Canada demands Meta lift news ban to allow wildfire info sharing

Canada should run it's own official mastodon or lemmy instance to post canadian news/communications and whatnot. I never undestood how we still depend on American corporations like Twitter and facebook to share news. Like, even for my local govt, if I want to know if there is any road works, water issues and so on, it ends up on facebook only! This is dumb.

As much as I love clowning on Zuck it's unreasonable to expect foreign companies to act as your nation's means of emergency notifications.

Or, and hear me out here, just don't use Facebook, especially if it doesn't have the features you say you need?

The internet is gigantic, there's so, so, so so many other ways to get and share information.

Lol they didn't "ban" news, they refused to pay to make the news relevant. Canada basically banned news sharing on the internet. They can repeal the stupid law.

This is so ridiculous. It's sad that people need to rely on social media to find "news".

Is CBC that hard to find?

Journalism is so fucked in Canada.

Oh no, I'm facing the consequences of my actions

~Canada

Governments are terrible at legislating in the tech and information space. It almost always results in terrible laws that don't even come close to doing what they intended.

I don't like facebook and i certainly don't give a shit if they lose money but you can't force them to buy news articles and deliver them to non-paying users.

Be me, the Canadian government

Decide that making social media companies pay news organizations to host their links is a good plan that will help struggling news sites.

The social media sites stop hosting links in order to avoid the payments, hurting said struggling news organizations.

Wait they weren't supposed to do that.

Canadians are not able to find out critical information about the wildfires due to your law.

Blame social media companies for being reckless.

Crisis averted.

I'm perfectly fine with shitting on Meta/Facebook/Instagram for gestures broadly at the last 10+ years, but Canada instituted a link tax for news. They added a fee to a fundamental part of the Internet: linking to something. I can't blame Meta for refusing to play that game.

Seems pretty straightforward, if Canada wants some news to be spread via Facebook, they could create a legislative niche that when a national emergency is declared, links to news will not be taxed.

Or they could have a clearing house of certain links that don't get taxed.

Facebook's responding to market incentives, as they're supposed to do. So you apply a tax and Facebook's opting out of the tax as is allowed by the law. You can't then force them to do the voluntary thing to pay the tax.

Governments often apply the same logic to things they don't want people to do. Like smoking. The sin attached to smoking is deliberately and clearly created to keep people from smoking. This is exactly the same as the government putting a 2000% tax on cigarettes and then complaining people aren't smoking anymore.

play stupid games, win stupid prizes

This administration writes legislation like kindergarten students.

Oh no. The leopards are eating their face. Someone do something. Help.

Lmaoooooo that took all of a month.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

OTTAWA, Aug 18 (Reuters) - The Canadian government on Friday demanded that Meta (META.O) lift a "reckless" ban on domestic news from its platforms to allow people to share information about wildfires in the west of the country.

Some people fleeing wildfires in the remote northern town of Yellowknife have complained to domestic media that the ban prevented them from sharing important data about the fires.

"Meta's reckless choice to block news ... is hurting access to vital information on Facebook and Instagram," Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge said in a social media post.

Chris Bittle, a legislator for the ruling Liberal Party, complained on Thursday that "Meta's actions to block news are reckless and irresponsible."

In response, a Meta spokesperson said by email that the company had activated the "Safety Check" feature on Facebook that allows users to spread the word that they are safe in the wake of a natural disaster or a crisis.

Canadians can use Facebook and Instagram to access content from official government agencies, emergency services and non-governmental organizations, the spokesperson added.

The original article contains 314 words, the summary contains 176 words. Saved 44%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Canada, it's called parasitising a symbiotic relationship. Evolution tries this from time to time. Now we see if your law is fit to survive.

I have no idea which side has better arguments for doing what they do, but this is like Mega-tech/Zuck doing this: