and Instagram and these can show up in feeds too if the post is popular enough)
In light of that, a world with no news on Facebook would be just fine. If anyone is that uninterested in news that they would never check out a news site directly on their own, they won’t miss it.
Because that's the reason. Folks interested in news tend to talk about it with other folks interested - and that has happened long before the internet. In some cases, it is pretty similar to leaving a newspaper in a fast food place: Let folks you don't see much (or at all) read that stuff as well.
It doesn't always matter if other options are better - folks work with what they have. Similar to wanting to talk to someone more intelligent about the news, but still talking about it with the folks you have around.
I don’t witness that happening though. When I see “news” posted by people on FB, I usually see a despairing one-line intro at most, and a link. Then the comments are a bunch of me-toos or, for those with unkempt friend lists of everyone they’ve ever met, a raucous flame war.
The other “news” is posted by the sites themselves or by large political Pages or Groups. Those are exclusively the “flame war” variety, 1000 strangers screaming into the void pointlessly.
So (imo) nothing of value would be lost by abolishing the whole concept of news on social media.
If you want a place where sane people can have a virtual water cooler discussion about the day’s news stories with friends they know, those friends should just set up a group text or a Discord.
I have taken to using a website I found that combines and aggregates all the mainstream news sites, so I can see from an aerial view what -- if any -- message they're trying to sell that day. And it's weird how close in lockstep these media outlets talk about things.
I see a lot of criticism on the Internet amount to "If they only used the good stuff..." So, where is it?
[1] http://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-as...
Sounds like an easy way to get on the grift train.
Meta, please ban newspapers all around the world!
Look at supermarkets: everything after the department for fruits an vegetables is basically bad for us. Science prooves that. But we have to pass all this convenience food that promises to be cheap and fast and healthy and it isn't. And most people somehow learned that in school but ever since they are being informed by the companies.
I will agree with your objection to the “prove” claim about the science (if only because it’s an overstatement of what science does) but the negative associations between various adverse health outcomes and a plant-based diet are well-supported in the literature: lower risk of type 2 diabetes, lower systolic BP, lower risk of cardiovascular events, lower total cardiovascular mortality, lower rates of certain malignancies.
Facebook... I mean... it wasn't pitched to be that? It was supposed to connect you to each other, not be an algorithmic view into the universe. Sure, sharing news can be a big part of that, and talking about news too, but every site doesn't have to be everything.
Why would my personal social group (i.e. facebook friends) make sense to combine with the random strangers on here who discuss technical posts? Sure there's some overlap in audience but it just doesn't seem like a necessary compromise to make.
If you're in the Facebook ecosystem maybe this is less visible. But if friends plan an event in a Facebook group they are excluding me and others who don't use Facebook for many valid but irrelevant reasons.
One such reason is that pseudo-anonymity is crucial for a lot of people for professional or personal reasons, and it's way easier to support that elsewhere.
Others include data privacy policies.
Maybe there's not a great choice that has the right blend of ease of access and ease of setup. But I think Facebook is demonstrably bad because of the requirements of logging in to read at all and to enforce that your profile has a real name.
No ads.
Thus, no engagement metrics to optimize for because HN isn’t even monetized that I know of (and hopefully doesn’t need to become one?)
With no engagement needing to be goosed we don’t need an algorithm to make sure we see the most outraging things possible. We just see what’s interesting to the whole community.
Radicalization online is a serious problem and I think the reverse qualities of the above, which FB, Twitter, and YouTube are perfect examples of, is a big part of how it happened.
HN pushes us toward the average interests of hackers. FB amplifies whatever interests repeatably get your attention until they become obsessions.
(I stopped following anything or anyone political on FB and YouTube, so that they only makes me more engaged in my nerdy, wholesome interests. I think I’m in the minority though)
It's like you're giving your children heroin, and complaining that your dealer has half-assed parenting controls.
Agreed.
Facebook would really blow my mind if they doubled down on their core mission.
Because people want to share and visit news links. Evidenced by the fact that they shared and visited news links often. Its a bit condescending to suggest you know whats better for people than the people freely choosing to engage in news articles.
Besides, the Canadian law doesn’t even ban news sharing on Facebook. It just institutes a shakedown.
This is a very naive view of what's going on or the impact.
I don't like reading clickbait or ragebait articles that people share. If connections of mine do that on social media too often I usually mute them.
I also don't "get" my news "from" Facebook. As in, if Facebook were to try and suggest news articles to me I would find that very annoying. I use FB Purity to give myself a very sanitized news feed that is configured to my liking.
And yet this ridiculous bill that literally no one in Canada asked for is impacting me.
How?
Because I follow a local independent news outlet that posts stuff about my area that actually matters to me. These are NOT articles that people share and they are NOT shit that Facebook is shoving my face. I CHOSE to click "Follow" on the FB Page for that news outlet so that I could find out about things like weather alerts, crime in my area and local events.
That page is now gone from Facebook.
What is INSANE to me is that this doesn't even seem like a case of Facebook distributing that news. It was that local news outlet that chose to create a Facebook page and create those links themselves in order to distribute their content on Facebook voluntarily. Yet that still, for some fucked up reason, falls under this insane law that no one asked for.
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.
The relevant legislation isn't just taxing the platforms for "content", it's taxing the platforms for merely linking to the content.
Google is exploiting copyrighted content to make profit and create audience.
If the search index of Google was empty, the people wouldn't use Google, it's that simple.
So the newspapers are asking for royalties for feeding that search index.
Granted, I have `disallow: /` in mine because I don't want my stuff scraped, but I still see Googlebot sometimes, and others, try to crawl my site.
It's not a very effective opt-out, because it requires the 'attacker' to honor the file's settings.
Feel free to enable it on your own server and watch the logs for a few days after sharing some links.
I hope daddy government treats you well.
Count on Big Brother to save you, and they will beat you down when it's time as well.
Noting that something exists and including it in reference material should by no means incur royalties.
To be clear, the bill is fundamentally broken. It would require Google or Facebook to pay simply when links to news sites are served, rather than for reproducing or condensing the material in the news article as a "preview" sort of be thing (as in other countries). The bill isn't banning links explicitly, but the government should have seen this coming.
Perhaps they could have listened when the two companies they are trying to impose this on provide suggestions - or maybe modeled it more closely after legislation in other countries where such media taxes have been successful.
Yet they publish articles with the entire headline and backing images marked for free display on Google/Facebook. Almost like they are trying to help the search engines to attract traffic.
But they care a lot. So clearly that exposure must be worth something.
Now nobody benefits.
In fact, you could probably make the case Facebook would be made better without news content. It's interesting that they chose to remove all news content for Canadians, rather than just Canadian news. I assume this was a good opportunity for them to try out some user testing.
This. Times 1000. My neighbor's cat's incredible Easter Island vacation photos are much more interesting that 1000 articles about presidential politics.
I'm really quite fine with this experiment happening.
An experiment is when you have a hypothesis about something that could be improved or optimized, test the hypothesis with a subset to find evidence or observe unintended effects of the change, replicate the finding, scale up, or revert depending on the outcomes observed.
A national policy by fiat is somewhat the opposite of what I consider an experiment to be.
Those organizations, being Canadian news organizations, employing Canadians, and making content for Canadian consumers. Aren't those the sort of organizations that should be able to work with the Canadian government and influence Canadian laws?
What sorts of organizations instead of those ones should be able to work with the government here? I think legislation should have outside influence, but I think I'm missing something here, or making the mistake of taking things at face-value.
You can make the same argument about local companies lobbying the government to enact tariffs to protect them from foreign competitors. The people being harmed are the same: consumers who end up with a worse product. How about nobody tries to influence the Canadian government to enact laws that distort the marketplace to their advantage?
Why the hell would I care if the people who are trying to basically legislate themselves into profitability are Canadian or not?
There is no such thing. This regulation is the consequence of a regularly passed law (Bill C-18), that passed with about 210 to 110 majority. If I remember public poling on the issue correctly, on the bill itself popular opinion was pretty evenly split, but the underlying principle of tech companies paying domestic news, had wide majority support.
Framing this as something being imposed on citizens is disingenuous and effectively the Facebook PR line. Just with related media laws anywhere else it has little basis in reality.
(edit: as an aside, I just want to clarify that when I write “lizard people”, I mean to suggest politicians and corporate leadership acting out of self-interest rather than implying a bigoted conspiracy theory. I realized this could come off as anti-semetic in 2023; sorry if that landed poorly for anyone)
As part of the process, the parliamentary committee released a survey asking questions like
* Independent candidates should be able to be elected to Parliament
* The current electoral system adequately reflects voters' intentions
* Seats should be allocated in proportion to the percentage of votes received by each political party
* Voters should elect local candidates to represent them in Parliament
* The current electoral system should be changed
* There should be parties in Parliament that represent the views of all Canadians, even if some are radical or extreme.
* Governments should have to negotiate their policy decisions with other parties in Parliament, even if it is less clear who is accountable for the resulting policy.
* It is better for several parties to have to govern together than for one party to make all the decisions in government, even if it takes longer for government to get things done.
I cant think of any western country with a more (effectively) non linear response of seats vs. vote share than Canada.
Because we do that now. "News" sites with independent journalist filled with misinformation. Aunt Marge telling you what happened, only putting a religious slant on it.
And I can pretty well promise that neither Aunt Marge nor the "news" sites are going to have any news on the war in another country that your neighbor's son just died in, nor a drought that has affected wheat prices globally or things like that.
It isn't that professional journalists always get things right, but its better than Aunt Marge and the "news" sites out there.
Many countries have protectionist laws and this isn’t much different.
I don't think that preserving Canadian culture is a factor in any of this, nor does it seem to be a concern of the current government.
These same politicians have been bringing in an absolutely staggering number of foreigners each year for many years now, with most of them from cultures that are extremely dissimilar from, if not outright incompatible with, what was Canadian culture.
Yet the government is passing even more laws to try to give them cash grabs. These companies should be broken apart and the spectrum sold off to smaller players. Canadians need more competition in both media and wireless / internet access, not less.
Canada appeared to be attempting to emulate countries like Australia, Spain, France, etc that have passed very similar laws. It seems like the tech giants were perfectly happy to just cut ties with Canadian media rather than make a deal however.
Imagine if I recommended you to watch a show on Netflix and I had to pay to give that recommendation. It makes absolutely no sense.
that it, or any portion of it, is reproduced; and
that access to it is facilitated by “any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content.”Just linking does not satisfy the first part of the clause according to the bill.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37029066
---
I think that's ambiguous enough to be problematic. For example, does a slug (headline-with-hyphens-in-it) count? If so, links often do. What about the headline? And what if a user copies a paragraph into their post?
"Any portion" is language that gives away that this is intended to be read pretty broadly. There's no qualifier, no "significant" or "substantial". If the goal were to prevent the kind of abuse that your bus driver analogy suggests, they should have been more specific.
'Making available of news content (2) For the purposes of this Act, news content is made available if
(a) the news content, or any portion of it, is reproduced; or
(b) access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content.'
https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-a...
https://lop.parl.ca/staticfiles/PublicWebsite/Home/ResearchP...
Obviously this is entirely beneficial for the news source for this to be shown - this bill is like trying to go after people for copyright infringement for showing somebody a movie trailer (since the movie trailer contains "any portion" of the full feature film).
And just like other protectionist laws, this is a dumb idea and is going to end up hurting consumers.
The underpinning concept in HTML is:
My document can link to your document without asking, and without cost.
This whole, if you send traffic to me you have to pay me for it is backwards.
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.
Even if, for the sake of argument, it was possible to do so, you would have to interrogate the methodology used to produce this value. Note the complexity in analyzing corruption by country. How does one investigate in detail, the governments of almost 200 countries? If one relies on survey results from members of those countries, how was the survey consistently conducted across language barriers, cultural barriers, and legal barriers?
Finally, even if you believe all of those incredibly dubious factors were accounted for, it could be possible that being 14th in a world that is becoming more corrupt does not mean that Canada is improving in that regard.
It's amazing how we can make excuses for everything, as long as we delude ourselves that we somehow have it better than the US.
edit: actually, Apple Music might be able to cover their 30% quota just with Neil Young's discography.
Don't forget Avril Lavigne, Drake, Gordon Lightfoot, Céline Dion, Joni Mitchell, deadmau5, The Weeknd, and Nelly Furtado.
Just off the top of my head. Interestingly enough I'd never heard of Kids in the Hall before today. But all of those are or were "Big Names" in music.
We have (protectionist, yes) media regulators (the CRTC) that are nominally arm's length from elected governments so it's not likely to change unless the Canadian public decides that this will become a major election issue. Don't hold your breath.
Of course one shouldn't forget what is perhaps Canada's greatest contribution to music: Nickelback.
As a Canadian I was actively trying to forget that one. Thanks :(
:P
Trudeau wasn't wrong. The fact that conservatives pillory him for this rare moment of truth-telling is part of what's turned him into such a breathy-mouthed coward.
But, why do I care? My parents dragged me into Canada at age six, I left as soon as I graduated. Not my country, not my problem.
But it's hard to see how that relates to "running the country".
I've kept my Canadian # for posterity and I'm on a legacy plan for $50 that gets me 15GB and US-Can voice so you can definitely get cheaper ones through retention (the only way to get a good deal on wireless in Canada).
> But it's hard to see how that relates to "running the country".
Agree that's a bit much, they basically rule the CRTC (telecom regulator) which has never made an adverse decision against them to my recollection. The running joke was they had regulatory meeting at the National Golf Club in Toronto.
They do own a fair proportion of TV & radio outlets and political influence but I wouldn't call it running the country.
Disclaimer: Not a conspiracy nut.
Interestingly different from the US I would say the vast majority of Canadians I knew (including my elderly parents) get their Canadian political news from print media rather than TV (acknowledging that biases towards people who attended university and live in cities) which is more for local news if anything. Canadian TV channels are very underwhelming and have no where near the relevance of CNN or Fox News to US society. I would even modestly wager that CNN has a larger Canadian viewership than Canadian news channels.
I expect a significant amount also get it from radio which from what I recall are mostly telecom owned.
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 :-)
Meta has blocked access in Canada, so I wouldn't consider it a threat anymore.
You could claim this is a negotiating tactic, but I suspect time alone will not change these policies.
Neither Google nor Facebook see significant direct value in having news links on their platform - they don't think they'll have a significant drop in user traffic from users not being able to see a few Canadian news sites.
> The analysis by the PBO, an independent body that provides economic and financial analysis to MPs and senators, concluded that newspapers and online media would get $81,550,000 a year, while broadcasters such as the CBC, Bell, Shaw and Rogers stand to get $247,677,000 if the bill becomes law.
First keep the money here, then we'll argue how to redistribute it. News is a tricky subject. In theory there are more clicks but sometimes people don't visit the site at all so it's hard to say.
If this was about diversifying communications providers I think I would side with you instead. It really depends what it is.
I would prefer my domestic companies to be in the strongest position while also allowing outside players - so a mixture. But we are hopelessly on the back leg and need a boost when it comes to funding domestic media. The solution can't be to just outsource everything because there's no way to win against Meta and Google.
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).
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.
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.
"I, [name], do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, Her Heirs and Successors. So help me God."
I guess Canada's politicians weren't sociopathic enough to think of such a thing.
The Canadian media is almost universally right wing. Helping these outlets survive is almost certainly against the governing parties interest.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/meta-instagram-canada-online...
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
Google and Facebook have syphoned off a lot of advertising income from these big publishers and they are leveraging their political clout to make politicians pass laws that have nothing to do with journalism and everything to do with serving the special interests of a few powerful publishers.
Yes the fact that too much money stays with Google and Facebook rather than funding serious journalism is a problem. But these laws are not supposed to fix that and they are not fixing it. It's just corruption.
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.
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.
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.
Social media as a profit center is a failed experiment and it must be dismantled (simple news delivery or not) - distributed communities will make a return as it should be.
I respect your opinion, but to me the situation is more akin to a random algorithm distributing a whole manner of both healthy and junk foods together with no labels. Now we're worried about that the people will no longer know how to get food at all, or that it'll all be junk.
Facebook helped create that problem (accident or not) and that now needs to be undone - staying the course is not a preferable solution. The news outlets also deserve a chance to deliver directly to their readers and viewers - if they're no better off financially that's the outlet's problem. Potential financial extortion of the Canadian government aside, I think it's a net positive having news links off the platform.
Maybe there should be more government funding tax dollars to support outlets people respect - the sooner we find out the result of this the sooner we can try a next step. Maybe we got it wrong.
Do they? Or are they simply making the most logical business decision for them? If it costs Facebook more to allow links than it does to not allow links, why should they allow them? Is Facebook really made that much of a better product with the inclusion of news?
Those are gone now. I used to think like you. I'm not a big social media user and it's easy to think of social media as a cesspool of clickbait and rage, but now that Meta has pulled even the pages of these outlets I realized that I'm suddenly not getting severe weather alerts and updates on local events that I was used to getting from a particular small indie outlet. How exactly was Facebook hurting that indie outlet by giving them a platform and free traffic?
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.
I think this happened to France early on. What they did was to force Google to pay no matter what. Optically, it looks like extortion and protectionist laws for incumbents too big to fail.
I’m not sure Canada can go that route though since they probably care about their relationship with the US unlike France.
After Google decided to block all news, the French government accused them of "not operating in good faith."
Nationalism is the sugar water they use to sweeten the deal to make it palatable to Canadians. People have a gut reflex to swallow this stuff because they are rightly or wrongly attuned to the threat of dominance from the US.
When Harper was prime minister, it was all about fossil fuel companies, defunding and silencing climate scientists, shoveling money into projects in the west and energy sector, etc. With Trudeau it's just a different pile of bullshit.
I'm sick of the dysfunction. It's a corrupt state, with corrupt, colonial foundations.
Canada is also in the midst of the biggest housing affordability crisis we’ve ever had. We’re in 3rd place in the world behind Luxembourg and Portugal for the most unaffordable housing, relative to income.
The U.S. may have some serious affordability issues in the Bay Area, Seattle, and New York, but large swaths of the rest of the country aren’t so bad. Most Canadians are crowded into a few extremely unaffordable cities.
But sometimes I talk to (born) Canadians - I’m an immigrant here - and they think of these issues as overwhelming, unsolvable crises that fundamentally undermine the viability of Canada as a nation.
And I think this isn’t a good problem-solving mindset, and isn’t the correct perspective either.
Or maybe I totally overinterpret their level of exasperation.
But that doesn't change the fact that Canadian democracy is under a lot of pressure with polarization and influence by wealthy special interests. We would be a lot better off if we had a better electoral system and were able to move toward more Scandinavian-style social systems.
First-past-the-post - FPTP - and wealthy interests have been here for a long time now. The system as it exists today works insanely great. This came to pass in spite of FPTP and the wealthy interest (hell, maybe even in part because of them).
Because the problems here are minor, the changes to the system should be mild, not radical. You don't give a complicated mechanism a big kick hoping to take it from 99% to 100% efficiency. You fine-tune it very carefully. Big kicks are for going from 0% to 50%.
I'm 50 next year, and have been politically conscious since I was a teen.. so have seen a half a century of it.
In particular the decimation of the health care system has just been slow and terrible to watch. Destruction of green spaces, sprawl, and difficulty of living in the GTA. Destruction of farmland, garbage on the beaches, overcrowding in almost every tourist or recreational area near Toronto. Nasty political polarization and viciousness. Racism and bigotry on the rise. And worst of all, that housing has become inconceivably expensive for working class people.
I wouldn't call the problems -- especially the trend line of them -- minor.
The expectation for previous generations was improvement of quality of life over generations. Unfortunately, that's no longer the case.
Again, I blame both major political parties. Liberals just happen to be wearing the hat right now federally.
This system can take care of every problem you mention with a couple of tweaks. Now "tweak" doesn't mean it's easy or will work instantly; it might take decades and consume entire political careers. But there's no need for a total re-imagining, or a doom-and-gloom outlook.
Most bad things I've noticed in my time here (GTA + Calgary) can be fixed by cheap housing. This is a matter of political will - there's a ton of space and a ton of capital ready to triple our housing stock in a year if they're allowed to build. Toronto doesn't have to be the Center of the Universe. Even if we insist on putting every tourist and immigrant in this one city, there's so much space around it, it could in principle be one of the biggest on the planet.
I'm not arguing for complacency. I'm saying let's not throw our hands up in the air.
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.
I think it’s a level beyond that, to the point that I’d just call it pure corruption. A government-mandated fee that a company has to pay isn’t any different than a tax. They’re taxing big tech, which is fine, and most people wouldn’t have a problem with that.
But then instead of booking that as revenue and deciding what to do with the money as part of the normal budgetary process, they’re short-circuiting procedure to send that money to news companies. If the government wants to fund news companies, it should be done in the normal way that all the other government funding gets decided upon, not in a special allocation just for news companies that is excluded from the federal budget.
if the government is going to be paying the media to report on them, that needs to happen in the open.
I beg to differ. Media companies need as much hands-off from the government as possible.
I think what the Canadian govt is legislating is silly but it's not like there's no problem: foreign governments in the US-sphere are losing a ton of tax revenue to US entities that are capturing all the value. This essentially strips the residents of wealth, further putting them at a comparative disadvantage in all other fields. Eyeballs are at the center of the largest commercial entities on the planet. There's a lot of value here being sent to the US with no obvious return mechanism.
Not recognizing this will prevent any mutually agreeable solution from being found. Canada isn't keeping up with the US and things aren't looking up either.
This isn't benign - setting precedents that linking to something is stealing it is toxic to the whole concept of the internet itself. It may take a while to seep through but that precedent is going to get built on by every other aggrieved party who sees an opportunity there eventually.
this is why we need to care. doing theatrics to hide their dirty spending is one thing. but they should at least do their dirt in a way that doesn't have the side effect of breaking how the internet works.
The calculus will have to change in the digital era. There are effects like zero marginal cost that are genuine challenges. But the targeted adtech period is such a great economic and social distortion it makes a difficult problem almost impossible.
I can't even imagine why someone would voluntarily participate in something like that. You must be among am exceptional group of people. :)
Most of the toxicity comes from larger political groups, and yeah, agreed they are absolutely trash.
At least where I'm at, local politics is the only sane politics left. It helps that in my city we don't have a party system at the local level, so candidates have to run on their own platform instead of on party affiliation.
> 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...
Who serve at the will of the PM, he recently just shuffled them around. Recently the government has concentrated and centralized power in remarkable ways that goes largely unnoticed.
As other commenters have noted, "Governor in Council" means the federal Cabinet, but more importantly than that "regulations made by the Governor in Council" is a magic phrase that allows published, regulatory rulemaking. This works in much the same way as when the US Congress passes a bill that authorizes the EPA to regulate air pollution.
This system generally gives greater grants of regulatory authority than the US system. Since Canada has a Westminster form of government based on partial unification of the executive and legislative branches, the executive (Prime Minister / Cabinet) is assumed to always be operating with the confidence of Parliament. (If that isn't the case, Parliament can turf the Prime Minister and by extension Cabinet.) The net result is that while the US has ingrained hostility between legislators and regulatory rulemakers, the situation in Canada is more one of cooperation and delegation.
Your concern about "you can always say that this newspaper [etc]" is textually founded, but an important rule in Canadian administrative law is that regulatory grants must be exercised 'reasonably', compatibly with both the text and intended purpose of the legislation.
A designation made (or not made) under 27(1) would be subject to judicial review if the denied business so wishes, giving courts the opportunity to weigh in. An arbitrary regulatory ruling made on thin grounds would not survive its day in court.
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.
Sylvain Poisson of Hebdos Quebec confidently said “they made those threats in Australia and elsewhere and every time they back down.” Chris Pedigo of the U.S.-based Digital Context Next assured the committee “it’s important to understand what happens when these bills become law. In Australia, they moved quickly to secure deals.
Basically it appears that the tech companies signing the same kinds of deals as elsewhere is being spun as a success of the legislation, even though the law does not apply to anyone, as a face saving measure.
1. Whether a significant bargaining power imbalance exists.
2. Whether the platform has made a significant contribution to the sustainability of news media.
As to 1. the mere existence of the code seems to redress any power imbalance somewhat. As for 2. The actual deals Facebook and Google made in response to the law being enacted are confidential, but many news media companies said they were happy with the results so there wouldn't seem to be any reason to designate these organisations in the first place.
We were advised by Australia's top policy wonk, but maybe he was in earnest and didn't understand the game he was in.
Your policymakers are either
- earnest and incredibly stupid
- malicious and only somewhat stupid
There's just no in-between here. A child that has done ten minutes of research on the issue could realize the problems with these bills.
Not necessarily. Meta eliminating news from Facebook and Instagram is consistent with either of two scenarios:
1. They're playing 'hardball' to negotiate a better outcome
2. The amount they would have to pay outweighs any benefit they gain from keeping news links on Facebook and Instagram.
If a prospective employee would not provide a business with more than minimum wage in productivity, it is not a 'negotiating struggle' if they don't hire him; it simply means it isn't worth it to them.
The difference here being, if this is simply a negotiating tactic, it is rational to just outwait Meta; they will restore news links eventually, because the benefit outweighs the cost.
But if it isn't worth it because of scenario 2, they could just never restore news links.
So the real question here is: How much value is added to Facebook and Instagram by allowing news links on those platforms?
Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if the value added were negative.
Now, whether posting links is the kind of enrichment that deserves payment is a separate question. But the idea that Facebook is somehow providing news sites a service in some sort of charitable way by allowing URLs to be posted by 3rd parties is ridiculous.
The equation is different for Google and search indexing, though. And of course once Google started harvesting content directly from third party websites and shoving it into answerboxes, actively siphoning traffic away, it got more complex.
In most cases, yes:
>Our users – and in this case news publishers – choose to share it themselves. Globally, more than 90% of organic views on article links from news publishers are on links posted by the publishers themselves.
https://about.fb.com/news/2023/05/metas-position-on-canadas-...
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.
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.
The Canadian people have asked their government to pass these laws and Facebook doesn't want to follow them. No one is forcing Facebook to operate in Canada. They're welcome to leave at any time if they don't like it - we all know FB talks a big game and won't do that, but I know I'm not alone in secretly hoping it happens anyway. Zuck can go zuck himself.
OP's article seems to indicate that Facebook is already following these rules without issue.
And Facebook is complying with the law by removing links. It’s just not the compliance the lobbyists were hoping for.
So, regulatory capture by the largest media companies?
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.
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.
It’s like every year some government somewhere learns this the hard way.
I'm not seeing the downsides...
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.
These deals were surely larger than their earlier deals, but small enough they could live with them. The terms were never published.
Seeing how misperception of this led directly to the Canadian law, my suspicion is Meta is now done with the charade lest others copy it, and will keep news out unless the law is repealed.
There are, to my knowledge, zero countries where Meta engaged in a forced negotiation framework such as the Canadian law. If you disagree, could you please name one?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/meta-australia-google-news-can...
With the erosion of local and hyper-local news in Canada and North America - the media that was largely being cut out is the national chains who are shutting down many of the local papers and leaving broader, more generalized coverage that is not regionally accurate in some cases.
Hyper local media wouldn't have the $ to lobby like this. It's not entirely unclear how much they were consulted in a meaningful way.
For example hearing something about the real estate industry in "Canada" often means Toronto, or Vancouver only, when there are plenty of interesting things happening in other areas contrary to this reporting, much like the US.
Edit; Typos
- 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
We can, I don't see what the problem is here either. I don't think it will lead to less fake news and less engagement though. People are addicted to this horrible cesspool, especially older folks, nothing you can do about that unfortunately. That ship has sailed.
Social media attracted the news traffic in the beginning.
Google news tried to get to know a visitors interests eagerly.
Facebook wanted to find what you liked and keep you digging into that at the expense of having a broader vision.
Maybe it's a good time for someone to roll out a media news aggregator that also presents it in the context of an interest like the media bias chart.
This reduces the reach of canadian news, increases the reach of US news, and reduces income to canadian news sources from social media traffic. There's no win here at all. The legislation does the opposite of what it claims it wants to do.
I can do that and have no problem with it.
Now can you explain why a Canadian shouldn't be able to open their browser and type in www.facebook.com or www.differentnews.com if they want news?
I'm being snarky and exaggerating, but it's not far off. Companies & contractors etcget squirrely & weird about e-mail, don't respond to it... but respond to Facebook Messenger in an instant, or have a Twitter feed. Schools & schoolboards don't update their own websites, but post updates on Twitter and Facebook. Want to find out about school snow day closure? You're going to hear about it on Twitter first, etc. Road closures from the city? Traffic incidents, fires, or crime notices from the police or fire department? Have fun finding it on anything other than social media.
It's a bleak, privatized, walled-off state of affairs, the opposite of what we were all pushing for in the 90s.
Well, it turns out news-site.com requires a paid subscription. The clickbait headlines and slugs on Facebook were free. No paid subscription required, just sign a contract for your soul in blood. Now Old Scratch is throwing a hissy fit and withholding the good intentions along his road.
Because they're really on instagram/TikTok and follow @mediaCorporation. They see their news between vacation pics and belly dances
In Canada, "Monopoly" is often confused for a free market.
It's also potentially an example of a company bigger and more powerful than small governments. Which could lead to problems, though this doesn't strike me as particularly the scariest one by a long shot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspapers_in_Canada
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Canadian_news_website...
Meta isn't a pirate company believing all the information must be preserved. It has a history of complying the law by deleting posts. Be it copyright infringement, child porn, privacy information or national security, they deleted it.
Meta must block all news (links) every where.
And if they don't, we must compel them.
Publishers are hurting and facing many challenges to staying afloat.
However, this idea that FB (or anyone) should pay for linking news content is idiotic.
Publishers benefitted hugely and we actively worked on pushing out content to platforms like FB to generate traffic (and therefore ad-impressions).
Like many, it feels weird to be supporting FB’s position but here we are.
(Pardon typos, Mobile)
People will just waste time on those.
Frankly, if Canadians are reading news about Canada mostly from foreign news sources, this might weaken the Canadian government’s control on political narrative - since they can’t pressure foreign news sources like Reuters, CNN, or Fox News, much if at all.
There is also no reason for why a political party cannot both advertise in a form of media, and in their governing role, regulate it.
Engaging in a financial transaction with someone does not permanently ensorcell you into a suicide pact with them.
The answer is obvious: Government awareness campaigns might be less effective, hiring and recruitment might be more difficult, but neither poses a risk to the government for staying in government. There's no principle here, just politics.
They are required to do this now. Blaming them and not lawmakers is strange to me.
If they're in Canada, its time to get your parents off of Facebook. The Canadian government is really playing with fire here. They need to either get reality back on Facebook in Canada or they need to curb stomp Meta in Canada. They can't leave things as they currently are.
Australia made a deal to keep news on Facebook. Why couldn't Canada? https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/meta-australia-google-news-can...
Canada is a lot closer to home, too. May happen in the other Americas too. I'm sure much more experienced and insightful folks on this might be able to comment, with or without a throwaway account.
These street interviews the cbc conducted gave me some hope however: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WltKtLi65fE
And maybe that's when they'll realize that might not play out as anticipated.
That's a great link, thanks for sharing.
Big companies using the guise of safety, or fairness to extract advantage at the expense of an informed populace feels just swell.
It's fun to look up how many of the "Canadian" major media groups are owned by the US, and to what degree, how much.
I am so enjoying this.
Sure, route my traffic to a local CDN cache, but don’t assume that’s my locale. Local newspaper websites make this mistake a lot assuming that being in the EU means I’m subject to GDPR and so cannot be shown the latest Bucks score on DeerLickTribune.com etc.
Facebook gets this right — they basically ask you your nationality in order to serve you legal traffic. The existence of a correct technical implementation does not make it right though. I don’t want HTTP to include an Accept-Jurisdiction header.
Being in the EU means you are subject to GDPR, regardless of your citizenship.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/meta-australia-google-news-can...
tl;dr the government has not left any room to negotiate, and the law is signed.
And Social thinks they will keep traffic, or the media sites will die.
As far as I can tell the basic point is "Australia changed the law to something these companies could accept before it passed, Canada didn't"
[0]https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/meta-australia-google-news-can...
I've yet to see anything that explains how a negatiations framework translates to a "link tax", but explaining it wasn't Google's goal when it coined the term to fight the bill.
This law targets Facebook and Google specifically. Facebook has been willing to negotiate in other countries but where do you start when the premise is false?
The only winning move is not to play.
If that's the case then why would media companies pursue deals that would lead to them getting removed from the site?
The Canadian law is different in that it did not leave any choice or negotiation up to the companies
Disclaimer: Meta employee programming games, unrelated to any of the ongoing discussions.
Are Canadians not allowed to buy from foreign companies?
The citizen takes on the responsibility of making sure the legal process of doing business in Canada is upheld. EG, they cannot buy something that is illegal to own in Canada, and the relevant taxes and tariffs must be paid, all of those things.
Should Canada be placing tariffs on Facebook? That would be interesting to see.