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It’s weird to be cheering on Facebook, but good for them for standing up to this gross (and incompetent) political corruption. Our governments are constantly l

It’s weird to be cheering on Facebook, but good for them for standing up to this gross (and incompetent) political corruption. Our governments are constantly looking for new ways to shovel money to the big telecom companies (and to protect them from competition), and it needs to be meet more resistance. For those not aware, the PBO analysis showed that the primary beneficiaries of this bill were to be Bell, Rogers, Shaw, and some CBC. But even if that were not the case, this bill simply makes no sense, and could do a lot of harm.

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j45 3y ago
In Canada it will mean news from other places, including the US will likely directly or indirectly influence those feeds. UGC (User Generated Content) could remain commentary about these news articles when shared in, but it would require consumers to become creators.
- loeg 3y ago
  The article states explicitly that news sources from the US would also be blocked.
  - j45 3y ago
    Yes it does. But will Buzzfeed type commentary choosing to interpret an interpretation and present it as facts about the articles also be blocked? I remember a facebook before any articles was posted there. News articles were brought in explicitly to get the news crowd there, and keep them engaged. I wonder how federated news delivery could work - anyone use anything like this.
ysavir 3y ago
Are we cheering on Facebook? It feels like a situation where all the foul players--the platforms, the government, and the media--are all losing. The article author tries to say "Individual Canadians who use the platforms to find links to news are losers since news links will be blocked from the platform" but doesn't actually support that with a reason as to why that's a loss. Feels like a win to individual Canadians to me, even if some are upset at their inability to easily and immediately share clickbait and ragebait articles. I think those are the people we're really cheering on.
- gspencley 3y ago
  > Feels like a win to individual Canadians to me, even if some are upset at their inability to easily and immediately share clickbait and ragebait articles. I think those are the people we're really cheering on. This is a very naive view of what's going on or the impact. I don't like reading clickbait or ragebait articles that people share. If connections of mine do that on social media too often I usually mute them. I also don't "get" my news "from" Facebook. As in, if Facebook were to try and suggest news articles to me I would find that very annoying. I use FB Purity to give myself a very sanitized news feed that is configured to my liking. And yet this ridiculous bill that literally no one in Canada asked for is impacting me. How? Because I follow a local independent news outlet that posts stuff about my area that actually matters to me. These are NOT articles that people share and they are NOT shit that Facebook is shoving my face. I CHOSE to click "Follow" on the FB Page for that news outlet so that I could find out about things like weather alerts, crime in my area and local events. That page is now gone from Facebook. What is INSANE to me is that this doesn't even seem like a case of Facebook distributing that news. It was that local news outlet that chose to create a Facebook page and create those links themselves in order to distribute their content on Facebook voluntarily. Yet that still, for some fucked up reason, falls under this insane law that no one asked for.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  If the only news is clickbait and ragebait then Facebook is in the right. If the news is good then the Canadian government is in the wrong.
pseudotrash 3y ago
[flagged]
- lolinder 3y ago
  > not distributing outrage clickbait to boomers Meta comment in the interest of improving discussion in the future: this is why you're getting downvotes. I've seen plenty of comments that include everything else you said and get upvoted to the top, but casual negative stereotyping of whole generations doesn't play as well on HN as it does on other platforms.
  - pseudotrash 3y ago
    Interesting for me to reflect on this because I'm in that age group and most of my environment is too and they are absolutely my target of this comment. While I have skin in the game holding this position I wonder if those downvoting do too. How many friends did you lose to social media dividing you harder than I ever could, and who do you direct that anger to. :) never mind fake internet points or moron writers that optimizes content for likes or whatever their audience wants to hear. Schopenhauer and Taleb have already written plenty on the subject.
    - simple-thoughts 3y ago
      If you’re abandoning your friends because of political differences, you’re part of the problem. Picking fights with people because you don’t agree with them doesn’t change any minds and does make the world a little worse. Also, your beliefs may not be rooted in fact as much as you’d like or you might be more confident in your truth to win in its own.
      - zlg_codes 3y ago
        [flagged]
flangola7 3y ago
Who is cheering on Facebook here? Facebook needs content to survive, as it does not produce anything itself. News agencies have THEIR content posted on Facebook, giving it value, not the other way around.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- gruez 3y ago
  >News agencies have THEIR content posted on Facebook, giving it value, not the other way around. The relevant legislation isn't just taxing the platforms for "content", it's taxing the platforms for merely linking to the content.
- ncann 3y ago
  Google and FB can easily drive 30%+ of a news site's traffic. If that's not value to a news site I don't know what is.
  - rvnx 3y ago
    News agencies and websites have their content reproduced on Google Search and News. That's massive value for a search portal.
    - dwaite 3y ago
      Publishers specifically provide that content however, via techniques like open graph. They already can control how much text or what images are displayed in results. They can also indicate they don't want indexing at all. Yet they publish articles with the entire headline and backing images marked for free display on Google/Facebook. Almost like they are trying to help the search engines to attract traffic.
    - warning26 3y ago
      Then ban that, don't ban linking.
DueDilligence 3y ago
[dead]
Waterluvian 3y ago
I don't necessarily think the government is right, but I can't help but feel like it might be a very good thing that people affected by this will have to leave the Facebook garden and seek out news elsewhere. I'm really quite fine with this experiment happening.
- trts 3y ago
  A choice is being imposed on citizens and private companies by the government, for the benefit of organizations that are influential with the establishment. An experiment is when you have a hypothesis about something that could be improved or optimized, test the hypothesis with a subset to find evidence or observe unintended effects of the change, replicate the finding, scale up, or revert depending on the outcomes observed. A national policy by fiat is somewhat the opposite of what I consider an experiment to be.
  - palijer 3y ago
    >for the benefit of organizations that are influential with the establishment. Those organizations, being Canadian news organizations, employing Canadians, and making content for Canadian consumers. Aren't those the sort of organizations that should be able to work with the Canadian government and influence Canadian laws? What sorts of organizations instead of those ones should be able to work with the government here? I think legislation should have outside influence, but I think I'm missing something here, or making the mistake of taking things at face-value.
    - gruez 3y ago
      >Those organizations, being Canadian news organizations, employing Canadians, and making content for Canadian consumers. Aren't those the sort of organizations that should be able to work with the Canadian government and influence Canadian laws? You can make the same argument about local companies lobbying the government to enact tariffs to protect them from foreign competitors. The people being harmed are the same: consumers who end up with a worse product. How about nobody tries to influence the Canadian government to enact laws that distort the marketplace to their advantage?
great_psy 3y ago
A bit off topic, bye does anyone know why those monopolistic companies (bell Rogers) stocks are doing relatively poorly compared to even the US index?
- afterburner 3y ago
  They already control all the market they'll control in Canada, and they won't expand outside Canada. Not a growth story.
bushbaba 3y ago
Disagree. The law ensures there are Canadian media, which can be used to push media to the betterment of Canadians. Many countries have protectionist laws and this isn’t much different.
- varenc 3y ago
  But if Facebook is blocking news links in Canada, it doesn’t seem like the law is having the desired effect.
- chongli 3y ago
  This is protectionist law but it’s not protecting independent media in Canada, it’s protecting big players like PostMedia, Bell, and Rogers. If anything this will just kill off the remaining small media companies in Canada, or force them to be bought up by the big companies.
  - midasuni 3y ago
    Those aren’t big players on a global basis. Canada is concerned its culture is at risk from globalisation, and those concerns are not without merit.
    - VancouverMan 3y ago
      > Canada is concerned its culture is at risk from globalisation, and those concerns are not without merit. I don't think that preserving Canadian culture is a factor in any of this, nor does it seem to be a concern of the current government. These same politicians have been bringing in an absolutely staggering number of foreigners each year for many years now, with most of them from cultures that are extremely dissimilar from, if not outright incompatible with, what was Canadian culture.
    - wesapien 3y ago
      What is Canadian culture?
      - 3y ago
sandworm101 3y ago
>> (and incompetent) political corruption. Hyperbolic and self defeating. If the corruption is incompetent then I guess there isn't much effective corruption. Canada ranks well above even the US on most indexes of corruption. Not liking the current government is a totally different thing than a country being corrupt. Canada=14th, which is nothing to be embarrassed about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
- chrisco255 3y ago
  That is a "perceptions" index. Note corruption is not something which can be reduced to a scalar value and analyzed like temperature or pressure. It's far more multivariate and complex than that. Even if, for the sake of argument, it was possible to do so, you would have to interrogate the methodology used to produce this value. Note the complexity in analyzing corruption by country. How does one investigate in detail, the governments of almost 200 countries? If one relies on survey results from members of those countries, how was the survey consistently conducted across language barriers, cultural barriers, and legal barriers? Finally, even if you believe all of those incredibly dubious factors were accounted for, it could be possible that being 14th in a world that is becoming more corrupt does not mean that Canada is improving in that regard.
- unpopular42 3y ago
  No way! A political index that doesn't actually reflect the reality, has that ever happened?
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  Most of these indices are nonsense and perception based.
- mardifoufs 3y ago
  Typical Canadian response. Who said anything about the US? It's amazing how we can make excuses for everything, as long as we delude ourselves that we somehow have it better than the US.
jacquesm 3y ago
Funny, for once I find myself on the side of Bell, Roger ands Shaw (the CBC was in my good book anyway). That normally wouldn't happen but if FB news feeds are exchanged by those of Bell, Rogers, Shaw and the CBC that could well be a net positive.
ChumpGPT 3y ago
Rogers, Bell and Telus run Canada. It's why Canadians have the highest mobile rates in the world. Trudeau offered to protect them for ever during NAFTA II and let them become Canadian Media Companies protecting them from any competition insuring Canadians will have less choice and higher rates for everything and basically letting Telco's control over all media, etc.
- VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
  Is Canada still going forward with the law that USA streaming companies have to provide at least 30% domestically-sourced Canadian programming? I know EU and Australia did that. I appreciate the resistance to the continued American-ization of their cultures, but let's be honest here. I can only think of Rush, Bieber, and Kids in the Hall. Where is the rest of the 30% going to come from? It's going to be a lot of nonsense filler content that is only there to comply with some law. edit: actually, Apple Music might be able to cover their 30% quota just with Neil Young's discography.
  - nvy 3y ago
    > I can only think of Rush, Bieber, and Kids in the Hall. Don't forget Avril Lavigne, Drake, Gordon Lightfoot, Céline Dion, Joni Mitchell, deadmau5, The Weeknd, and Nelly Furtado. Just off the top of my head. Interestingly enough I'd never heard of Kids in the Hall before today. But all of those are or were "Big Names" in music. We have (protectionist, yes) media regulators (the CRTC) that are nominally arm's length from elected governments so it's not likely to change unless the Canadian public decides that this will become a major election issue. Don't hold your breath.
    - gspencley 3y ago
      > Don't forget ... Céline Dion ... As a Canadian I was actively trying to forget that one. Thanks :( :P
    - philwelch 3y ago
      Yeah, I've always assumed that Canadians were overrepresented in popular culture as a consequence of Canadian content regulations.
epgui 3y ago
Who says anything about corruption? This seems much more likely to be a result of technological incompetence.
firecall 3y ago
They did this in Australia. It all seemed like it was to prop up Murdoch owned media. The Australian Gov must have cut an acceptable deal with Google and Facebook though, as both threatened to do what FB has done in Canada. There are more details to it all, I'm sure. I'd have to go research more as I dont recall them all :-)
- dwaite 3y ago
  > …as both threatened to do what FB has done in Canada Meta has blocked access in Canada, so I wouldn't consider it a threat anymore. You could claim this is a negotiating tactic, but I suspect time alone will not change these policies. Neither Google nor Facebook see significant direct value in having news links on their platform - they don't think they'll have a significant drop in user traffic from users not being able to see a few Canadian news sites.
winddude 3y ago
huh? What? This has nothing to do with telecom.
- jiveturkey 3y ago
  did you even read the post you're replying to? "PBO shows ...". one google search away tells me > The analysis by the PBO, an independent body that provides economic and financial analysis to MPs and senators, concluded that newspapers and online media would get $81,550,000 a year, while broadcasters such as the CBC, Bell, Shaw and Rogers stand to get $247,677,000 if the bill becomes law.
aprdm 3y ago
Why should the government of Canada be on Facebook's team instead of the Canadian Telecom's team?
- tomComb 3y ago
  It shouldn’t be on either of those teams.
  - lucasyvas 3y ago
    Rare case that I'll support the parent of your post - I'd way rather a Canadian company get the upside than a US (foreign) one even if the Canadian ones are a bunch of assholes and an oligopoly. That's our problem to deal with. First keep the money here, then we'll argue how to redistribute it. News is a tricky subject. In theory there are more clicks but sometimes people don't visit the site at all so it's hard to say. If this was about diversifying communications providers I think I would side with you instead. It really depends what it is. I would prefer my domestic companies to be in the strongest position while also allowing outside players - so a mixture. But we are hopelessly on the back leg and need a boost when it comes to funding domestic media. The solution can't be to just outsource everything because there's no way to win against Meta and Google.
teunispeters 3y ago
One of the nice things about Canada is a requirement to be honest within reason, and to always fact check - and handle if things don't match later. For the news source I go to, this means they're pretty reliable and honest - and not so prone to lying or deception. I mean at the end of the day people are people, and different agencies will have some bias, so I check across a bunch. And I avoid anything owned by Rupert Murdoch, as that drives down the quality by a lot. APTN for instance is good, and honestly so is Al Jazeera USA. I've liked CBC, and between the different programs they're pretty good at calling out political bias - especially about their own. (the actual news news on CBC has some center-right bias towards either Liberal or Conservative parties - and will occasionally even air "official lies". Their long form shows on the other hand are much better and will catch out those "official lies". Canada is complicated in its own way).
osigurdson 3y ago
Fully agree. If the electorate can’t manage to get rid of this freedom constraining government in the next election then the country is probably a write off. At least it is hard to imagine how we can recover from another government like this.
- fooster 3y ago
  That hyperbole is just that. Overly dramatic nonsense. If the other parties want to win an election they first must elect a leader who themselves speak to the remainder of Canadians. Which is something they managed to do even more badly this time around.
  - osigurdson 3y ago
    I hope you are right, as I’d rather not pay any attention to politics. What actions would they have to take before you would become less comfortable with the direction of the country is going? Are you fine with what they have done so far?
JacobThreeThree 3y ago
You can include Post Media, TorStar, Quebecor and other media in the list of those lobbying for this. It's part Canadian protectionism and part desperate ploy to prop up a few large failed media business models. Canada has a long history of protectionist measures. The shocking part of the bill is the way it exposes the complete technical incompetence of the government. There are many ways to extract a pound of flesh, implementing your tax in a way that is fundamentally incompatible with the web is inexcusable. It will hurt Canada's efforts to be a tech leader.
onlypositive 3y ago
Governments are for the people by the people. Cheering on Facebook is cheering against your own interests. Companies need to learn that they play in and extract resources from our sandbox. If they want to continue to play in our sandbox, they need to play by our rules. They need to act in a socially responsible way. There are even laws about corporate governance pertaining to this. You don't have to agree with Canada's laws (I don't), but you do need to recognise that they are their laws. Being hostile like this is a good way to make enemies.
- sintaxi 3y ago
  This is verifiably incorrect. Members of the Canadian House of Commons swear their allegiance to the monarch. They make no such oath to the People nor the Constitution in Canada. "I, [name], do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, Her Heirs and Successors. So help me God."
  - onlypositive 3y ago
    chill america
    - sintaxi 3y ago
      I'm Canadian.
- lolinder 3y ago
  [flagged]
matheusmoreira 3y ago
In my country they tried to sneak in similar laws into a "fake news" censorship law. There were provisions to preempt this exact move: it would have made it illegal for social media companies to block the links. I guess Canada's politicians weren't sociopathic enough to think of such a thing.
bparsons 3y ago
The entire Canadian media ecosystem is collapsing. This is a desperate last shot at salvaging a few newspapers. This is a rounding error of a rounding error for Meta. The Canadian media is almost universally right wing. Helping these outlets survive is almost certainly against the governing parties interest.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
I'm cheering on the content producers. https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/meta-instagram-canada-online-news-act-explainer-news-1.6914154 https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/meta-instagram-canada-online...
barbariangrunge 3y ago
The rule is because of American monopolies and oligopolies. To have your news seen at all, you need to use major social media platforms or google. These platforms benefit from the news links, and the news has to fight to compete on those platforms, earning less and less revenue every year because the news is less engaging than flamebait. So the news gradually becomes flamebait to try to garner enough engagement to compete, otherwise the news stops existing, and next thing you know, investigative journalism is almost extinct. This isn’t an ideal solution, it’s basically a subsidy that big tech is supposed to pay for, but there is a massive, massive! power imbalance where the platforms are the only winners, so it’s also not the worst rule ever. I don’t know. The overwhelming power imbalance of oligopoly platforms is a thing, I’m not sure what to do about it. The issue is bigger than just news, and this law only partially addresses one aspect of the situation
- fauigerzigerk 3y ago
  The issue of real journalism having to compete with sensationalist tabloids and clickbait is nothing new though. There was a time before all the blind rage turned against big tech when we actually found it problematic how much political influence media moguls like Murdoch, Berlusconi or Springer had accumulated. Google and Facebook have syphoned off a lot of advertising income from these big publishers and they are leveraging their political clout to make politicians pass laws that have nothing to do with journalism and everything to do with serving the special interests of a few powerful publishers. Yes the fact that too much money stays with Google and Facebook rather than funding serious journalism is a problem. But these laws are not supposed to fix that and they are not fixing it. It's just corruption.
sneak 3y ago
Both sides of this argument are bad. The choices on the menu are "Facebook chooses what links (published by users) to censor" or "the legislature chooses what links (published by users) to censor". The dispute is just which authority decides what you get to share with your friends and contacts - not that you should be allowed to do so freely.
heresie-dabord 3y ago
> the primary beneficiaries of this bill were to be Bell, Rogers, Shaw, and some CBC. Yes, owners and creators of Canadian media content. For Canadians. From TFA: > The Internet platforms are losers as they comply with an unreasonable law by removing links and making their services objectively worse in order to do so. Individual Canadians who use the platforms to find links to news are losers since news links will be blocked from the platform. And the government is a loser, as having dismissed critics and ignored repeated warnings about the risks associated with its bill, it has now left Canada as the global example of digital policy disastrously gone wrong. i) I accept what Geist asserts, that the US social media business will be worse without Canadian news. Having Canadian news content in these billion-dollar US companies' products should not be free for these companies. ii) Canadian media must do better for Canadians. Canadian news is not US news. iii) US media companies don't want to start paying US journalism either. Rich US companies are fighting to resist the precedent that this law set in Australia and will set in Canada.
jtode 3y ago
Canadian here. I'm cheering on the insane government. Crazy like a fox. I listened to a statement on Front Burner the other day where some facebook homunculus said they are "ending access to news in Canada," which brought forth a real guffaw. I listened to the news yesterday while working in the yard on an AM radio. The only delusion here is on Facebook's part, where they think they are punishing us by removing their heavily-filtered hate machine from our media pool. They believe they have "captured" our ability to find the news. Anyone who pays attention knows what kind of crap they've been pulling on media outlets since the start, and I frankly don't care that it's Rupert Murdoch benefitting here - better him than Zuck, because we have had Murdoch for half my life and things didn't get really bad till Facebook. ANYTHING that gets their hands off the media is a good thing.
- gspencley 3y ago
  What about small independent news outlets that rely on social media by creating pages in order to voluntarily post links to their content, so that people can follow them in order to see their content in their feeds? Those are gone now. I used to think like you. I'm not a big social media user and it's easy to think of social media as a cesspool of clickbait and rage, but now that Meta has pulled even the pages of these outlets I realized that I'm suddenly not getting severe weather alerts and updates on local events that I was used to getting from a particular small indie outlet. How exactly was Facebook hurting that indie outlet by giving them a platform and free traffic?
- simondotau 3y ago
  You're delusional if you think that many Canadians won't still "get their news" from Facebook, et al. Some will add more bookmarks to their daily web pit stops. Many won't. The only difference for most is that the ratio of nominal reporting to unhinged "opinion" pieces they see is going to be worse than it already is.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - lucasyvas 3y ago

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j45 3y ago

In Canada it will mean news from other places, including the US will likely directly or indirectly influence those feeds. UGC (User Generated Content) could remain commentary about these news articles when shared in, but it would require consumers to become creators.

loeg 3y ago
The article states explicitly that news sources from the US would also be blocked.
- j45 3y ago
  Yes it does. But will Buzzfeed type commentary choosing to interpret an interpretation and present it as facts about the articles also be blocked? I remember a facebook before any articles was posted there. News articles were brought in explicitly to get the news crowd there, and keep them engaged. I wonder how federated news delivery could work - anyone use anything like this.

ysavir 3y ago

Are we cheering on Facebook? It feels like a situation where all the foul players--the platforms, the government, and the media--are all losing. The article author tries to say "Individual Canadians who use the platforms to find links to news are losers since news links will be blocked from the platform" but doesn't actually support that with a reason as to why that's a loss. Feels like a win to individual Canadians to me, even if some are upset at their inability to easily and immediately share clickbait and ragebait articles. I think those are the people we're really cheering on.

gspencley 3y ago
> Feels like a win to individual Canadians to me, even if some are upset at their inability to easily and immediately share clickbait and ragebait articles. I think those are the people we're really cheering on. This is a very naive view of what's going on or the impact. I don't like reading clickbait or ragebait articles that people share. If connections of mine do that on social media too often I usually mute them. I also don't "get" my news "from" Facebook. As in, if Facebook were to try and suggest news articles to me I would find that very annoying. I use FB Purity to give myself a very sanitized news feed that is configured to my liking. And yet this ridiculous bill that literally no one in Canada asked for is impacting me. How? Because I follow a local independent news outlet that posts stuff about my area that actually matters to me. These are NOT articles that people share and they are NOT shit that Facebook is shoving my face. I CHOSE to click "Follow" on the FB Page for that news outlet so that I could find out about things like weather alerts, crime in my area and local events. That page is now gone from Facebook. What is INSANE to me is that this doesn't even seem like a case of Facebook distributing that news. It was that local news outlet that chose to create a Facebook page and create those links themselves in order to distribute their content on Facebook voluntarily. Yet that still, for some fucked up reason, falls under this insane law that no one asked for.
robertlagrant 3y ago
If the only news is clickbait and ragebait then Facebook is in the right. If the news is good then the Canadian government is in the wrong.

pseudotrash 3y ago

[flagged]

lolinder 3y ago
> not distributing outrage clickbait to boomers Meta comment in the interest of improving discussion in the future: this is why you're getting downvotes. I've seen plenty of comments that include everything else you said and get upvoted to the top, but casual negative stereotyping of whole generations doesn't play as well on HN as it does on other platforms.
- pseudotrash 3y ago
  Interesting for me to reflect on this because I'm in that age group and most of my environment is too and they are absolutely my target of this comment. While I have skin in the game holding this position I wonder if those downvoting do too. How many friends did you lose to social media dividing you harder than I ever could, and who do you direct that anger to. :) never mind fake internet points or moron writers that optimizes content for likes or whatever their audience wants to hear. Schopenhauer and Taleb have already written plenty on the subject.
  - simple-thoughts 3y ago
    If you’re abandoning your friends because of political differences, you’re part of the problem. Picking fights with people because you don’t agree with them doesn’t change any minds and does make the world a little worse. Also, your beliefs may not be rooted in fact as much as you’d like or you might be more confident in your truth to win in its own.
    - zlg_codes 3y ago
      [flagged]

flangola7 3y ago

Who is cheering on Facebook here? Facebook needs content to survive, as it does not produce anything itself. News agencies have THEIR content posted on Facebook, giving it value, not the other way around.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gruez 3y ago
>News agencies have THEIR content posted on Facebook, giving it value, not the other way around. The relevant legislation isn't just taxing the platforms for "content", it's taxing the platforms for merely linking to the content.
ncann 3y ago
Google and FB can easily drive 30%+ of a news site's traffic. If that's not value to a news site I don't know what is.
- rvnx 3y ago
  News agencies and websites have their content reproduced on Google Search and News. That's massive value for a search portal.
  - dwaite 3y ago
    Publishers specifically provide that content however, via techniques like open graph. They already can control how much text or what images are displayed in results. They can also indicate they don't want indexing at all. Yet they publish articles with the entire headline and backing images marked for free display on Google/Facebook. Almost like they are trying to help the search engines to attract traffic.
  - warning26 3y ago
    Then ban that, don't ban linking.

DueDilligence 3y ago

[dead]

Waterluvian 3y ago

I don't necessarily think the government is right, but I can't help but feel like it might be a very good thing that people affected by this will have to leave the Facebook garden and seek out news elsewhere. I'm really quite fine with this experiment happening.

trts 3y ago
A choice is being imposed on citizens and private companies by the government, for the benefit of organizations that are influential with the establishment. An experiment is when you have a hypothesis about something that could be improved or optimized, test the hypothesis with a subset to find evidence or observe unintended effects of the change, replicate the finding, scale up, or revert depending on the outcomes observed. A national policy by fiat is somewhat the opposite of what I consider an experiment to be.
- palijer 3y ago
  >for the benefit of organizations that are influential with the establishment. Those organizations, being Canadian news organizations, employing Canadians, and making content for Canadian consumers. Aren't those the sort of organizations that should be able to work with the Canadian government and influence Canadian laws? What sorts of organizations instead of those ones should be able to work with the government here? I think legislation should have outside influence, but I think I'm missing something here, or making the mistake of taking things at face-value.
  - gruez 3y ago
    >Those organizations, being Canadian news organizations, employing Canadians, and making content for Canadian consumers. Aren't those the sort of organizations that should be able to work with the Canadian government and influence Canadian laws? You can make the same argument about local companies lobbying the government to enact tariffs to protect them from foreign competitors. The people being harmed are the same: consumers who end up with a worse product. How about nobody tries to influence the Canadian government to enact laws that distort the marketplace to their advantage?

great_psy 3y ago

A bit off topic, bye does anyone know why those monopolistic companies (bell Rogers) stocks are doing relatively poorly compared to even the US index?

afterburner 3y ago
They already control all the market they'll control in Canada, and they won't expand outside Canada. Not a growth story.

bushbaba 3y ago

Disagree. The law ensures there are Canadian media, which can be used to push media to the betterment of Canadians. Many countries have protectionist laws and this isn’t much different.

varenc 3y ago
But if Facebook is blocking news links in Canada, it doesn’t seem like the law is having the desired effect.
chongli 3y ago
This is protectionist law but it’s not protecting independent media in Canada, it’s protecting big players like PostMedia, Bell, and Rogers. If anything this will just kill off the remaining small media companies in Canada, or force them to be bought up by the big companies.
- midasuni 3y ago
  Those aren’t big players on a global basis. Canada is concerned its culture is at risk from globalisation, and those concerns are not without merit.
  - VancouverMan 3y ago
    > Canada is concerned its culture is at risk from globalisation, and those concerns are not without merit. I don't think that preserving Canadian culture is a factor in any of this, nor does it seem to be a concern of the current government. These same politicians have been bringing in an absolutely staggering number of foreigners each year for many years now, with most of them from cultures that are extremely dissimilar from, if not outright incompatible with, what was Canadian culture.
  - wesapien 3y ago
    What is Canadian culture?
    - 3y ago

sandworm101 3y ago

>> (and incompetent) political corruption. Hyperbolic and self defeating. If the corruption is incompetent then I guess there isn't much effective corruption. Canada ranks well above even the US on most indexes of corruption. Not liking the current government is a totally different thing than a country being corrupt. Canada=14th, which is nothing to be embarrassed about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

chrisco255 3y ago
That is a "perceptions" index. Note corruption is not something which can be reduced to a scalar value and analyzed like temperature or pressure. It's far more multivariate and complex than that. Even if, for the sake of argument, it was possible to do so, you would have to interrogate the methodology used to produce this value. Note the complexity in analyzing corruption by country. How does one investigate in detail, the governments of almost 200 countries? If one relies on survey results from members of those countries, how was the survey consistently conducted across language barriers, cultural barriers, and legal barriers? Finally, even if you believe all of those incredibly dubious factors were accounted for, it could be possible that being 14th in a world that is becoming more corrupt does not mean that Canada is improving in that regard.
unpopular42 3y ago
No way! A political index that doesn't actually reflect the reality, has that ever happened?
whimsicalism 3y ago
Most of these indices are nonsense and perception based.
mardifoufs 3y ago
Typical Canadian response. Who said anything about the US? It's amazing how we can make excuses for everything, as long as we delude ourselves that we somehow have it better than the US.

jacquesm 3y ago

Funny, for once I find myself on the side of Bell, Roger ands Shaw (the CBC was in my good book anyway). That normally wouldn't happen but if FB news feeds are exchanged by those of Bell, Rogers, Shaw and the CBC that could well be a net positive.

ChumpGPT 3y ago

Rogers, Bell and Telus run Canada. It's why Canadians have the highest mobile rates in the world. Trudeau offered to protect them for ever during NAFTA II and let them become Canadian Media Companies protecting them from any competition insuring Canadians will have less choice and higher rates for everything and basically letting Telco's control over all media, etc.

VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
Is Canada still going forward with the law that USA streaming companies have to provide at least 30% domestically-sourced Canadian programming? I know EU and Australia did that. I appreciate the resistance to the continued American-ization of their cultures, but let's be honest here. I can only think of Rush, Bieber, and Kids in the Hall. Where is the rest of the 30% going to come from? It's going to be a lot of nonsense filler content that is only there to comply with some law. edit: actually, Apple Music might be able to cover their 30% quota just with Neil Young's discography.
- nvy 3y ago
  > I can only think of Rush, Bieber, and Kids in the Hall. Don't forget Avril Lavigne, Drake, Gordon Lightfoot, Céline Dion, Joni Mitchell, deadmau5, The Weeknd, and Nelly Furtado. Just off the top of my head. Interestingly enough I'd never heard of Kids in the Hall before today. But all of those are or were "Big Names" in music. We have (protectionist, yes) media regulators (the CRTC) that are nominally arm's length from elected governments so it's not likely to change unless the Canadian public decides that this will become a major election issue. Don't hold your breath.
  - gspencley 3y ago
    > Don't forget ... Céline Dion ... As a Canadian I was actively trying to forget that one. Thanks :( :P
  - philwelch 3y ago
    Yeah, I've always assumed that Canadians were overrepresented in popular culture as a consequence of Canadian content regulations.

epgui 3y ago

Who says anything about corruption? This seems much more likely to be a result of technological incompetence.

firecall 3y ago

They did this in Australia. It all seemed like it was to prop up Murdoch owned media. The Australian Gov must have cut an acceptable deal with Google and Facebook though, as both threatened to do what FB has done in Canada. There are more details to it all, I'm sure. I'd have to go research more as I dont recall them all :-)

dwaite 3y ago
> …as both threatened to do what FB has done in Canada Meta has blocked access in Canada, so I wouldn't consider it a threat anymore. You could claim this is a negotiating tactic, but I suspect time alone will not change these policies. Neither Google nor Facebook see significant direct value in having news links on their platform - they don't think they'll have a significant drop in user traffic from users not being able to see a few Canadian news sites.

winddude 3y ago

huh? What? This has nothing to do with telecom.

jiveturkey 3y ago
did you even read the post you're replying to? "PBO shows ...". one google search away tells me > The analysis by the PBO, an independent body that provides economic and financial analysis to MPs and senators, concluded that newspapers and online media would get $81,550,000 a year, while broadcasters such as the CBC, Bell, Shaw and Rogers stand to get $247,677,000 if the bill becomes law.

aprdm 3y ago

Why should the government of Canada be on Facebook's team instead of the Canadian Telecom's team?

tomComb 3y ago
It shouldn’t be on either of those teams.
- lucasyvas 3y ago
  Rare case that I'll support the parent of your post - I'd way rather a Canadian company get the upside than a US (foreign) one even if the Canadian ones are a bunch of assholes and an oligopoly. That's our problem to deal with. First keep the money here, then we'll argue how to redistribute it. News is a tricky subject. In theory there are more clicks but sometimes people don't visit the site at all so it's hard to say. If this was about diversifying communications providers I think I would side with you instead. It really depends what it is. I would prefer my domestic companies to be in the strongest position while also allowing outside players - so a mixture. But we are hopelessly on the back leg and need a boost when it comes to funding domestic media. The solution can't be to just outsource everything because there's no way to win against Meta and Google.

teunispeters 3y ago

One of the nice things about Canada is a requirement to be honest within reason, and to always fact check - and handle if things don't match later. For the news source I go to, this means they're pretty reliable and honest - and not so prone to lying or deception. I mean at the end of the day people are people, and different agencies will have some bias, so I check across a bunch. And I avoid anything owned by Rupert Murdoch, as that drives down the quality by a lot. APTN for instance is good, and honestly so is Al Jazeera USA. I've liked CBC, and between the different programs they're pretty good at calling out political bias - especially about their own. (the actual news news on CBC has some center-right bias towards either Liberal or Conservative parties - and will occasionally even air "official lies". Their long form shows on the other hand are much better and will catch out those "official lies". Canada is complicated in its own way).

osigurdson 3y ago

Fully agree. If the electorate can’t manage to get rid of this freedom constraining government in the next election then the country is probably a write off. At least it is hard to imagine how we can recover from another government like this.

fooster 3y ago
That hyperbole is just that. Overly dramatic nonsense. If the other parties want to win an election they first must elect a leader who themselves speak to the remainder of Canadians. Which is something they managed to do even more badly this time around.
- osigurdson 3y ago
  I hope you are right, as I’d rather not pay any attention to politics. What actions would they have to take before you would become less comfortable with the direction of the country is going? Are you fine with what they have done so far?

JacobThreeThree 3y ago

You can include Post Media, TorStar, Quebecor and other media in the list of those lobbying for this. It's part Canadian protectionism and part desperate ploy to prop up a few large failed media business models. Canada has a long history of protectionist measures. The shocking part of the bill is the way it exposes the complete technical incompetence of the government. There are many ways to extract a pound of flesh, implementing your tax in a way that is fundamentally incompatible with the web is inexcusable. It will hurt Canada's efforts to be a tech leader.

onlypositive 3y ago

Governments are for the people by the people. Cheering on Facebook is cheering against your own interests. Companies need to learn that they play in and extract resources from our sandbox. If they want to continue to play in our sandbox, they need to play by our rules. They need to act in a socially responsible way. There are even laws about corporate governance pertaining to this. You don't have to agree with Canada's laws (I don't), but you do need to recognise that they are their laws. Being hostile like this is a good way to make enemies.

sintaxi 3y ago
This is verifiably incorrect. Members of the Canadian House of Commons swear their allegiance to the monarch. They make no such oath to the People nor the Constitution in Canada. "I, [name], do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, Her Heirs and Successors. So help me God."
- onlypositive 3y ago
  chill america
  - sintaxi 3y ago
    I'm Canadian.
lolinder 3y ago
[flagged]

matheusmoreira 3y ago

In my country they tried to sneak in similar laws into a "fake news" censorship law. There were provisions to preempt this exact move: it would have made it illegal for social media companies to block the links. I guess Canada's politicians weren't sociopathic enough to think of such a thing.

bparsons 3y ago

The entire Canadian media ecosystem is collapsing. This is a desperate last shot at salvaging a few newspapers. This is a rounding error of a rounding error for Meta. The Canadian media is almost universally right wing. Helping these outlets survive is almost certainly against the governing parties interest.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

I'm cheering on the content producers. https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/meta-instagram-canada-online-news-act-explainer-news-1.6914154 https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/meta-instagram-canada-online...

barbariangrunge 3y ago

The rule is because of American monopolies and oligopolies. To have your news seen at all, you need to use major social media platforms or google. These platforms benefit from the news links, and the news has to fight to compete on those platforms, earning less and less revenue every year because the news is less engaging than flamebait. So the news gradually becomes flamebait to try to garner enough engagement to compete, otherwise the news stops existing, and next thing you know, investigative journalism is almost extinct. This isn’t an ideal solution, it’s basically a subsidy that big tech is supposed to pay for, but there is a massive, massive! power imbalance where the platforms are the only winners, so it’s also not the worst rule ever. I don’t know. The overwhelming power imbalance of oligopoly platforms is a thing, I’m not sure what to do about it. The issue is bigger than just news, and this law only partially addresses one aspect of the situation

fauigerzigerk 3y ago
The issue of real journalism having to compete with sensationalist tabloids and clickbait is nothing new though. There was a time before all the blind rage turned against big tech when we actually found it problematic how much political influence media moguls like Murdoch, Berlusconi or Springer had accumulated. Google and Facebook have syphoned off a lot of advertising income from these big publishers and they are leveraging their political clout to make politicians pass laws that have nothing to do with journalism and everything to do with serving the special interests of a few powerful publishers. Yes the fact that too much money stays with Google and Facebook rather than funding serious journalism is a problem. But these laws are not supposed to fix that and they are not fixing it. It's just corruption.

sneak 3y ago

Both sides of this argument are bad. The choices on the menu are "Facebook chooses what links (published by users) to censor" or "the legislature chooses what links (published by users) to censor". The dispute is just which authority decides what you get to share with your friends and contacts - not that you should be allowed to do so freely.

heresie-dabord 3y ago

> the primary beneficiaries of this bill were to be Bell, Rogers, Shaw, and some CBC. Yes, owners and creators of Canadian media content. For Canadians. From TFA: > The Internet platforms are losers as they comply with an unreasonable law by removing links and making their services objectively worse in order to do so. Individual Canadians who use the platforms to find links to news are losers since news links will be blocked from the platform. And the government is a loser, as having dismissed critics and ignored repeated warnings about the risks associated with its bill, it has now left Canada as the global example of digital policy disastrously gone wrong. i) I accept what Geist asserts, that the US social media business will be worse without Canadian news. Having Canadian news content in these billion-dollar US companies' products should not be free for these companies. ii) Canadian media must do better for Canadians. Canadian news is not US news. iii) US media companies don't want to start paying US journalism either. Rich US companies are fighting to resist the precedent that this law set in Australia and will set in Canada.

jtode 3y ago

Canadian here. I'm cheering on the insane government. Crazy like a fox. I listened to a statement on Front Burner the other day where some facebook homunculus said they are "ending access to news in Canada," which brought forth a real guffaw. I listened to the news yesterday while working in the yard on an AM radio. The only delusion here is on Facebook's part, where they think they are punishing us by removing their heavily-filtered hate machine from our media pool. They believe they have "captured" our ability to find the news. Anyone who pays attention knows what kind of crap they've been pulling on media outlets since the start, and I frankly don't care that it's Rupert Murdoch benefitting here - better him than Zuck, because we have had Murdoch for half my life and things didn't get really bad till Facebook. ANYTHING that gets their hands off the media is a good thing.

gspencley 3y ago
What about small independent news outlets that rely on social media by creating pages in order to voluntarily post links to their content, so that people can follow them in order to see their content in their feeds? Those are gone now. I used to think like you. I'm not a big social media user and it's easy to think of social media as a cesspool of clickbait and rage, but now that Meta has pulled even the pages of these outlets I realized that I'm suddenly not getting severe weather alerts and updates on local events that I was used to getting from a particular small indie outlet. How exactly was Facebook hurting that indie outlet by giving them a platform and free traffic?
simondotau 3y ago
You're delusional if you think that many Canadians won't still "get their news" from Facebook, et al. Some will add more bookmarks to their daily web pit stops. Many won't. The only difference for most is that the ratio of nominal reporting to unhinged "opinion" pieces they see is going to be worse than it already is.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lucasyvas 3y ago