Crazy thought, wild idea, hear me out…
What if people stopped getting their news from Facebook
Only people who are mad are the lazy people who seriously cant be assed to actually read the news and want it spoon fed to them in the form of clickbait headlines shared by anti-vax aunt suzy
This is the best possible outcome. The less misinformation coming from meta the better.
I would like to think so, but wouldn’t this just make those who rely on facebook for news only hear from Jim the pogo anarchist and his constant rants about how the Jovian lizards are making everybody stupid drones with their vaxx rays?
I agree completely. Warning for democracy is total click bait, so long as we all make the bare minimum effort to find news elsewhere; its really not that hard for most people.
It’s not us that I’m worried about
Is getting news from Facebook any different from getting news from reddit? Does reddit need to pay the same tax?
Not yet, but probably. Meta makes money hands over fist, so the government and their friends in the media were hoping to pump them for cash first. They’ll keep looking around for new sources of cash and their attention might eventually land on Reddit.
It sounds like any link aggregator could be cut off from posting Canadian news links
This. Good riddance, I say
Create a law that singles out specific players in a monopoly to pay other players in a falling monopoly (look who owns nearly all news media in Canada).
Make the law NOT about summarizing and ad funding but about linking which is fundamental to how the internet works and how all sites get found.
Facebook / Google links to Canadian news isn’t valuable enough to them for the hassle so they turn them off, it really was the expected outcome.
I’m no big fan of the tech monopolies but this whole Liberal thing has been so fucking Liberal, it’s like a parable.
I am no fan of Meta.
But…
This is maybe 10% meta’s fault, but 90% the government’s.
The law they passed was completely ridiculous in that it would force meta and others to pay Canadian news companies for each link posted. A concept that anyone with an understanding of either the internet or economics could have told you would lead to the situation we are in now.
Any business would react the same way and the have publicly been saying this is what they would do since the law was in the planning/proposal phase. Experts have likewise predicted this. But the government here seemed to think that nobody would dare defy the ‘mighty’ Canadian government. The fact is we have a smaller population than California alone, and it’s not worth it for meta or other companies to comply with this law.
It’s almost like the feds here watched the “Canada wants some of that internet money” episode of South Park and thought “great idea!!”
But it’s not what happened in Australia when they did this. So saying it is the expected outcome after the fact fact is a little easy.
Australia went through a similar thing. Facebook got what they wanted after a few days.
They didn’t cave Facebook reached an agreement with the News outlets. It says to a total of 200 million AUD to various news outlets. And Facebooks problem with the bill is there was no limit to how much they could pay.
The money would go to the news companies, NOT the government.
It’s like, 0% metas fault (and it’s not even that I’m not a fan… I viscerally hate them as a company. I do not have a Facebook account)
They’re a company and they’re obligated to maximize the return on investment of their shareholders. That’s it. Full stop.
They crunched the numbers and the cost of compensating for the links outweighs the value of the links. They are obligated to make this decision.
Western governments are absolutely reaping what they’ve sown. Pathetic anti-trust enforcement and the evisceration of ACTUAL public services (who are instead of shareholders, are obligated to serve the public interest) have put us here.
In a healthy country, “Meta no longer posting news links” would be met with a “so what?”. The fact that anyone gives a shit is evidence of a failure of the government to protect the social infrastructure of this nation.
And, it’s not the just the liberals fault. They’re just the ones still standing when the music stopped.
Boycott Zuckerberg. Boycott Billionaires.
The most watched/heard Canadian media has a number of billionaires behind it, though. By extension, we should boycott the biggest corporate media conglomerates as well.
One single anti-democracy RW US billionaire having control over what Canadians see is unacceptable. Do whatever else you want.
How exactly did our democracy manage, between 1867 and whenever the fuck Facebook came by?
If you can’t find the news without an algorithm you won’t understand it anyway and I don’t mind if don’t take part in any elections.
There’s been too many articles about how bad it is that Meta and Google are going to stop carrying news, and not nearly enough on how to find news without Meta and Google. And, really, C-18 kind of disincentivizes news sites bringing up alternatives since the point was to get news sites paid, and Meta’s and Google’s competitors won’t have to pay them.
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