Canadians will no longer have access to news content on Facebook and Instagram, Meta says
Canadians will no longer have access to news content on Facebook and Instagram, Meta says
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77 comments
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Good. This law is ridiculous and I'm glad it won't give the result they intended. Being able to link to things freely is a very basic part of the web, we really shouldn't mess with that. And Facebook is a ridiculous place to get news from so it may have ancillary benefits as well in terms of maybe slightly improving public discourse and encouraging people onto other platforms with more transparency around their content weighting and data use practices.
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That's hopeful. The only thing I see coming from this is no actual news being linked and the woo to spread exponentially faster.
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Oof. Ya.
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Given what's going on with WhatsApp in India I think this will be the case.
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How is it ridiculous to ask them to share some of the profit they make from Canadian work with Canada?
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It's not, that's why I didn't say that.
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You said the law is ridiculous
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I did, because it tries to regulate merely linking to content, something I consider absurd. What I did not say is that it is "ridiculous to ask them to share some of the profit they make from Canadian work with Canada". So I responded as such. I'm not terribly interested in engaging with someone who puts words in my mouth. If you're curious for more of my thoughts on this topic, I intend to respond to the interesting comment by @StaggersAndJags@kbin.social when I have time to be more thoughtful.
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That's exactly what this law does, it makes them obligated to pay taxes to the government to compensate Canadian news agencies because they make profit off of them.
https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-charte/c18_1.html
"Overview Many Canadians access news content through digital intermediaries. Bill C-18 would enact the Online News Act (the Act), which proposes a regime to regulate digital platforms that act as intermediaries in Canada’s news media ecosystem in order to enhance fairness in the Canadian digital news market. The Bill introduces a new bargaining framework intended to support news businesses to secure fair compensation when their news content is made available by dominant digital news intermediaries and generates economic gain."
So, again, how is it unfair to compensate the people whose work you profit from?
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Does your employer pay you by paying taxes and then government distributes them to you? If there was a real business here, then an arrangement would be made between Facebook and these news organizations. Facebook wouldn't want to lose out on the profit so they'd pay news agencies for the content. But the truth this, the news agencies are profiting far more than Facebook is from this arrangement. They literally need the government to step in because there is no actual business here.
The news agencies can absolutely pull out of Facebook. They can opt out of summaries and photos. But they don't.
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Eh...
Universal healthcare, roads, free education...
My employer pays taxes and I profit from it.
You think an arrangement could be made by individual news agencies where the freaking government couldn't? Meta would have just blocked them one by one instead of all at once.
News agencies don't profit because people don't click and they actually lose profit because these companies are responsible for people losing faith in traditional media by intentionally pushing disinformation because fear and hate increases engagement and they don't care about the consequences.
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My employer pays taxes and I profit from it.
That's not what I mean and you know it. Your employer pays you directly for your services because it's a benefit to them. Which is basically how all commerce works.
You think an arrangement could be made by individual news agencies where the freaking government couldn’t?
No. I think the government has to force this business arrangement because it's completely backwards. Media companies benefit from linking (they'd literally have no traffic if they didn't) and they're trying to extract some value where none exists.
News agencies don’t profit because people don’t click
And stores won't profit if people don't buy stuff. And streaming services don't profit if nobody subscribes. That's life. If, as a media company, you've giving up all your value by providing summaries and images then that's your problem. If Tim Hortons can't sell any donuts because they give out a free Timbit and a shot of coffee, it is not for the government to fix that. They should just stop doing it.
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So Meta would pay for the service media companies provide then, glad we agree, don't know why you're arguing then.
The government is forcing the arrangement, the companies decided to just pull out if they had to pay their fair share.
Media companies lost traffic because of social media but they bring traffic to social media. If they don't provide summaries or images then they won't get promoted. See what's happening? You're arguing in favor of letting US private companies control the financing and promotion of Canadian media.
You realise you're defending companies that together make trillions yet pay next to nothing in taxes in their own country (and pay nothing in Canada)?
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So Meta would pay for the service media companies provide then, glad we agree, don’t know why you’re arguing then.
Media companies should pay Meta for the service they provide. It's literally advertising. Media companies post this material themselves. But if media companies are providing a service that's worth paying for then they should simply withhold that service until Meta pays. That's how the free market works. Tim Hortons doesn't give out free donuts and then go to the government and force you to pay for them if you take one. No, you just buy the damn donut if it's worth buying.
The government is forcing the arrangement, the companies decided to just pull out if they had to pay their fair share.
If Meta benefited from this arrangement they'd pay. Is Lemmy also morally responsible to pay media companies because there is a link to this article with a summary?
Media companies lost traffic because of social media but they bring traffic to social media.
Media companies lost traffic because the Internet invalidates their business model. Linking is the only thing they have left -- they should be thankful for it.
You realise you’re defending companies that together make trillions yet pay next to nothing in taxes in their own country (and pay nothing in Canada)?
Just because someone is an asshole doesn't mean they're entitled to less justice. If something is wrong, it's wrong for everyone.
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The amount of traffic they drive to the news sites is payment enough.
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It doesn't drive traffic to the news site though, people check the summary and move on to the next thing on their wall.
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If it doesn't drive traffic then the news sites shouldn't at all be worried about sites not linking to them anymore.
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Well I haven't seen any media complaining about it. You realise they're just reporting a fact in that article?
Maybe if people actually read the articles more they would know the difference between reporting and giving an opinion 🤔 I wonder what happened for people to just start reading summaries and titles and not understand what news are... Ooooooh...
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It doesn't, though. Facebook is grabbing more and more of the content making it less and less necessary to actually go to the news site. As a result, Facebook gets to profit from ads instead of the news site.
This is a well-intentioned but horrible law. There are a couple of things they could do instead.
Ban large scale data collection on end users without the combination of oversight and properly informed consent that happens in medical research. That still allows for some of the things that are actually beneficial to individuals and society while stripping the power to use the data for such frivolous things as ads. Doing micro-targeted ads requires a level of surveillance and data processing that is beyond the means of any company that has anything else as it's core competency. That would put ads back a few decades to when an advertiser did not choose a customer via surveillance, but chose a market based on interest (context ads). This would put the original creators and publishers of content back in charge. This would have the added benefit of increasing privacy online.
They could ban any practice that interferes with the end-to-end principal of communications. This is the principal that says "the stuff I specifically request is the stuff that is most visible." Right now, Facebook et al are poisoning feeds with "pay to promote" crap so extensively that I'm likely to see something from a bunch of right wing nut jobs at the top of my feed instead of the Marxist outlet I've actually subscribed to. Worse, I might never see the people and organizations that I explicitly follow unless those people and organizations pay up. That could have the side effect of pouring water on the dumpster fire that passes for discourse, because fringe movements would have to actually gain traction through the quality of their ideas and arguments instead of by just throwing money around.
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We're they linking or showing full content within Facebook?
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To my understanding the bill is about payment for links.
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77 comments