Crazy thought, wild idea, hear me out…
What if people stopped getting their news from Facebook
Only people who are mad are the lazy people who seriously cant be assed to actually read the news and want it spoon fed to them in the form of clickbait headlines shared by anti-vax aunt suzy
This is the best possible outcome. The less misinformation coming from meta the better.
I agree completely. Warning for democracy is total click bait, so long as we all make the bare minimum effort to find news elsewhere; its really not that hard for most people.
Is getting news from Facebook any different from getting news from reddit? Does reddit need to pay the same tax?
Facebook et al want the advertising dollars without any of the costs of reportage. This is a ham-fisted attempt to rectify the situation. I’m fine with it.
The government should up the ante by making Facebook “publishers” under the law. Make them responsible for all of the libel, slander and defamation posted to their sites. Make them responsible for their lack of moderation, and the fallout it’s been causing.
Yeah and so do the companies that are lining up at the feeding trough. Look at the pathetic state of the Canadian newspaper and TV news empires. They shouldn’t be entitled to advertising dollars if they don’t have a sufficiently enticing product to sell to advertisers.
Plenty of small-scale and digital independent news companies were doing fine. It’s the Postmedias and the Torstars that are complaining, as they cannibalize journalism to feed their corporate acquisitions and stock buybacks.
Create a law that singles out specific players in a monopoly to pay other players in a falling monopoly (look who owns nearly all news media in Canada).
Make the law NOT about summarizing and ad funding but about linking which is fundamental to how the internet works and how all sites get found.
Facebook / Google links to Canadian news isn’t valuable enough to them for the hassle so they turn them off, it really was the expected outcome.
Boycott Zuckerberg. Boycott Billionaires.
The most watched/heard Canadian media has a number of billionaires behind it, though. By extension, we should boycott the biggest corporate media conglomerates as well.
I am no fan of Meta.
But…
This is maybe 10% meta’s fault, but 90% the government’s.
The law they passed was completely ridiculous in that it would force meta and others to pay Canadian news companies for each link posted. A concept that anyone with an understanding of either the internet or economics could have told you would lead to the situation we are in now.
Any business would react the same way and the have publicly been saying this is what they would do since the law was in the planning/proposal phase. Experts have likewise predicted this. But the government here seemed to think that nobody would dare defy the ‘mighty’ Canadian government. The fact is we have a smaller population than California alone, and it’s not worth it for meta or other companies to comply with this law.
It’s almost like the feds here watched the “Canada wants some of that internet money” episode of South Park and thought “great idea!!”
Reminder that Canadian media actually lobbied for this. They spent like two years calling Zuckerberg a thief for displaying news articles on Facebook.
This isn’t the result of the government just doing a random thing. They did what they were asked to do by the media outlets.
The media outlets aren’t going to get what they want, but this still seems like a potentially good thing for users. After all, it’s not just Canadian media sites that are being black listed.
Agreed! The media in Canada asked for this, expecting a big payday and now they are getting screwed (fewer eyeballs means less money from advertising) with themselves to blame.
Indeed. The world is rife with situations where people go “I don’t care if it makes sense, I just want money” and this was clearly one of them.
If news companies want to make money off of the content they’ve posted, it behooves them to find ways to do that themselves. Paywall it, put advertising on it, use it as a loss leader for other paid services. Putting it up on a billboard and then running around demanding cash from anyone that looks at it is just dumb. I fully support telling them no.
Sensational news articles like this are also expected in the fallout. Most news companies in Canada lobbied for the change and simply hoped that big players would cave right away. But now that Meta and Alphabet have announced that they’ll block news in Canada (a predictable response), news companies are realizing the impact it’ll actually have on them and the amount of lossed revenue it’ll entail if things don’t work out the way the want them to. They’re basically crapping their pants and writing up these types of headlines to pressure Meta/Alphabet as a last-ditch effort.
It’s like, 0% metas fault (and it’s not even that I’m not a fan… I viscerally hate them as a company. I do not have a Facebook account)
They’re a company and they’re obligated to maximize the return on investment of their shareholders. That’s it. Full stop.
They crunched the numbers and the cost of compensating for the links outweighs the value of the links. They are obligated to make this decision.
Western governments are absolutely reaping what they’ve sown. Pathetic anti-trust enforcement and the evisceration of ACTUAL public services (who are instead of shareholders, are obligated to serve the public interest) have put us here.
In a healthy country, “Meta no longer posting news links” would be met with a “so what?”. The fact that anyone gives a shit is evidence of a failure of the government to protect the social infrastructure of this nation.
And, it’s not the just the liberals fault. They’re just the ones still standing when the music stopped.
Australia went through a similar thing. Facebook got what they wanted after a few days.
