Canada demands Meta lift news ban to allow wildfire info sharing

Even on the fediverse the articles are sctaped and pasted. Or bot summarized.

Both significantly reduce the likelihood I click through.

And that's forgetting the significant demo that's trying to stay ad-free.

There ARE other downsides to this law, outside of the hissy fit Facebook is throwing.

For example, smaller independent news companies don't have the bargaining power to come to a fair agreement with Facebook, like the larger organizations can. A solution to that might be to have some standard rates set up, but again, don't know enough about it

If people aren't clicking through to read the details, the investigative journalism no matter how good is ineffective. So if the summarization one or two sentences is enough for most people then they don't need more in-depth reporting

Well, I think the government at the core has a small point, network effects drive these sites, and the news being there draws people to them, which draws news to be there. But they frame it as one sided, and the fact is the news benefits from being on Facebook way more than Facebook benefits from people sharing news. People are on Facebook, the news is irrelevant if people can't share it with each other in their lives, but Facebook doesnt become irrelevant without it. The government stepped out of line here and are doing anything and everything in their power to avoid admitting it, even resorting to propaganda. This is a shakedown for a failing industry that the government needs to continue to exist for it to control public narrative, that's tye long and short of it.

Personally I'm of the opinion that all news is propaganda, and so I consume none of it. The fact that every news organization is parroting the government line about Facebook being a meanie and blocking the news tells me who controls the news and/or where power lies. If something's important enough for me to need to know it, someone in my life will tell me. So I'd disagree with you that this needs a solution.

I do like your other long term solution, I don't use Facebook either.