The NWT government and city of Yellowknife are describing in tweets, Instagram messages etc. how to search key evacuation information on CPAC and CBC. The broadcast carriers have a duty to carry emergency information, but Meta and X are blocking links.
While internet access is reportedly limited in Yellowknife, residents are finding this a barrier to getting current and accurate information. Even links to CBC radio are blocked.
Don’t let people post links to Canadian news unless you’ve paid the publisher.
No, not like that!
Like what?
Meta and X are acting preemptively before the government has even finalized how the system would work.
The law hasn’t even come into force. The regulations haven’t even been Gazetted and put through the public consultation period.
Meta and X feel that they shouldn’t be subject to the law of any other country. That’s what’s at the foundation of this.
Meta and X are acting preemptively before the government has even finalized how the system would work.
Stands to reason. If Canadians were creating laws around homicide for the first time, but the exact details weren’t yet known, are you going to go around killing people while you still can, or are you going to respect the intent to the best of your ability knowing that Canadians do not want to be killed?
Logically, the latter, of course. Even if you don’t quite get it right with respect to the final details, trying to respect the wishes is clearly better than ignoring them.
Meta and X feel that they shouldn’t be subject to the law of any other country.
And they are no doubt right. There are cases where they have ignored Canadian court decisions around individuals without any consequences. And if that were the only thing of relevance, they could simply ignore this whole ordeal.
Trouble is that, when it comes to the mass user base, they need to appease the people of those countries, else they will leave. Facebook doesn’t have a compelling business if they can only win over product and customers from one country. Its value is dependent on serving the entire world.
It is not like the people of Canada went to all the trouble of bringing this legislation to the table because they wanted to play a prank on Musk. They are serious about it. If Facebook showed that it didn’t care the users would get pissed off and walk away.
You can screw around with individuals without noticing, but in this case Canadians as a whole called for action. Losing all Canadian users would be a significant loss to their business. Facebook had to do something. Going on killing for months until the details come out, even if technically allowable, is not a good look.
Demonstrating what your response will be before the law goes into force seems like a good idea to me - the cost to Facebook is minimal and if people are going to change their minds, the earlier they do the easier it’ll be to return to the status quo.
There’s nothing above-the-law about this. The law sets the terms which Facebook must comply with if it wants to do business in Canada, but the law can’t make Facebook keep doing business in Canada.
But Facebook is doing business in Canada while refusing to be subject to Canadian law or courts while doing it.
It’s platforms are up in Canada, recruiting members, collecting and monetizing data on Canadians.
There have been court cases and orders in Canada where both Meta and Google have refused to comply with judicial decisions on the grounds that only California and US federal courts have jurisdiction over them.
The law in this case could require Meta, Google and X to carry emergency information and links to it without monetization, just as it does for private broadcasters and cable carriers.
Why is former Twitter even doing that? I thought only G and FB were affected, as it was based on company size. Supposedly Twitter is (still) not profitable, even.
Should they? Not if we punish them with fees for linking. I mean, imagine you’re trying to warn your neighbours about an approaching fire and a police officer pulls up to tell you that you’ll have to pay $50 for each neighbour you warn. I wouldn’t blame you if you stopped, I’d blame whatever law stopped you. Similarly here, I don’t blame Meta for not linking but I blame the government that will penalize Meta the moment any link points to a news outlet, emergency or not.
This is a bad take. I’m blaming Facebook for deciding they’d rather not have news than share the money they make off it with the people who need to be paid to make it.
I’m not engaging with this. Obviously facebook is monetized. I’m not gonna sit here and explain how advertising and the sale of your data makes a company revenue.
While paying 0$ in taxes on the profit they make off of Canadians, don’t forget to add that part!
@Kecessa @ram
So tax them!
C-18 is the absolute WRONG way to extract revenue. It hurts Canadians as well as smaller Canadian news and content providers.
The CBC and our oligopoly of mainstream news are pushing C-18 to cement their own status, not help Canadians to be better informed.
It’s not Meta and Alphabet’s fault that our media can’t monetize their content once people get to their sites. Taxing links is not the answer and the consequences are obvious.
The tax and the legislation is at least a half a year from coming into force, the regulatory framework to operationalize it hasn’t even been published for public consultation.
Meta has started blocking preemptively. This is a power play protest about avoiding being subject to other countries’ law. That’s it.
While I’m sure there are some messaging aspects to doing it early, it’s worth pointing out that by January, unless the government repeals the law, Meta will be penalized for allowing links during emergencies. This specific law comes into operation regardless of whether the government has published any framework or not.
This is a power play protest about avoiding being subject to other countries’ law.
Meta is complying with this law. The idea behind the law was that Meta was stealing ad revenue from news organizations by linking to them, and that if they wanted to continue linking to them they needed to compensate news organizations. Meta has thus stopped ‘stealing’ the ad revenue. That’s complying with the law. It did exactly what it was expected to do, in the same way that when you tax cigarettes you expect some people to cut back on smoking. Even better, Meta stopped ‘stealing’ before the law even came into force!
Seriously it’s like there’s nothing they can do to satisfy their critics - they get accused of stealing news so they stop it, and then they get accused of harming news sites by not stealing.
Which is it? Is Meta beneficial to news organizations or harmful to them? If harmful then there’s no problem with Meta blocking news links. If beneficial, then maybe this is a dumb law that’s akin to the government putting a tax on exercising.
Perhaps we’d do better to look at the text of Bill C-18.
You seem to be saying that the law itself has already laid out that Meta is who it applies to.
Instead, it says that a list needs to be established.
List of digital news intermediaries 8 (1) The Commission must maintain a list of digital news intermediaries in respect of which this Act applies. The list must set out each intermediary’s operator and contact information for that operator and specify whether an order made under subsection 11(1) or 12(1) applies in relation to the intermediary.
Meta clearly sees that the law is intended to apply to digital platforms with significant market power such as it has. But it has not yet been designated.
Timing - coming into force - you are correct that there is a hard deadline at end of year.
180 days after royal assent (6) Despite subsections (1) to (5), any provision of this Act that does not come into force by order before the 180th day following the day on which this Act receives royal assent comes into force 180 days after the day on which this Act receives royal assent.
Basically, you are justifying Meta’s actions on the basis that it recognizes that a law it doesn’t like will apply to it in future.
They could have put on their big boy pants and done like Alphabet and send someone to talk to the government to negotiate with them so the law wouldn’t affect them… But Zuck is Zuck and he preferred to “make an example of Canada” and people are defending them for some reason…
CBC is grasping at straws trying to put the blame on Facebook for the very bill they pushed through, that had very predictable consequences. Canadians news publishers have no one to blame for this but themselves.
The article basically reads as though they’re upset for not being paid by Meta during emergencies and sad they can’t profit as much off people glued to watching emergencies (it’s absolutely not because they’re truly concerned for the actual ppl facing the emergency). It’s quite tasteless for them to pull the misinformation card when news publishers aren’t always known to spread accurate or helpful information – they’re mostly there for the fear mongering. And Meta’s response on that front is the correct one: they’re not blocking government sites and government sites should be considered the sources of truth and information during emergencies.
That said, unrelated to news link sharing, there’s a larger discussion to be had around emergency broadcasts over the internet: should the government create legislation to have an emergency notification tool in place that can be triggered on Canadian websites and websites catering to Canadians (social media included)? Many institutions, including universities, have their own systems for doing exactly this so why can’t the government?
Facebook’s response was petulant and childish. This is not Canada’s fault any more than it was the fault of other countries who enacted the same regs.
Oh. You didn’t know there were others?
There’s only one country with even a remotely similar legislation, that being Australia. Facebook got the amendments it wanted before the Australian Code received royal assent.
If you’re going to cry foul about how Facebook is following the legislation Canada is putting in place, you’ll need to try harder than that.
The legislation isn’t even in place yet, and FB are acting like Trudeau just nut punched Zuckerburg.
FB didn’t want to talk. If they did, they would say they are in talks.
What FB wanted, was to be a bully and have the law repealed. Not have it adjusted.
“More than ever, this kind of dangerous situation shows how having more access to trustworthy and reliable information and news is vital for so many of our communities to be informed about the current emergency.”
Facebook isn’t trustworthy. Tech bros can’t be trusted.
It’s not like the internet has been removed. Social media isn’t the internet. News sites are still accessible. As is the whole internet. People need to get their head out of their asses already. This problem is farcical. Life threatening situation, ‘oh no my facebook is broken what will I do?!?11’. How did we even get to this point. The internet circa 90s and early 2000s is laughing their asses off at all this. PEBKAC.
The real issue is whether these apps should carry emergency alerts and information
Should they? Absolutely. Should they be forced to? I don’t think so.
But, it seems like an easy gesture of goodwill to do it, if there’s a system in place for it.
It’s more than time that we show these private platforms that they can’t act however they want if they want to do business in our country without paying a cent of taxes on the profit they make here. Yes they should be forced to pay by our rules or face the prospect of being outright banned in Canada.
We made the rules, and now they’re playing by them. You can force them to pay for news links, but you can’t force them to display news links and make them pay for them.
So they shouldn’t compensate the people whose work brings them profit? Know what we call that in the physical world?
Stealing.
If the government is willing to make an exception for emergency news, that Meta proved they’re able to do it in Australia and even told the Canadian government it’s something they could do, then who’s in the wrong here?
So Lemmy instance admins should be paying for all the links on their sites too?
Whose work is bringing who profit?
The cruel reality is that the Canadian media need Facebook more than Facebook needs Canadian media.
Journalists and media company produce content, journalists are paid by media company that profit from their work and pay taxes on that profit.
Facebook is used to share content from media companies and make profit from it, they don’t compensate media companies or pay taxes in Canada.
Media companies receive a small bump in traffic compared to the total number of views, they get a small bump in profit from ads revenues on their website and they pay taxes on it.
In the end the majority of revenues generated from views on Facebook doesn’t profit the content creators/owners in any way nor does it profit the country in which the owners are established.
So you need me to make it even simpler than that? You’re arguing that medias should settle for the scraps when Facebook is feasting by exploiting their work.
