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.
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.
First, nobody really wanted FB to show news articles especially when they were always biased to something they wanted to propagate (like when Google started pushing news to Android devices out of blue without any prior request). Second, the main utility of FB was to connect with friends and acquaintances and have some cursory look into their lives. There is this thing called Internet to browse newspapers if one wishes to anyway.
This. People using FB to share information outside their lives has been a net bane to society. Unfortunately, FB profits immensely from the damage it causes.
Thus, no engagement metrics to optimize for because HN isn’t even monetized that I know of (and hopefully doesn’t need to become one?)
With no engagement needing to be goosed we don’t need an algorithm to make sure we see the most outraging things possible. We just see what’s interesting to the whole community.
Radicalization online is a serious problem and I think the reverse qualities of the above, which FB, Twitter, and YouTube are perfect examples of, is a big part of how it happened.
HN pushes us toward the average interests of hackers. FB amplifies whatever interests repeatably get your attention until they become obsessions.
(I stopped following anything or anyone political on FB and YouTube, so that they only makes me more engaged in my nerdy, wholesome interests. I think I’m in the minority though)
I mean, I gave up on Facebook long ago to be honest, but this is a news aggregator website that is specifically about sharing links to articles of news or interest.
Facebook... I mean... it wasn't pitched to be that? It was supposed to connect you to each other, not be an algorithmic view into the universe. Sure, sharing news can be a big part of that, and talking about news too, but every site doesn't have to be everything.
Why would my personal social group (i.e. facebook friends) make sense to combine with the random strangers on here who discuss technical posts? Sure there's some overlap in audience but it just doesn't seem like a necessary compromise to make.
Facebook has a lot of topical groups where you likely don't know anyone anymore than you do here aside from they have expressed interest in a topic enough to join the same group as you.
Sure, but I don't think there's any particularly obvious reason why Facebook would be the place for a topical group to set up shop. I think it is a bad place for a topical group because you cannot read the posts without logging in.
If you're in the Facebook ecosystem maybe this is less visible. But if friends plan an event in a Facebook group they are excluding me and others who don't use Facebook for many valid but irrelevant reasons.
One such reason is that pseudo-anonymity is crucial for a lot of people for professional or personal reasons, and it's way easier to support that elsewhere.
Others include data privacy policies.
Maybe there's not a great choice that has the right blend of ease of access and ease of setup. But I think Facebook is demonstrably bad because of the requirements of logging in to read at all and to enforce that your profile has a real name.
I should have phrased it better, my intention wasn't to focus responsibility on typical FB users. It's posting and consuming news on a platform that deliberately puts them in an information bubble that feeds into and reinforces their existing viewpoints. It's what keeps people there and drives FB profits, but it causes harm to society. The responsibility is on FB and those knowingly feeding toxic content into it.
According to the people doing it or outside observers? Seems like there are lots of things that are net negatives in the opinion of one group of people despite many others choosing it for themselves. Should we ban soda? Granulated sugar in general? Rap music? The liberal arts? This is the government acting as a parent. We need a society of adults, not children.
Yes, we created a world, where many people make objectively bad decisions, because we let companies become so big and so rich that they can pay the cleverest mind to influence us. I too want a free society of adults, that can choose their own fate. But we as single persons do not have the capacities to find a reasonable way through all the bullshit that rich organisations feed us every day.
Look at supermarkets: everything after the department for fruits an vegetables is basically bad for us. Science prooves that. But we have to pass all this convenience food that promises to be cheap and fast and healthy and it isn't. And most people somehow learned that in school but ever since they are being informed by the companies.
Science does not in fact prove only fruits and vegetables are good for you, and in recent years the healt benefits of meat and dairy have been coming to light.
> Science does not in fact prove only fruits and vegetables are good for you
I will agree with your objection to the “prove” claim about the science (if only because it’s an overstatement of what science does) but the negative associations between various adverse health outcomes and a plant-based diet are well-supported in the literature: lower risk of type 2 diabetes, lower systolic BP, lower risk of cardiovascular events, lower total cardiovascular mortality, lower rates of certain malignancies.
Ban clickable links even. I mean, if someone wants to share a web location, they can still do so. The opt-in effect of having to drag to copy, right click, click copy, open a new tab and paste would likely be enough to keep stupid shit journalism from turning viral.
Facebook would really blow my mind if they doubled down on their core mission.
Links benefit the publishers because they get traffic. And I think you underestimate how many people will copy paste outrageously long and bogus things that begin like "if I paste this Facebook cannot charge me $15/month starting Monday"
A news media producing "clickbait and ragebait" articles should not be covered by the law because it requires to follow a code of ethics (article 27 [1] ) unless it is a Indigenous news organization. I think the articles you mention definitely are not compatible with "code of ethics whose standards of professional conduct require adherence to the recognized processes and principles of the journalism profession, including fairness, independence and rigour in reporting news and handling sources" so please rest assured that they can be shared free of charge. Sadly, clickbait articles from Indigenous news organization might disappear.
People share links with their friends online. If you login to facebook you will see links your friends shared.
This is a major source of traffic for media, along with say sharing links via imessage.
Almost no one logs onto facebook with the goal of "checking the news". But they see news there and it adds up to a lot of traffic because Facebook and instagram are huge. (The media posts clips to Facebook and Instagram and these can show up in feeds too if the post is popular enough)
Not wrong at all. But also after like 15 years of this mechanism, I’m comfortable ruling it as very, very not worth it. Compared to before FB had this format, do we even think the average person even reads more actual journalism than before? Pretty sure most of the “articles” people find through social media are more like ragebait from the political fringes because that’s what gets the views, clicks, comments, and reshares.
In light of that, a world with no news on Facebook would be just fine. If anyone is that uninterested in news that they would never check out a news site directly on their own, they won’t miss it.
Your average person never gave a shit about good content. That's the proof that's been visible for centuries, where there were newspapers, there were tabloids with giant click-bait headlines to make a quick buck and it always worked, because people don't want to read, they want just a headline to tell them how to feel.
But those average people are the majority of "views" of said paper, that's why all these media outlets are desperate for that ad revenue. They already have subscriber bases that are actual real interest in reading content.
Welcome to the sad reality of our world, crack open a cold one and laugh with the rest of us.
Such an insufferable quote. The vast majority of people aren’t stupid in any sense of the word just because they have different priorities than what the over zealous “smart people” think makes one smart.
It's not just different priorities. The average person will more consistently act against their own self-interests (eg their own priorities) because they simply cannot reason well enough to choose the best path forwards for themselves.
According to whom? In my experience people tend to think they know what’s best for others and call them stupid when they do what they consider best. It’s almost always different priorities with one persons priorities being considered the “obviously best path forward.”
- a more technical, intelligent, and successful userbase
than the average website.
Or are you really trying to imply that it (and it's users) are not much different from, say, Reddit or a Fox News's comment section or TikTok or Facebook?
HN is full of people that think they are smart about everything because they have above average knowledge in technology. I can not even start counting the number of uninformed but confident comments I have read here about my non-technology fields.
The problem is these people were told that software was going to eat the world, so they anointed themselves as Certified Experts In Everythingology and think their garbage takes are the word of god.
Human intelligence is arguably not even truly ordinal, let alone cardinal. No one who reasonably understands human intelligence believes it's as simple as a normal distribution. IQ is defined as a normal distribution but that doesn't mean the difference between 100 to 110 IQ is comparable to the difference between 140 and 150 IQ. If you boil "human intelligence" down to nothing more than IQ, sure, but in reality there's no such thing as a mean here and median is tenuous as well.
Indeed, and also, same as it ever was. Before the dominance of the internet, television was the dominant structure of media, it is also jam packed full of ads and shitty "click-bait" news. As you allude to, that's just life.
The big difference today is that they're trying the same shit on protocols and platforms that allow you to block anything you want, so it's an arms race between blockers and DRM enforcers. Eventually, they'll just split HTTP into the Web side and the App side. The App side will be encumbered with EME and other anti-standards drafted by WHATWG.
The techno-elites act like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok aren’t at all enjoyable when they have billions of daily active users.
This is the 2020s equivalent of saying that there can’t possibly be legitimate news culture happening with Comedy Central viewers at the peak era of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It’s just out of touch with the common person.
By the way, Meta products are incredibly good at a UX and technical level. Fast loading, simple UI, and ads have a predictable layout where they don’t bloc site elements or interrupt you (much unlike a typical news website).
It’s not just the “techno-elites”, it is elites of all stripes. I grew up in DC with exactly the sorts of interactions you might imagine, none of those people are techies, and they all have similar anti-social media views.
AFAICT, most of what they really take issue with is intrinsic to allowing direct communication between anyone in the world. There seem to be severely anti-democratic implications for many of the critiques of Meta that I hear.
Truly the only place where the techies seem to diverge is that they care about privacy, whereas it is about “fake news” for everyone else.
and ads have a predictable layout where they don’t bloc site elements or interrupt you
Are we using the same apps? My FB and Insta feeds were a steaming pile of ads and influencers and other garbage. I stopped using both because posts from people I follow were buried
“Updates from friends you know” is what elder millennials think the product is, but that’s not primarily what it is anymore.
I’m talking about the endless stream of content that is the bread and butter of social media. Your friends don’t have infinite content to post.
The endless stream of content product (think Reels and TikTok) is what captures 90% of users’ attention.
In that context, yes, you’ll get ads and influencers shilling sponsored stuff, but you can swipe them away instantly. And my argument is that this product is very good for very many people.
> In that context, yes, you’ll get ads and influencers shilling sponsored stuff, but you can swipe them away instantly.
I'd note that this isn't even good at the UX/technical level.
I very rarely use FB, but opened it the other day and noticed that that the promo card for reels is always showing up despite me having clicked "Hide" on it several times before. I spent a minute or two clicking "Hide" on it probably 20 more times, and as far as I can tell, it has zero effect. Not good UX. Furthermore, if you click "Report this post" in the dialog after "Hide", you get a consistent "Sorry, something went wrong" popup. Not good technically.
Have you tried using Facebook in a web browser? It's an utter disaster. Scrolling jumps all over the place. Sometimes it just starts loading more content as you scroll, kicks you off of the post you were just reading, then just keeps scrolling around loading the page in an infinite loop. Marketplace is abysmal to try to find things on because the filters are trash, and just shows you shit you weren't searching for. Messenger is slow as fuck in every browser I have tried, and the notifications are totally inconsistent. Fucking errors all the time when I use it.
I dunno to what extent you use Facebook. But it's not technically great at all, and the UX is total trash.
Which non-dumpster news outlets are there? Just about every big name can be counted on to spin in favor of their owners' political aims. Fox News and friends are obvious propaganda. I've not been impressed with CBS, NBC, CNN, WaPo, The New Yorker, all sorts of outlets that I cannot rely on for truthful and relevant news.
I have taken to using a website I found that combines and aggregates all the mainstream news sites, so I can see from an aerial view what -- if any -- message they're trying to sell that day. And it's weird how close in lockstep these media outlets talk about things.
I see a lot of criticism on the Internet amount to "If they only used the good stuff..." So, where is it?
Do you also think it is odd that news consumers would then want to possibly discuss or share the news with people they know?
Because that's the reason. Folks interested in news tend to talk about it with other folks interested - and that has happened long before the internet. In some cases, it is pretty similar to leaving a newspaper in a fast food place: Let folks you don't see much (or at all) read that stuff as well.
It doesn't always matter if other options are better - folks work with what they have. Similar to wanting to talk to someone more intelligent about the news, but still talking about it with the folks you have around.
> news consumers would then want to possibly discuss or share the news with people they know?
I don’t witness that happening though. When I see “news” posted by people on FB, I usually see a despairing one-line intro at most, and a link. Then the comments are a bunch of me-toos or, for those with unkempt friend lists of everyone they’ve ever met, a raucous flame war.
The other “news” is posted by the sites themselves or by large political Pages or Groups. Those are exclusively the “flame war” variety, 1000 strangers screaming into the void pointlessly.
So (imo) nothing of value would be lost by abolishing the whole concept of news on social media.
If you want a place where sane people can have a virtual water cooler discussion about the day’s news stories with friends they know, those friends should just set up a group text or a Discord.
It goes a bit deeper than that. Older people had to actively seek out news. They didn't have to option to go to a service operated by an global corporation that pushed the headlines to them. (Or, as I used to put it to my generation back in the day: grandma invented the computer. We simply use them.)
People subscribed with money to a newspaper. Which then delivered curated content right to their front door. They didn't go seek it out. Also, most of the newspapers are part of global corporations, even local ones.
Heard of them, and you're right about subscriptions to a degree and you're right about corporate ownership to a degree.
I say to a degree vecause there are some distinct differences. At least in my neck of the woods, major newspapers were owned at a national level. Some of the stories came from international corporations (e.g. AP), but what was published tended to be local editorial decisions. You also got the same news as everyone else who subscribed to or purchased single copies of the paper.
Contrast that to online news through social media sites. Chances are the editorial decisions are made in a different country, and there may not even be direct human intervention in choosing what you (as an individual) sees.
Unlike subsequent generations, boomers weren’t born with the internet, and they’ve developed habits that fall outside of the internet like reading physical periodicals and subscribing to cable TV that they’ve kept for the past 30 years.
All subsequent generations weren't born with the internet either. I guess it depends on your definition of the internet, but ARPAnet didn't start using TCP/IP until the 1980's.
That may hold water for some of Gen X, but it was still a key part of many of their formative years. Many Millennials literally grew up with it.
To be clear, I'm not saying that boomers aren't smart enough to use technology. It's just that old, comfortable habits are hard to break. Facebook for many of them is a safe, walled garden compared to the wild west internet.
It's not about who's in the right. It's about whether this law, as it plays out, acts in the best interest of the people.
We can't let our impression of how things should play out be determined by asking which self-serving powerful player deserves the right of way in policy making.
You're right. You weren't speaking with that intent and I brought that context into it. My apologies there.
I think I was responding to the idea that because the government was acting in self-serving ways, that we were necessarily cheering on Facebook, and that what facebook is doing is "standing up to...corruption", when their own efforts are a corruption of a different kind. The phrasing there made me feel like I was being made to choose--that I was either cheering for facebook or for their rivals in this situation--and I didn't feel that that choice was accurate. It's possible to think that both parties are in the wrong, even if they are on opposite sides here.
Your follow up post reinforced that feeling as it maintained the idea that one party or the other was in the right, but that post was also a direct response to what I said, and not necessarily a continuation of what you had posted earlier. So by continuing that thread I reinforced my own misinterpretation.
I will try to better understand my own reactions to people's posts in the future, and be better in responding in the appropriate context, not with a shift.
"right" and "wrong" are normative statements: quite literally they're statements about how things should be. IMO it's a reasonable read of your comment
Most Canadians are obsessed with American news anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of people barely notice.
If I was an American/Euro/South American news org I'd be staffing up my Canadian journos. Any org out of reach of the backroom dealing Ottawa private school clique can probably hire some local freelancers and fill the void by the end of the year.
I mean, sure Facebook has its bad points, but anyone who thinks that this is true clearly has no idea how hard it was to stay connected to so many people pre-Facebook. And keeping up on those connections really does have value.
I dont use facebook anymore and think life is better without it so I dont even care about the merits you listed. Even still, it doesnt mean we should legislate this opinion on others.
Regardless, Canada isn’t protecting people from facebook. They didn’t ban news sharing, they just wanted to give their media companies a cut.
> 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.
> but doesn't actually support that with a reason as to why that's a loss
Because people want to share and visit news links. Evidenced by the fact that they shared and visited news links often. Its a bit condescending to suggest you know whats better for people than the people freely choosing to engage in news articles.
Besides, the Canadian law doesn’t even ban news sharing on Facebook. It just institutes a shakedown.
Exactly right. It's shocking to see such an authoritarian-type viewpoint that far at the top. I don't like Facebook (never had an account) but people sharing links is none of the government's business.
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.
They control the media and you only hear or get their sanctioned perspective. They can sway public opinion in any direction they want. Ultimately those who control the message control the narrative. They could destroy anyone then want, even the Prime Minister.
In a more respectful way he's probably getting at the fact that while the telecoms control a significant proportion of TV and radio there's still the CBC (owned by the government at arm's length, theoretically) and print media, which is arguably more important, that's independent.
Interestingly different from the US I would say the vast majority of Canadians I knew (including my elderly parents) get their Canadian political news from print media rather than TV (acknowledging that biases towards people who attended university and live in cities) which is more for local news if anything. Canadian TV channels are very underwhelming and have no where near the relevance of CNN or Fox News to US society. I would even modestly wager that CNN has a larger Canadian viewership than Canadian news channels.
I expect a significant amount also get it from radio which from what I recall are mostly telecom owned.
I think he is exaggerating the internet speed and competition issues that seem to be more prevalent in Canada. I don't know if this is true anymore but a friend told me many plans have upload caps?
That part is not an exaggeration. We don't have unlimited data plans for mobile AFAIK. Anecdotally, I pay around 90$ for somewhere between 6 or 10 GB per month, and I pay extra for long distance calls. I pay through the nose for international calls (sometimes when I have to make 20-60 minutes' worth of calls to the US my monthly bill goes up to 150$). An internet connection at home (fiber op) costs 120$/month for 1.5 gbps.
But it's hard to see how that relates to "running the country".
That's a pretty crappy cell phone deal unless you're somewhere really remote. Rogers offers 75GB @ 5G and unlimited throttled with Canada-wide long distance and North America roaming for $90.
I've kept my Canadian # for posterity and I'm on a legacy plan for $50 that gets me 15GB and US-Can voice so you can definitely get cheaper ones through retention (the only way to get a good deal on wireless in Canada).
> But it's hard to see how that relates to "running the country".
Agree that's a bit much, they basically rule the CRTC (telecom regulator) which has never made an adverse decision against them to my recollection. The running joke was they had regulatory meeting at the National Golf Club in Toronto.
They do own a fair proportion of TV & radio outlets and political influence but I wouldn't call it running the country.
I haven't had time to shop around in a number of years, so I probably don't have the most competitive deal. I've carried this cell phone plan since around 2014-2015.
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.
> 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.
Off the top of my head, more recent ish bands that never really crossed the border: The Arkells, Metric, July Talk, Broken Social Scene, Billy Talent, Tegan and Sarah, and many more. These bands sell out large music venues domestically, but can't gain much cross-border traction. They basically are able to exist because of Canadian Content laws.
The fact that most people don't realize that a huge number of musicians and other celebs popular in the USA are Canadian isn't really a stirring argument in favor of the distinctness of Canada's culture. Our values may be distinct, and our history, but our culture? At least here in the English-speaking part of Canada, the culture is vaguely American with a lacquer of branded fandom for Tim Horton's and the NHL.
Trudeau wasn't wrong. The fact that conservatives pillory him for this rare moment of truth-telling is part of what's turned him into such a breathy-mouthed coward.
They attack him because, rightly, it was his father who set in place a series of policies that destroyed English Canada's once unique, distinctly British, culture.
But, why do I care? My parents dragged me into Canada at age six, I left as soon as I graduated. Not my country, not my problem.
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.
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?
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.
Also Canadian - rip the Band-Aid off. Fuck those users honestly. Some would likely be family members to most, but it's not an excuse to defend an unnecessary middle-man.
Social media as a profit center is a failed experiment and it must be dismantled (simple news delivery or not) - distributed communities will make a return as it should be.
I respect your opinion, but to me the situation is more akin to a random algorithm distributing a whole manner of both healthy and junk foods together with no labels. Now we're worried about that the people will no longer know how to get food at all, or that it'll all be junk.
Facebook helped create that problem (accident or not) and that now needs to be undone - staying the course is not a preferable solution. The news outlets also deserve a chance to deliver directly to their readers and viewers - if they're no better off financially that's the outlet's problem. Potential financial extortion of the Canadian government aside, I think it's a net positive having news links off the platform.
Maybe there should be more government funding tax dollars to support outlets people respect - the sooner we find out the result of this the sooner we can try a next step. Maybe we got it wrong.
Do they? Or are they simply making the most logical business decision for them? If it costs Facebook more to allow links than it does to not allow links, why should they allow them? Is Facebook really made that much of a better product with the inclusion of news?
You need to look into their history of how they've dealt with traditional media. They are consistent about one thing, which is, they operate on bad faith. Their bad faith operations have had a hugely detrimental effect on real media; I am proud that my government does something rather than nothing, and I think it's fantastic that Facebook has "made the most logical business decision," because it gets them the fuck out of our business lol
Maybe if the government wants to do something, the parties in government should take their ads off Facebook. You know, put their money where their mouths are.
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.
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.
The Grits, Tories, and media companies in Toronto are all lizard people, but they’re much easier for Canadians like me to bully via ballot box than the lizard people running Meta.
(edit: as an aside, I just want to clarify that when I write “lizard people”, I mean to suggest politicians and corporate leadership acting out of self-interest rather than implying a bigoted conspiracy theory. I realized this could come off as anti-semetic in 2023; sorry if that landed poorly for anyone)
Maybe it's best to not call them "lizard people" as that's now conspiracy theory on right. If I saw someone on HN call a government official a lizard person I seriously wouldn't know if they were being literal
The Canadian ballot box isn't super effective though, since there's not really much competition for the Liberals given they cover the center pretty well and many people don't align with the Conservatives and NDP hasn't been very viable...
Is it any wonder then that the Liberals dragged their heels on the 2015 campaign promise of electoral reform?
As part of the process, the parliamentary committee released a survey asking questions like
* Independent candidates should be able to be elected to Parliament
* The current electoral system adequately reflects voters' intentions
* Seats should be allocated in proportion to the percentage of votes received by each political party
* Voters should elect local candidates to represent them in Parliament
* The current electoral system should be changed
* There should be parties in Parliament that represent the views of all Canadians, even if some are radical or extreme.
* Governments should have to negotiate their policy decisions with other parties in Parliament, even if it is less clear who is accountable for the resulting policy.
* It is better for several parties to have to govern together than for one party to make all the decisions in government, even if it takes longer for government to get things done.
>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.
>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?
There is no such thing. This regulation is the consequence of a regularly passed law (Bill C-18), that passed with about 210 to 110 majority. If I remember public poling on the issue correctly, on the bill itself popular opinion was pretty evenly split, but the underlying principle of tech companies paying domestic news, had wide majority support.
Framing this as something being imposed on citizens is disingenuous and effectively the Facebook PR line. Just with related media laws anywhere else it has little basis in reality.
How about get their news from independent journalists and fellow citizens?
Because we do that now. "News" sites with independent journalist filled with misinformation. Aunt Marge telling you what happened, only putting a religious slant on it.
And I can pretty well promise that neither Aunt Marge nor the "news" sites are going to have any news on the war in another country that your neighbor's son just died in, nor a drought that has affected wheat prices globally or things like that.
It isn't that professional journalists always get things right, but its better than Aunt Marge and the "news" sites out there.
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.
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.
Because, outside of QC at least, that's the country's only reason for existing and has been since the 18th century. First it was "staying with the UK and Crown" and now its "being more progressive" - both in reaction to what the US does.
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.
> 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.
Why does it matter whether they’re big players on a global basis or not? Those companies have an oligopoly over Canadian media. They also abuse their dominant position over Canadian wireless and broadband internet service, leading to some of the highest rates in the world.
Yet the government is passing even more laws to try to give them cash grabs. These companies should be broken apart and the spectrum sold off to smaller players. Canadians need more competition in both media and wireless / internet access, not less.
As someone who grew up from outside of the US/UK/Commonwealth, you really have to stretch the imagination to see the difference. Quebec is the only place in the US/CA I can feel is different.
Also: PostMedia, at least, is owned by an American hedge fund. I see this as more of an internecine war between U.S. capitalists over how to divide the spoils than anything else. Canada is only involved in a secondary role.
How exactly does Facebook and Google blocking links to news in Canada ensure that there are Canadian media? I'm having trouble seeing the connection from "fewer inbound links" to "sustainable Canadian news media".
Presumably he's talking about the intent of the law, which seems to have been to ensure news outlets actually receive money for linked articles. It seems that the government didn't expect Google or Facebook to just stop linking to Canadian news instead.
Canada appeared to be attempting to emulate countries like Australia, Spain, France, etc that have passed very similar laws. It seems like the tech giants were perfectly happy to just cut ties with Canadian media rather than make a deal however.
Its more like if instead of dropping you to a cinema a bus driver was showing you the full film so that you don't have to enter the cinema and spend money there.
Your analogy would only make sense if the bill were only trying to tax including all or part of a news article on Facebook/Google. It sounds like instead any link would be taxable, so it would be more like the bus driver having to pay the cinema for the privilege of driving you there.
"Clause 2(2) stipulates that news content is “made available” if two conditions are met:
that it, or any portion of it, is reproduced; and
that access to it is facilitated by “any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content.”
"
Just linking does not satisfy the first part of the clause according to the bill.
Edit: mannerheim points out that OP is quoting from an outdated version of the bill, and the final version is much worse. I'm going to leave my original reply because I think my objection is also valid, but mannerheim's point is more important:
I think that's ambiguous enough to be problematic. For example, does a slug (headline-with-hyphens-in-it) count? If so, links often do. What about the headline? And what if a user copies a paragraph into their post?
"Any portion" is language that gives away that this is intended to be read pretty broadly. There's no qualifier, no "significant" or "substantial". If the goal were to prevent the kind of abuse that your bus driver analogy suggests, they should have been more specific.
'Any portion' seems very much key (although the final version of the law is apparently even worse). Sites linking (that is, driving free traffic to a news website) often include the time and a one sentence or so (or even just a truncated sentence with ellipsis) so people know what they're clicking on. Sometimes a low-res thumbnail from the meta info.
Obviously this is entirely beneficial for the news source for this to be shown - this bill is like trying to go after people for copyright infringement for showing somebody a movie trailer (since the movie trailer contains "any portion" of the full feature film).
How does forcing some companies to pay to link TO a news story (and send traffic to that new story) do anything other than give an incentive not to link to news stories any more? How is making it impossible to discover news stories good for Canadian media? How is it good for Canadian citizens and Canadian democracy?
The underpinning concept in HTML is:
My document can link to your document without asking, and without cost.
This whole, if you send traffic to me you have to pay me for it is backwards.
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).
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.
> …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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Who's banning linking? The new law tried to get tech companies to pay to show the links with previews (similar to Australia and France, etc).
To be clear, the bill is fundamentally broken. It would require Google or Facebook to pay simply when links to news sites are served, rather than for reproducing or condensing the material in the news article as a "preview" sort of be thing (as in other countries). The bill isn't banning links explicitly, but the government should have seen this coming.
> The bill isn't banning links explicitly, but the government should have seen this coming.
Perhaps they could have listened when the two companies they are trying to impose this on provide suggestions - or maybe modeled it more closely after legislation in other countries where such media taxes have been successful.
But they could easily opt out with robots.txt. They want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the free traffic from search engines AND want google to pay them for the privilege of bringing them traffic.
robots.txt is not an actual Internet standard, and there are no standard controls for when a bot ignores its contents. You're on your own to protect your pages.
Granted, I have `disallow: /` in mine because I don't want my stuff scraped, but I still see Googlebot sometimes, and others, try to crawl my site.
It's not a very effective opt-out, because it requires the 'attacker' to honor the file's settings.
Feel free to enable it on your own server and watch the logs for a few days after sharing some links.
That's like demanding that Rand McNally pay a fee to each city they print onto their maps. Or demanding that World Book Encyclopedia pay a royalty fee to every entity they write an article about.
Noting that something exists and including it in reference material should by no means incur royalties.
Paid for what? If Google and social media sites didn't send people to the news sites for free through links, then the news sites would have to pay for a lot more advertising to get the same visitors...
Traffic is not money. Traffic is exposure. Ads are money. Facebook keeps the ad revenue and the media are left with the expense of creating content. Exposure my bare behind.
"Traffic is exposure"? What are you talking about? People see links in Google and FB, a significant amount click on those links and visit the news site. How does FB keep the ad revenue? Your comment makes no sense.
That makes no sense. Social media drives people to the news site. Google and social media aren't showing all or even large parts of the articles. If the news website fails to monetise those visits then it's their problem...
Facebook needs content, but it doesn't need news content.
In fact, you could probably make the case Facebook would be made better without news content. It's interesting that they chose to remove all news content for Canadians, rather than just Canadian news. I assume this was a good opportunity for them to try out some user testing.
> Facebook would be made better without news content.
This. Times 1000. My neighbor's cat's incredible Easter Island vacation photos are much more interesting that 1000 articles about presidential politics.
Facebook posts their content, and in return the agencies can run ads and beg for subscriptions from the traffic that Facebook drives to them. They both benefit.
People post links to their content. Not the content itself - this is a very strong misconception that has been at the heart of all of these bills and laws (Australia, this one, etc.) - from the start, there seems to be a determination to treat posting a link with maybe a headline and one sentence of preview as being the exact same thing as posting the entire article, which is incorrect and ludicrous!
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.
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."
As a Canadian, I’m glad that Meta is doing this. Google is going to be doing it soon as well from what I’ve heard.
The irony is the government says their intent was to “protect Canadian media by getting big tech to pay their fair share” and it is backfiring spectacularly. Having the opposite effect where there is less traffic going to these media sites, and will have a big impact on their bottom line from their innability to run ads on their own domains and make revenue that way.
Of course, this will just lead to another media bailout making them even more reliant on government subsidy - which the Liberal party will use as a wedge issue come election time because the opposition (which is leading and gaining in the polls right now) will want to defund them. Wether this would be successful as an election issue is yet to be seen, but there’s one thing that the Liberal party is good at is demonizing the opposition and if their gravy train is on the line I’m sure e media corps will gladly indulge him.
And of course this completely neuters independent media which is much more likely to actually be critical of the establishment. Leaving only pro establishment agencies in place to do the bidding of the hand that feeds them.
So the big players take a hit to revenue (and get bailed out), and every one else gets completely wiped out.
It’s absolutely sinister what Justin Trudeau’s government is doing. I used to think they were just stupid but it’s scandal after corruption scandal after corruption scandal with him. At some point you stop giving them the benefit of the doubt.
> Having the opposite effect where there is less traffic going to these media sites, and will have a big impact on their bottom line from their innability to run ads on their own domains and make revenue that way.
I think this happened to France early on. What they did was to force Google to pay no matter what. Optically, it looks like extortion and protectionist laws for incumbents too big to fail.
I’m not sure Canada can go that route though since they probably care about their relationship with the US unlike France.
I really want to see tech companies pull out of France and watch it collapse technologically overnight because of this. Ridiculous that the government can get away with acting like this.
I can’t find that anywhere. I see google was fined for not compensating publishers. But not that google blocked news or whatever in France and still owed publishers something.
It's all just consistent with Canadian economic policy since confederation and before. The preference here is for monopolies dating back to the Hudson's Bay Company, etc, and powerful protected interests in large part control the state here ... Both major parties are completely under their control, just with variance in the sectors. The federal Conservatives are dominated and controlled these days by western energy sector interests (and the provincial Ontario ones by real estate development). The federal Liberals by the Westons and Bell and, it seems, the shrinking media sector.
Nationalism is the sugar water they use to sweeten the deal to make it palatable to Canadians. People have a gut reflex to swallow this stuff because they are rightly or wrongly attuned to the threat of dominance from the US.
When Harper was prime minister, it was all about fossil fuel companies, defunding and silencing climate scientists, shoveling money into projects in the west and energy sector, etc. With Trudeau it's just a different pile of bullshit.
I'm sick of the dysfunction. It's a corrupt state, with corrupt, colonial foundations.
One of the ways less corrupt countries keep it that way is by free societies calling out and addressing that corruption. When we refuse to, that’s when corruption festers, even if it looks like heaven on earth to an outsider, corruption is corruption.
We’re not North Korea or anything like that, but we have a pretty terrible legacy with residential schools and the destruction of indigenous people’s families, languages, and cultures, not to mention land.
Canada is also in the midst of the biggest housing affordability crisis we’ve ever had. We’re in 3rd place in the world behind Luxembourg and Portugal for the most unaffordable housing, relative to income.
The U.S. may have some serious affordability issues in the Bay Area, Seattle, and New York, but large swaths of the rest of the country aren’t so bad. Most Canadians are crowded into a few extremely unaffordable cities.
But sometimes I talk to (born) Canadians - I’m an immigrant here - and they think of these issues as overwhelming, unsolvable crises that fundamentally undermine the viability of Canada as a nation.
And I think this isn’t a good problem-solving mindset, and isn’t the correct perspective either.
Or maybe I totally overinterpret their level of exasperation.
Well, like anything people's mindsets are relative to the situation. Most Canadians cannot possibly imagine what Ukrainians are going through. If we could, we would probably be a lot happier with the situation we have here.
But that doesn't change the fact that Canadian democracy is under a lot of pressure with polarization and influence by wealthy special interests. We would be a lot better off if we had a better electoral system and were able to move toward more Scandinavian-style social systems.
I take your point. I don't blame them for not knowing how bad it is elsewhere. But what I'm saying is that this lack of perspective leads many Canadians to underestimate the value of the system as it exists today.
First-past-the-post - FPTP - and wealthy interests have been here for a long time now. The system as it exists today works insanely great. This came to pass in spite of FPTP and the wealthy interest (hell, maybe even in part because of them).
Because the problems here are minor, the changes to the system should be mild, not radical. You don't give a complicated mechanism a big kick hoping to take it from 99% to 100% efficiency. You fine-tune it very carefully. Big kicks are for going from 0% to 50%.
Those of us born here have seen the decline. And are not happy about it.
I'm 50 next year, and have been politically conscious since I was a teen.. so have seen a half a century of it.
In particular the decimation of the health care system has just been slow and terrible to watch. Destruction of green spaces, sprawl, and difficulty of living in the GTA. Destruction of farmland, garbage on the beaches, overcrowding in almost every tourist or recreational area near Toronto. Nasty political polarization and viciousness. Racism and bigotry on the rise. And worst of all, that housing has become inconceivably expensive for working class people.
I wouldn't call the problems -- especially the trend line of them -- minor.
The expectation for previous generations was improvement of quality of life over generations. Unfortunately, that's no longer the case.
Again, I blame both major political parties. Liberals just happen to be wearing the hat right now federally.
I can see your point of view. Here's why I think these problems are "minor": there's a very richly-resourced system of capital, highly-developed and educated people, developed systems, and social trust (even if you think trust is declining, it's approximately one million times higher than the world average).
This system can take care of every problem you mention with a couple of tweaks. Now "tweak" doesn't mean it's easy or will work instantly; it might take decades and consume entire political careers. But there's no need for a total re-imagining, or a doom-and-gloom outlook.
Most bad things I've noticed in my time here (GTA + Calgary) can be fixed by cheap housing. This is a matter of political will - there's a ton of space and a ton of capital ready to triple our housing stock in a year if they're allowed to build. Toronto doesn't have to be the Center of the Universe. Even if we insist on putting every tourist and immigrant in this one city, there's so much space around it, it could in principle be one of the biggest on the planet.
I'm not arguing for complacency. I'm saying let's not throw our hands up in the air.
If all media outlets no longer receive traffic from big tech companies there's actually a decent chance that it will not affect their traffic much. If only some news outlets would be affected the others would profit, but if all are than there is a good chance that people just start accessing news more directly again.
> In 2000, Jimmy Fallon performed in blackface on Saturday Night Live, imitating former cast member Chris Rock.
> Jimmy Kimmel donned black paint over his body and used an exaggerated, accented voice to portray NBA player Karl Malone on The Man Show in 2003.
> In 2007, Sarah Silverman performed in blackface for a skit from The Sarah Silverman Program.
I don't think many people really realized blackface was problematic until sometime after 2007. Twitter started in 2006, so I imagine awareness improved in part due to twitter.
Can you give more sources into the 2017 FPTP not happening event?
That was one of the biggest issues I was rooting for, and they claimed "it wouldnt have benefit the system", which I mark as bullshit on the theory [1]
So I was always curious about the inside baseball of why it failed
[1] I did my Msc. thesis on game theory - not on public choice stuff but still I'd consider myself versed in the matter
They (Liberals) only wanted an end to FPTP if they could get ranked ballots,
And the multiparty committee that was struck to look at the issue refused to accept that, and recommended a mixed-member proportional system. Ranked ballots would effectively mean, in the context of Canadian politics, a strong bias towards the Liberals -- because in a Venn Diagram of voter preferences in Canada the Liberals almost always end up in the centre. So ranked ballots would effectively end the NDP and other third/fourth parties as an electoral force, or so NDP & Bloc & Greens analysts etc thought.
It's notable that Australia's ranked ballot system also seems to have narrowed choices there to a two party system and they have no left wing party equivalent to the NDP anymore.
The NDP favours a proportional or mixed-member proportional system and has since its founding in the 60s & the Conservatives don't want any reform at all.
So Trudeau killed the committee, gimped the minister in charge of it, and lied and said "the committee couldn't come to an agreement" -- which really meant: they wouldn't adopt the policy he demanded.
And that was the closing of that very briefly open window.
If Canada ever gets electoral reform federally it will be because the NDP wins power, by some freak accident. Except Singh has basically sunk the party.
> It's notable that Australia's ranked ballot system also seems to have narrowed choices there to a two party system and they have no left wing party equivalent to the NDP anymore.
It's been a while since I studied the topic, but that's a bad way to frame it. You have a set of policy ideas, which get aggregated in member constituents (congress in the US, parliament in Canada, etc.) and those get aggregated into parties.
Changing the voting system changes the voting power of policies against each other. Ranked voting for instance diminishes the electability of policies that people *hate* (so a lot of right wing culture war stuff for instance get reduced by ranked choice)
> because in a Venn Diagram of voter preferences in Canada the Liberals almost always end up in the centre
That was a very short term way of thinking on their end (no surprise from politicians tbh). The change in voting system would change what policies the parties are about over the medium-long run.
Even though the name of the parties might remain the same -- the actual discussion and policies being proposed change in response.
> The NDP favours a proportional or mixed-member proportional system
I'd be fine with that. I also like cardinal voting a lot tbh.
> the Conservatives don't want any reform at all.
No surprise there, they're coasting on the hilarious overrepresentation of suburbs and exurbs + FPTP being a broken piece of crap.
> If Canada ever gets electoral reform federally it will be because the NDP wins power, by some freak accident.
Canadian liberals will sink themselves like they did in Quebec IMO.
The sad truth is that it'll get us some wacko culture war right winger for a decade rather than a healthier center-left wing party.
Story time: For a brief period 10 years ago the Liberals were sunk down to the point where the NDP was official opposition and leading in the polls heading into the election. Their leader (Tom Mulcair) was a fairly moderate social democrat with amazing parliamentary skills, powerful in both languages, a hardened debater and a former Quebec provincial Liberal cabinet member with a strong base in Quebec (new for the NDP) and polled reasonably well federally. Plus they were running on the sympathy and charisma from their recently well loved but deceased former leader, Jack Layton. And people were pissed at the Liberals for post-Y2K era corruption scandal, after the Liberals had ruled Canada for well over a decade under Chretien. And the Conservative prime minister at the time, Stephen Harper, a machiavellian backroom manipulator wearing a bit of a scandal himself, also basically a subtle climate change denier... was pretty hated, and had really hit his expiry date.
Things looked fantastic for the NDP, and not good for the Liberals and their new young and inexperienced leader, Justin Trudeau, who seemed to only have his name and good looks going for him.
Until the latter half of the campaign, when three things happened: 1) Mulcair took a principled stand during the debate about Islamaphobia (anti-veil laws) in Quebec... while Trudeau waffled. 2) Canadian capitalism got freaked out about the idea of an NDP government... and ... most importantly ... 3) The Liberal pivoted on policy on two popular issues: Marijuana legalization and Electoral Reform... both things they had always been opposed to, and which were NDP policy planks since its founding.
They stole the policy items from the NDP, insisted that this would be the last FPTP election, and in the last few weeks of the election the polls shifted dramatically and the NDP have never recovered.
We did get cannabis legalization, but electoral reform never happened. It never will because any party that has enough power to enact would have too much to lose from actually enacting it.
The Liberals have "died" a couple times in the last couple decades and always re-emerge. Because Canadian capitalism will never ever let the other "left" party -- the NDP -- get elected federally. When it happened provincially in Ontario in the 90s, Bay Street finance shit their pants and went on a capital strike and no matter how moderately they attempted to govern, they were railroaded and destroyed. Similar thing in Alberta, down to death threats and harassment, etc.
In any case, all that said, despite that ... one of the strengths of Canada vs the US is that we don't have the two-party trap that the US has (and Australia). It pushes policy and keeps debate options around doors that have definitely closed in the US.
You mention that in certain reform situations the focus of debate moves from party structure and representatives towards jockeying and moving within parties. And actually this is how the US system is. There's plenty of "left wing" and "socialists" activists in the Democratic party. And they exist only up until the primary level, and then their viewpoints are exterminated. They are never able to present in a legislature, to put forward bills, and to really compete on the national stage, and so they are continually taken advantage of and then strategically defeated over and over again. To the point where US politics has narrowed so intensely that the public there does not even recognize any political-economic policy as being possible left of what would be quite right-wing policy in most other western countries.
I do not want this for Canada. I actually think ranked ballots, based on the experience of places like Australia, would take us directly there.
Canada should have an MMP system, like Germany. Like Germany we are a federal system with strong provinces (Länder there). Like Germany we value local representation, and a parliamentary structure. And like Germany, I think most of us would like to keep our history of a diversity of political parties, but without it degrading into an Israel or Italy. I think Germany has a good model to offer in this regard.
For what it's worth, in general, the more information the voting system provides, the more. I tend to like it.
I prefer IRV ranked choice to FPTP. I prefer proportional if possible. I tend to really like cardinal systems [1].
I think the fact that ranked sometime leads to deadlocked systems is more of an issue of how representative voting is made (rather than the public voting system itself). You talk about mixed representation, which is a good idea for instance.
My main issue is that we don't change the voting system all that much, when it could yield massive societal benefits. I'd much prefer a ranked system to a FPTP system we currently have.
The problem with all of these laws is the lack of integrity in the underlying logic. The laws are written because ad revenue is no longer supporting news. But the laws are written as if somehow this is connected to social media and search linking to news media content. It just isn't. You can take away all the news media content (as Facebook is) and you will still have no ad business left for news media. The ads are going where the eyeballs are and it's just a brutal fact that the eyeballs want much more than news media - they want a lot of other things that the news media aren't providing. So they go where they can get what they want.
Trying to fix any complex problem without addressing the root cause is nearly always going to be futile. The root cause here is something important to society (news media) is intrinsically / structurally impossible to fund organically. The people who need it most either can't or won't pay for it (and many are in the "can't" bucket).
Guess what, there are many things like that. We structurally can't fund hospitals, roads, defense either based on organic funding methods. When we want or need something that can't be funded like that, there is one party that is supposed to step up to the table - designed by intent for that purpose.
Which is all to say that to me, a lot of what is happening here is theatrics because governments want to avoid doing the actual hard thing which is convincing taxpayers that this should be part of what we support through broad based support as societies.
> governments want to avoid doing the actual hard thing which is convincing taxpayers that this should be part of what we support through broad based support as societies.
I think it’s a level beyond that, to the point that I’d just call it pure corruption. A government-mandated fee that a company has to pay isn’t any different than a tax. They’re taxing big tech, which is fine, and most people wouldn’t have a problem with that.
But then instead of booking that as revenue and deciding what to do with the money as part of the normal budgetary process, they’re short-circuiting procedure to send that money to news companies. If the government wants to fund news companies, it should be done in the normal way that all the other government funding gets decided upon, not in a special allocation just for news companies that is excluded from the federal budget.
News companies are always interacting with politicians, always criticizing the government. The logic is to distance as much as possible the monetary help from the government. So you don’t have the appearance of collusion. Media companies themselves want it that way.
i'm not sure if you're trying to back up my point or disagree, but yeah. they're trying to hide the money as much as possible. that's why it's so bad. it is collusion, so if there's no appearance of it that's a problem.
if the government is going to be paying the media to report on them, that needs to happen in the open.
You think a law that forces tech companies to sign deals with Canadian media companies is more problematic than taxation and a check with the country’s flag on it?
I beg to differ. Media companies need as much hands-off from the government as possible.
Next they'll sue for monopoly on eyeballs and they'll have a strong case, as evidenced by how these two companies were able to starve an entire country's news medias by merely ignoring them.
I think what the Canadian govt is legislating is silly but it's not like there's no problem: foreign governments in the US-sphere are losing a ton of tax revenue to US entities that are capturing all the value. This essentially strips the residents of wealth, further putting them at a comparative disadvantage in all other fields. Eyeballs are at the center of the largest commercial entities on the planet. There's a lot of value here being sent to the US with no obvious return mechanism.
Not recognizing this will prevent any mutually agreeable solution from being found. Canada isn't keeping up with the US and things aren't looking up either.
If they simply acknowledged that and said "we are making a tax on tech social/search companies" and then that they were distributing the proceeds of that to news/media? I'd be fine with it. It's the theatrics that are the problem - pretending the underlying issue is social/search "stealing" content from news media.
This isn't benign - setting precedents that linking to something is stealing it is toxic to the whole concept of the internet itself. It may take a while to seep through but that precedent is going to get built on by every other aggrieved party who sees an opportunity there eventually.
>This isn't benign - setting precedents that linking to something is stealing it is toxic to the whole concept of the internet itself
this is why we need to care. doing theatrics to hide their dirty spending is one thing. but they should at least do their dirt in a way that doesn't have the side effect of breaking how the internet works.
Newspapers and magazines thrived for more than a century on ads, subscriptions and the like.
The calculus will have to change in the digital era. There are effects like zero marginal cost that are genuine challenges. But the targeted adtech period is such a great economic and social distortion it makes a difficult problem almost impossible.
This actually made our neighbourhood and local politics Facebook groups more tolerable (which is the only reason I still use it once a week). It was basically 24/7 ragebait articles being shared around anyways, since that’s the only way of gathering large-scale engagement.
I would assume that they don't mean "local group discussing national politics", but "local group discussing local politics". Think city councils and mayors.
At least where I'm at, local politics is the only sane politics left. It helps that in my city we don't have a party system at the local level, so candidates have to run on their own platform instead of on party affiliation.
Fastest way to get information regarding street closures, city events, infrastructure upgrades and etc. At least in my city 80% of the people in the group sound reasonable, so it’s fun Saturday morning reads.
Most of the toxicity comes from larger political groups, and yeah, agreed they are absolutely trash.
I'm not Canadian (nor American), but I used a few back in the day when I had Facebook. It was actually not that bad when people used those groups for local politics only. When it becomes too partisan then it's unbearable, but moderators can squash that.
I think that requires the moderators to be willing to do so, both in the sense that they are inclined to strongly moderate the group, and in the sense that they aren’t themselves getting an emotional high out of the ragebait.
Note that the law intentionally has a backdoor that allows to exclude any digital platform from having to bargain with media outlets by decision of Governor [1]:
> The Commission must make an exemption order in relation to a digital news intermediary if ... the following conditions are met:
> ...
> (b) any condition set out in regulations made by the Governor in Council.
So instead of treating every digital platform equally and clearly writing the rules they have reserved an option to make arbitrary exemptions. I wonder, who will get an exemption? Canadian search engine? Or maybe a company managed by a friend of the Governor?
The definition of "eligible news business" (who is supposed to receive money) is also written unclearly, for example in article 27:
> 27 (1) At the request of a news business, the Commission must, by order, designate the business as eligible if it ...
> ...
> produces news content that is not primarily focused on a particular topic such as industry-specific news, sports, recreation, arts, lifestyle or entertainment, and
This rule allows to exclude anyone, because you can always say that this newspaper is too focused on politics, that one is too focused on the war etc.
"Governor in Council" in the Canadian political system is the Cabinet.
Who serve at the will of the PM, he recently just shuffled them around. Recently the government has concentrated and centralized power in remarkable ways that goes largely unnoticed.
This has been the largest trend in western countries since early 2000s (growth in executive/PM power). And Canada wasn't even close to the notorious executive over reach of the US until recently (if anything Canada has long been a better beacon for state-rights/federalism than even the US), but like all Canadian politicians they get jealous of the US system of power.
Im not sure that it goes unnoticed. People are literally asking for it. Not necessarily the particular event you mention but generally for the government to expand power with the expectation that they can do more good.
You're missing the context of Canadian administrative law.
As other commenters have noted, "Governor in Council" means the federal Cabinet, but more importantly than that "regulations made by the Governor in Council" is a magic phrase that allows published, regulatory rulemaking. This works in much the same way as when the US Congress passes a bill that authorizes the EPA to regulate air pollution.
This system generally gives greater grants of regulatory authority than the US system. Since Canada has a Westminster form of government based on partial unification of the executive and legislative branches, the executive (Prime Minister / Cabinet) is assumed to always be operating with the confidence of Parliament. (If that isn't the case, Parliament can turf the Prime Minister and by extension Cabinet.) The net result is that while the US has ingrained hostility between legislators and regulatory rulemakers, the situation in Canada is more one of cooperation and delegation.
Your concern about "you can always say that this newspaper [etc]" is textually founded, but an important rule in Canadian administrative law is that regulatory grants must be exercised 'reasonably', compatibly with both the text and intended purpose of the legislation.
A designation made (or not made) under 27(1) would be subject to judicial review if the denied business so wishes, giving courts the opportunity to weigh in. An arbitrary regulatory ruling made on thin grounds would not survive its day in court.
This has happened in every other places such a plan has been tried like Spain or Australia. What did they expect?
And really, what else could goog/fb etc do -- what other company or person for that matter would pay someone in order to provide them a service? Governments tax things they want less of (e.g. smoking) so this should be no surprise.
Sylvain Poisson of Hebdos Quebec confidently said “they made those threats in Australia and elsewhere and every time they back down.” Chris Pedigo of the U.S.-based Digital Context Next assured the committee “it’s important to understand what happens when these bills become law. In Australia, they moved quickly to secure deals.
And apparently we've yet to hear from Google on this regarding Canada. But what's different? It's hard to see how Google can have a principled objection to Canadian but not Australian danegeld.
The dirty secret is that the Australian law doesn't actually apply to anyone. They passed the law, but left it to the government to define which companies are in scope. And the government never designated any companies to it.
Basically it appears that the tech companies signing the same kinds of deals as elsewhere is being spun as a success of the legislation, even though the law does not apply to anyone, as a face saving measure.
[Australian here] Recalling these 'negotiations' when they happened and when Facebook blocked news links for a short while (which was actually quite a lovely time) - the whole thing came across as a shake-down with all the subtlety of a tele-evangelist.
I'm Canadian and I suspect our problem is that we're approaching this in earnest, not realizing that the Australian law was a shakedown and made no sense from an earnest perspective.
We were advised by Australia's top policy wonk, but maybe he was in earnest and didn't understand the game he was in.
I've got mixed feelings about the news media bargaining code but I don't think the lack of designations is one of its problems. Only stepping in once negotiations fail seems to be how the law is intended to operate. 52E(3) of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 says that in making the designation that the code applies the minister must consider:
1. Whether a significant bargaining power imbalance exists.
2. Whether the platform has made a significant contribution to the sustainability of news media.
As to 1. the mere existence of the code seems to redress any power imbalance somewhat. As for 2. The actual deals Facebook and Google made in response to the law being enacted are confidential, but many news media companies said they were happy with the results so there wouldn't seem to be any reason to designate these organisations in the first place.
Details matter? Australian law may have had details to make negotiations happen and result in deals that are still commercially viable for search engines.
I believe the Australian deals were "tell you what: we won't pay you, but we'll continue to send you traffic" and the papers realised that that was better than the alternative: "we won't pay you and we won't send you traffic either."
How is Facebook providing the news sites a service? Did they go out to Facebook and say "please post our content on your users' feeds"? No. It's not a business relationship between the two. Facebook users are posting the news sites' content on Facebook, which enriches Facebook and the Facebook users.
Now, whether posting links is the kind of enrichment that deserves payment is a separate question. But the idea that Facebook is somehow providing news sites a service in some sort of charitable way by allowing URLs to be posted by 3rd parties is ridiculous.
The equation is different for Google and search indexing, though. And of course once Google started harvesting content directly from third party websites and shoving it into answerboxes, actively siphoning traffic away, it got more complex.
>Did they go out to Facebook and say "please post our content on your users' feeds"?
In most cases, yes:
>Our users – and in this case news publishers – choose to share it themselves. Globally, more than 90% of organic views on article links from news publishers are on links posted by the publishers themselves.
Nobody is surprised. People discuss current events without being surprised. In this case it’s a negotiation struggle between two parties, they will both play their cards until one side gives up. Any side can decide to increase pressure or give up at any time, there isn’t just one possible outcome.
>In this case it’s a negotiation struggle between two parties
Not necessarily. Meta eliminating news from Facebook and Instagram is consistent with either of two scenarios:
1. They're playing 'hardball' to negotiate a better outcome
2. The amount they would have to pay outweighs any benefit they gain from keeping news links on Facebook and Instagram.
If a prospective employee would not provide a business with more than minimum wage in productivity, it is not a 'negotiating struggle' if they don't hire him; it simply means it isn't worth it to them.
The difference here being, if this is simply a negotiating tactic, it is rational to just outwait Meta; they will restore news links eventually, because the benefit outweighs the cost.
But if it isn't worth it because of scenario 2, they could just never restore news links.
So the real question here is: How much value is added to Facebook and Instagram by allowing news links on those platforms?
Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if the value added were negative.
Good. If journalists had been doing their job for the last 15 years they would not need federal intervention to force other businesses to fund them, they would not need subsidies, and we would not have these incompetent politicians and these repeated failures on almost every level of government.
Journalists need to do their job for subscribers and the public:
* Keep an updated profile on every elected official, judge, journalists, high level clerk, private entities and their owners who work for government and who get money from government.
* Keep track of the MONEY by providing analysis and correlations of potential misbehaving officials.
* Who voted for what and how it conflicts with their promises for the term.
* Every statement from elected official and how it conflicts with previous statements, corresponding retractions or post mortems.
* Previous and future employment history of elected officials to root out ethicsless individuals.
* There's a very long list of accountability measures journalists should be providing to make them worth their weight but they do only the above with extreme ideological selectiveness which nullifies it all. It needs to be done in full for them all of them to be objective and to get Canadians to subscribe to them.
Journalists aren't the ones who make decisions about how a news site monetizes its content, and they aren't the ones responsible for the consolidation of the media. This whole dispute is 100% about monetization and has nothing to do with the idea that journalists somehow completely abandoned their responsibilities.
Sorry, but that's simply not true. The ICIJ (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists) released things like the Panama Papers and Football Leaks. Those were massive investigations, and yet the yielded little attention.
Simply do opinion pieces about migration, climate or gender and you'll get a hundred times the attention (and ads.)
Newspapers no longer have the news alone, they don't have a used-item market (ebay) or real estate ads. Those were cross-funding the real journalism.
Look no further than Trump to see how much "the people" care about the truth.
I hope Google follows through, too. The government forcing two companies to pay for links to news is pretty disgusting rent seeking by media companies.
The media actual controls the summaries seen. They purposefully made large, enticing summaries in order to encourage clicks! They are free to write any summary they want.
That's an opinion to have but the Canadian people, through their elected representatives, have decided they disagree and have codified that requirement into law.
The Canadian people have asked their government to pass these laws and Facebook doesn't want to follow them. No one is forcing Facebook to operate in Canada. They're welcome to leave at any time if they don't like it - we all know FB talks a big game and won't do that, but I know I'm not alone in secretly hoping it happens anyway. Zuck can go zuck himself.
The “we voted for it so it’s voluntary” people always seem to move goalposts when you try applying their logic in a scenario that doesn’t benefit them. Would you like to prove me wrong?
> Canadian media is a loser, particularly the small and independent media outlets that are more reliant on social media to develop community and build their audience.
So, regulatory capture by the largest media companies?
This is likely the intended result, without caring at all if it generates revenue for the large media corporations. Consolidated media is easier to influence and manipulate.
Stupid, stupid, stupid politicians and media companies. I'm glad to see tech companies show some backbone to the sheer hubris and greed that they were being subjected to.
There is no other way that news companies will be shared except via social media. I hope within weeks they are on their knees, begging for the law to be repealed. Too bad you can't recall politicians in Canada the same way you can in the US.
> For months, supporters of Bill C-18, the Online News Act, assured the government that Meta and Google were bluffing when they warned that a bill based on mandated payments for links was unworkable and they would comply with it by removing links to news from their platforms.
So its already moved from “Facebook removing news is bad and not going to happen as a consequence of this law” (the quote) to “the Canadian government’s ban on news is good for Canada ( the comments here).
The intention was never to ban news. It was to take a cut. If they wanted to ban news that would have been the law. Regardless of whether you think the effect is good or not, the laws purpose has failed. It was a blunder.
I'm Canadian and I'm not upset by this. If you can't find the local news websites, it's probably best that you don't get the news. Incompetence and (dis)information are a bad combination.
What's he so angry about? He's getting just what the news site operators wanted: for Meta to stop linking to their sites without paying them. Problem solved! They won't be linked to any more!
As a Canadian, I applaud this. And I hope the government sticks to its guns. This is not just about "big Canadian media", it affects a lot of small outlets who draw from the journalism fund as well.
It was stupid to allow media business models to depend on monopolistic search engines and social media platforms in the first place. This stuff is like hard drugs. For everybody.
And getting off the smack is painful.
The Canadians who care about this are going to find other ways to get their news. And the ones who don't weren't part of the real readership in the first place.
There is likely engagement statistics available from other countries on how much engagement was/wasn't lost, and how it changed in other contries where this was started.
With the erosion of local and hyper-local news in Canada and North America - the media that was largely being cut out is the national chains who are shutting down many of the local papers and leaving broader, more generalized coverage that is not regionally accurate in some cases.
Hyper local media wouldn't have the $ to lobby like this. It's not entirely unclear how much they were consulted in a meaningful way.
For example hearing something about the real estate industry in "Canada" often means Toronto, or Vancouver only, when there are plenty of interesting things happening in other areas contrary to this reporting, much like the US.
False. Australia is the example often cited, but Australia caved and elected not to apply the law to Google and Facebook. Instead, Facebook and Google made deals outside of the law.
These deals were surely larger than their earlier deals, but small enough they could live with them. The terms were never published.
Seeing how misperception of this led directly to the Canadian law, my suspicion is Meta is now done with the charade lest others copy it, and will keep news out unless the law is repealed.
There are, to my knowledge, zero countries where Meta engaged in a forced negotiation framework such as the Canadian law. If you disagree, could you please name one?
Sorry if I wasn't clear, I was suggesting that Facebook has yet to comply to these kinds of rules directly and as you noted for Australia, they made their own deal.
Less fake news, less engagement on platforms, less polarization. Why can't Canadians open their browsers and type in www.news-site.com if they want news? The Canadian government is obviously putting forward some really dumb policy, but the unintended consequences seem like a win-win to me. Hopefully neither side backs down and we'll get a juicy experiment to watch.
> Why can't Canadians open their browsers and type in www.news-site.com if they want news?
We can, I don't see what the problem is here either. I don't think it will lead to less fake news and less engagement though. People are addicted to this horrible cesspool, especially older folks, nothing you can do about that unfortunately. That ship has sailed.
If it results in 10% reduction in engagement or fake news, I think its worth it. I do wonder: can you share substack, medium.com, or similar links? Do blogs count as news?
Because the majority of Canadians never learned what the WWW is/was, and think of the Internet only as something they get through Facebook.
I'm being snarky and exaggerating, but it's not far off. Companies & contractors etcget squirrely & weird about e-mail, don't respond to it... but respond to Facebook Messenger in an instant, or have a Twitter feed. Schools & schoolboards don't update their own websites, but post updates on Twitter and Facebook. Want to find out about school snow day closure? You're going to hear about it on Twitter first, etc. Road closures from the city? Traffic incidents, fires, or crime notices from the police or fire department? Have fun finding it on anything other than social media.
It's a bleak, privatized, walled-off state of affairs, the opposite of what we were all pushing for in the 90s.
This only affects canadian news on those platforms. Canadian users can still see US news, disinformation, and polarizing things. All this does is block canadian news from reaching canadians. There are no positive benefits.
This reduces the reach of canadian news, increases the reach of US news, and reduces income to canadian news sources from social media traffic. There's no win here at all. The legislation does the opposite of what it claims it wants to do.
> Why can't Canadians open their browsers and type in www.news-site.com if they want news?
Well, it turns out news-site.com requires a paid subscription. The clickbait headlines and slugs on Facebook were free. No paid subscription required, just sign a contract for your soul in blood. Now Old Scratch is throwing a hissy fit and withholding the good intentions along his road.
These media companies who want Meta to pay them for content sure seem to post an awful lot of content on Meta properties for free, seemingly on purpose.
As an American, I am wondering if I could somehow convince Meta that I'm Canadian, so as to exclude all news from my FB feed as well? But then, I'm on it once a week or less for the last few years, so I suppose it doesn't really matter.
And nothing of value was lost. We need a do over that aligns news with incentives for a working democracy. Now of course this isn’t it, but burning down Facebook news is a good step into the right direction.
Evidence imo that the laws legislators pass mean things, matter, and shouldn't be done without a lot of thinking.
It's also potentially an example of a company bigger and more powerful than small governments. Which could lead to problems, though this doesn't strike me as particularly the scariest one by a long shot.
"As disbelief has shifted to acceptance, Canadian media outlets are now rushing to promote direct access to their content via web, email or any other non-social media platform."
I don't understand how could any Canadians thought Meta not removing the news link. They are for-profit company. If the cost exceeds the benefit, they'll sure to chose the cheapest solution. Disabling the link for finite list of news domains? That's not that hard.
Meta isn't a pirate company believing all the information must be preserved. It has a history of complying the law by deleting posts. Be it copyright infringement, child porn, privacy information or national security, they deleted it.
Other non-Canadian news sources are still available right?
People will just waste time on those.
Frankly, if Canadians are reading news about Canada mostly from foreign news sources, this might weaken the Canadian government’s control on political narrative - since they can’t pressure foreign news sources like Reuters, CNN, or Fox News, much if at all.
Canada has a pretty independent press already (15th in the World Press Freedom Index). CNN and Fox News present narratives optimized for engagement by a U.S. audience. The only time they would present anything at all about Canada is when it would interest a U.S. viewer, and as U.S. audiences understand pretty much nothing about Canadian culture and politics, the coverage is rarely insightful or informative to a Canadian audience.
We never should've privatized the public square and monetizing attention at scale in the fashion that allows social media to succeed has been nothing but bad for society writ large. That these companies also managed to exploit and then cripple journalism as a practice is just one of many negative externalities.
Cory Docotorow puts all this in proper light in all his recent articles and appearances about "enshitification". Michael Geist is well advised to consider those angles, and think again about who the losers are, here.
Why make the fuss about taking government ads off of Facebook if you're not going to take your party ads off of it, too?
The answer is obvious: Government awareness campaigns might be less effective, hiring and recruitment might be more difficult, but neither poses a risk to the government for staying in government. There's no principle here, just politics.
Not really, in France same thing happened, and France signed a confidential deal with Google news (because close to zero in amount, just for face saving)
I am not sure I understand it correctly. It is not about Google News ripping article title and summaries but platform users sharing links? Publisher wanted to be paid for that?
If you look at the past, it was when Facebook adjusted their algorithms to promote posts from "friends" over news that the platform really started radicalizing its users. Now, in Canada at least, it's nothing but "friend" posts with no actual news to provide a reality check.
If they're in Canada, its time to get your parents off of Facebook. The Canadian government is really playing with fire here. They need to either get reality back on Facebook in Canada or they need to curb stomp Meta in Canada. They can't leave things as they currently are.
If they do make a deal, it should be pretty cheap now. The news sites will see their traffic drop off a cliff and probably feel pretty ready to start negotiating.
Canada is a lot closer to home, too. May happen in the other Americas too. I'm sure much more experienced and insightful folks on this might be able to comment, with or without a throwaway account.
It's been interesting seeing the reactions from my friends. It's a split down the middle between f the government and f the Americans. Seem like people are increasingly unable to be sensible re conversations like this these days, crazy how polarized things have become.
Mixing geo stuff with the Internet is like mixing milk and beer. Apps/websites behaving differently based on your “country” always feels weird and not very Internetty.
Sure, route my traffic to a local CDN cache, but don’t assume that’s my locale. Local newspaper websites make this mistake a lot assuming that being in the EU means I’m subject to GDPR and so cannot be shown the latest Bucks score on DeerLickTribune.com etc.
Facebook gets this right — they basically ask you your nationality in order to serve you legal traffic. The existence of a correct technical implementation does not make it right though. I don’t want HTTP to include an Accept-Jurisdiction header.
I wonder why Meta seems to be so unwilling to participate in negotiations in good faith here. What's different here compared to Australia and Europe, the post doesn't explain that.
> In fact, if Google follows suit, there will be even more cancelled deals, lost links, and absolutely no new revenues from the legislation given that those are the only companies subject to the law (former Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez’s insistence that there is value in links that deserve compensation while simultaneously excluding Microsoft, Apple, Twitter and other platforms from the law amply demonstrates how the argument stands on shaky grounds).
This law targets Facebook and Google specifically. Facebook has been willing to negotiate in other countries but where do you start when the premise is false?
What I'm hearing is that meta/google are threatening the government through public opinion on a piece of legislation that doesn't benefit them... How could anybody side with meta/google?
I’m on Google/meta’s side because link taxes are a bad idea for the internet as a whole. That anyone (even Meta, who I generally dislike) should have to pay to link to a news article is morally offensive to me.
I've skimmed the legislation multiple times, and the only thing close to a "link tax" is the theoretical ability of the government to create one if that's what's deemed fair.
I've yet to see anything that explains how a negatiations framework translates to a "link tax", but explaining it wasn't Google's goal when it coined the term to fight the bill.
Because one of the things the negotiating framework covers is how much money google and meta must pay to news providers when news content is “made available” to canadians, and “made available” specifically includes when “access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content”. So if the negotiated value is anything over $0 then, yeah, it’s a “link tax”.
The post states that in Canada the Government has ultimate authority over all payment negotiations, it would seem that in the other countries facebook and media companies can establish their own content licensing contracts as independent businesses ought to be able to.
They’re taking the decision making power away from the news agencies, not Zuck. Government is essentially banning news agencies from setting their own prices and instead taking all that power for themselves.
Lol. They're talking about meta running an expirement where they're threatening the government to change legislation that will lead to lower revenue and run the risk of losing that revenue anyway by removing news permanently.
The government isn't running any experiments, as always it's meta running the unsanctioned experiments.
I saw an estimate that it would have been something like a -6X ROI in this case. Would be a reasonable nonstarter to set a bad precedent (from Meta POV)
The Australian law got watered down to the point where it allowed Google and Facebook to have private negotiations with news companies on pricing, and come to mutually agreeable terms are not. The Australian landlord didn't force medicine Google to pay them or come to an agreement.
The Canadian law is different in that it did not leave any choice or negotiation up to the companies
Doesn't work by design, because of Final Offer Arbitration baked into the solution. FB and news cartel are expected to enter negotiations and at the end set their respective "final" best offers and government gets to choose one of them that will take effect. Everyone knows what will happen.
This is based on the idea of said negotiations being made in good faith in the first place, when in reality it's nothing more than the media conglomerates wanting to shake down tech companies.
What would happen if Meta and Google would say "As American companies, we are allowed to link to those news articles. If a Government thinks their citizens should not see those links, it is up to them to block their citizens from accessing our servers"?
Errr that’s not really how it works. Meta sells ads and conducts business in Canada. They have Canadian entity which is required to conduct business in Canada, and must comply with local laws to be permitted to conduct business there
A Canadian citizen buying from a foreign company is not the same as the company conducting business in Canada.
The citizen takes on the responsibility of making sure the legal process of doing business in Canada is upheld. EG, they cannot buy something that is illegal to own in Canada, and the relevant taxes and tariffs must be paid, all of those things.
Should Canada be placing tariffs on Facebook? That would be interesting to see.
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.