The Canadian government on Friday demanded that Meta lift a “reckless” ban on domestic news from its platforms to allow people to share information about wildfires in the west of the country.
Meta started blocking news on its Facebook and Instagram platforms for all users in Canada this month in response to a new law requiring internet giants to pay for news articles.
Look, I hate Facebook as much as the next guy but you have to admit, Canada doesn’t have much to bitch about. They did this to themselves.
Facebook doesn’t want to pay for news articles so they decided not to have news at all. ¯\(ツ)/¯
The entire premise of a link tax is batshit insane. It’s not mediocre. It’s not “I can see where they’re coming from”. It completely and irreparably breaks the internet.
The previews are exactly what sites ask for them to show. You don’t get to tell them “please show this content” then accuse them of stealing content.
Sounds like Canada should be working in effective ways to communicate with its citizens that doesn’t rely on Facebook
I mean it’s a tough situation. If users want to dive deep into their bubble and ignore everything else, you’d pretty much have to set up Amber Alert style phone alarms or something. How well would that go over?
You could have just not punished them for allowing users to use the “share on Facebook” link the news sites put below every article?
Fuck Facebook. They’re a disgusting excuse for a company that’s in the wrong on basically everything else they’ve ever done. But they aren’t even a shred of wrong on this.
Those people need to pull their head out.
It should be on the government to post this information on a public government website. It should be on the people to go read it.
I do believe governments should be looking at alternative alerting options though. They should take the recent API rate hikes by Twitter as a bright red warning that they should never have relied on private companies like this for important alerts.
I was initially thinking that our government could just start up a Lemmy instance but then I remembered how awful our current software infrastructure is
like it’s not the worst but definitely far from the best available
I dunno, maybe it’s worth trying anyways as it could kickstart a recursive update on everything else🤔¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Around, they fucked. Out, they now find.
FB should ask money from the Canadian govt.