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Meta's news ban is preventing Canadians from sharing vital information about the wildfires ripping through western Canada (www.businessinsider.com)
submitted 3 years ago by [M, B] to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Meta's news ban is preventing Canadians from sharing vital information about the wildfires ripping through western Canada::Canadians are calling on Meta to lift its news ban so they can share news about the wildfires in the Northwest Territories and British Columbia.

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[–] 97 points 3 years ago (3 children)

As much as Meta shouldn't be relied on for news, Canada creating legislation which stops Meta showing news then crying when Meta doesn't show news is frankly laughable and I don't know how their government didn't see it coming

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  • [–] 24 points 3 years ago (6 children)

    Lol Meta has some good PR. The government did not stop Meta from sharing news. They stopped them from profiting off someone else's work without paying for it. Meta was told they had to start paying and decided to stop showing it entirely.

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  • [–] 28 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    The Government telling meta and Google they'd have to pay to link has led to this entirely predictable result, and the companies said they would block links since very early on in the process. Independent experts (e.g., Michael Geist) also said that C18 was a bad idea.

    It's ridiculous to complain about someone complying with laws that you (the government) drafted and passed.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    The laws aren’t even in effect now. They pulled it as a bargaining chip like they did in Australia. They could show wildfire news for free right now and choose not to.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    They didn’t have to pay to link — they had to pay to publish. As in, links are fine, adding a summary based on the content of that link is not.

    That said, C18 was definitely a bad idea, and Meta spun it to their advantage.

    Considering the undue influence Meta had over WHICH news people saw, I think Meta made the right choice.

    And Twitter X - shame on them for requiring login to search for emergency hashtags. But nobody’s talking about that one.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    From the text of the bill: https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-assent

    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.

    (b) sounds like just linking or indexing it would count as making it available, and thus require payment.

    That seems to be backed up by at least a couple of the news sites: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-bill-c18-online-news-law-explained/

    What is Bill C-18? Bill C-18 is legislation that would force tech companies such as Google and Meta to negotiate compensation deals with news organizations for posting or linking to their work.

    https://ottawacitizen.com/news/politics/online-streaming-news-bills-whats-next

    At the Heritage committee, Liberal MPs resisted efforts from the Conservatives to take links out of the bill [...]

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  • [–] 21 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    They told Meta that they had to pay to so much as host links to news sites on their platforms.

    ie they had to pay to literally direct users to news sites, where news sites would make money off advertising to them, allowing the news sites to double dip. If anyone's got good PR, it's the news sites (would you believe it, the news sites have good connections with the press?)

    There were ways to stop Meta from scraping news sites, but they decided to effectively stop them from even sharing news. They could've stopped the bill at purely "reproducing" news, but no, they got greedy and decided to make them pay for the privilege to give news sites free advertising. Why on earth would Meta agree to that, and why is it surprising that they just turned around and said no?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    Also to be extra extra super clear, the news sites ALWAYS has control over the view of snippets and previews and indexing via HTML headers, HTTP headers, and robots.txt. They're just pretending they didn't have full control over how that was displayed.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    I seriously do not understand where this idea of "profiting off someone else's work" even comes from. I am on Meta's side here 100%.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I didn't pay much attention when this was happening. Are there size requirements or something? How does lemmy.ca or sh.itjust.works avoid paying?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    There's no set size but there needs to be an imbalance of power:

    https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-assent

    Application 6 This Act applies in respect of a digital news intermediary if, having regard to the following factors, there is a significant bargaining power imbalance between its operator and news businesses:

    (a) the size of the intermediary or the operator;

    (b) whether the market for the intermediary gives the operator a strategic advantage over news businesses; and

    (c) whether the intermediary occupies a prominent market position.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago*

    I hate meta and I actually went out of my way to get my family and friends off of their platforms, but in this case I don't think they're in the wrong. Even if we roll with the logic that they should be paying for these links, then what is wrong with them deciding to not profit off of the links now by not showing them? Isn't that the right thing to do?

    It seems to me the news agencies and the Canadian government just wants extra revenue, and when their plan didn't go as expected they're now just crying and bit**ing about facing consequences of their actions.

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