[HN Gopher] A year of Meta's news ban in Canada
___________________________________________________________________
A year of Meta's news ban in Canada
Author : ikesau
Score : 79 points
Date : 2024-08-02 19:23 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mediaecosystemobservatory.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mediaecosystemobservatory.com)
| ch33zer wrote:
| This is super interesting, but I think the question everyone
| wants an answer to is how are the news orgs doing? Are they going
| out of business or does the ban just not matter to them? Looking
| at revenue or other metrics would have been the study I'd want to
| see.
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| CBC is publicly funded so they aren't going to go out of
| business. The smaller outlets maybe, but remains to be seen.
| thrusong wrote:
| I mean, they'll probably shut down if Pierre Poilievre
| assumes power, though.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| One of the oldest (though smaller) dailies, the _Whitehorse
| Star_ , folded this past May:
|
| <https://thewalrus.ca/whitehorse-daily-star/>
| Scoundreller wrote:
| They're going out of business/further consolidating/mass layoff
| for a lot of reasons but this doesn't help.
|
| A lot of newsrooms have already done mass layoffs over the
| years and there isn't much more to cut other than shutting
| down.
|
| https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-wire-news-releases-pm...
|
| https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/corus-entertainment-says-ong...
|
| Can sort by date here and see a pile of newspaper closures in
| 2023:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_newspapers_o...
|
| Metromedia filed for bankruptcy and shut down all papers in
| August 2023: https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/an-atomic-bomb-for-
| local-news-me...
| humanlion87 wrote:
| This is especially having a huge negative impact on some of the
| smaller newspapers. One example from a recent article -
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/one-year-after-news-ban-can...
| jsnell wrote:
| Yeah. This study is almost entirely about vanity metrics. Like,
| who cares about the number of social media engagements for news
| companies? Nobody. They're not worth anything to anyone.
|
| Or how is the proportion of people who don't know that news
| content is blocked interesting?
|
| Basically, this appears to be a study of data that was easy to
| get, not of data that could produce any kind of actionable
| insights for anyone.
|
| In addition to the kind of data you asked for, data on whether
| use of FB/Instagram went down when the block was put in place
| would be fascinating.
| apatry wrote:
| I am curious if the reduction in quantity of news consumed
| resulted in an increase in average quality of news consumed.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| Seems like both a reduction in quality and quantity.
|
| > Canadians continue to learn about politics and current events
| through Facebook and Instagram, but through a more biased and
| less factual lens than before and many Canadians do not even
| realize the shift has occurred.
| stanleykm wrote:
| Although this makes me wonder about the nature of news that
| tends to get shared on social media. Is it factual reporting
| or is it opinions we pretend are factual because they're on
| the right domain?
| tossandthrow wrote:
| All media are under some influence and has an agenda.
| "factual" information is another way to say that the
| narrative is controlled in accordance with societal values.
|
| I think the take away is that Canada is loosing the ability
| to keep macro beliefs in check.
|
| It I'd going it be interesting to see what the long term
| management of this is.
|
| Interesting previous cases is how we shaped the media
| landscape after the second world War in order to (attempt
| to) eradicate nazist beliefs.
| Stefan-H wrote:
| If there is an increase in the quality of news consumed it is
| not the result of the quantity of news consumed decreasing. It
| would have to be the result of the consumers seeking alternate
| sources, or some other factor.
| meiraleal wrote:
| > If there is an increase in the quality of news consumed it
| is not the result of the quantity of news consumed
| decreasing.
|
| If you read 10x less news from Joe and Billy on Facebook but
| start reading from professional sources of news, they still
| might be bad but it will probably be a better article to
| read.
| bfung wrote:
| Other curiosity/follow-up questions:
|
| * has this impacted biases or political stances (extreme or
| middle) in any direction?
|
| * has this impacted individual happiness in any way?
| kredd wrote:
| My neighbourhood Facebook groups have gotten much more tolerable,
| if I'll be honest. People stopped polluting them with
| provincial/federal news, and just talk about hyper local stuff,
| which I really like.
| kbos87 wrote:
| For what it's worth I see a similar trend in the US. I'm in a
| few neighborhood/city Facebook groups in different places and
| over the past year or so there does seem to be a new,
| reasonable consensus of opinion against divisive topics or
| offensive/rude behavior. Posts have taken a turn toward being
| people-oriented (e.g., this person needs your help) and
| utilitarian (recommendations for tradespeople.) Angry, overly
| political, or confrontational posts are quickly called out or
| deprived of engagement. It's refreshing!
| kredd wrote:
| Yeah it is great, isn't it? Someone told me there was an
| announcement from Meta how they're deranking all political
| posts (maybe only on Threads?) and there was a lot of
| curfuffle that said stuff like "censorship", but I genuinely
| believe it's a very good idea. It sucks for big name
| political commentators, I guess, but I really don't want to
| see anything election related when I'm trying to find the
| opening hours for my farmer's market.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| This is one of the reasons politics is (loosely) a banned
| topic on HN: right or wrong, it has a tendency to just suck
| all the air out of the room if it's allowed to run rampant
| in every forum.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think social sharing of screenshots is a disease and I'm
| thinking about making a filter that blocks them. Yikes!
| rpdillon wrote:
| It's a common technique to get around censorship. Won't last
| long with how AI is progressing, though.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I've been thinking about a "mastodon reader that doesn't
| suck" and one of them would use OCR to eat image memes.
| seryoiupfurds wrote:
| This whole fiasco was such an obvious own-goal cooked up by an
| unholy coalition of newspaper industry lobbyists and progressive
| politicians who are explicitly hostile to understanding the
| simplest economic principles.
|
| To illustrate the absurdity, imagine if a newspaper had a
| community section containing blurbs about upcoming local events.
| Some well-meaning politician comes in and says that the newspaper
| should pay $10 to every event they feature, because they're
| benefitting from selling ads on the next page.
|
| The obvious outcome would be for the newspaper to decide that
| it's just not worth the trouble and remove the community events
| page. Now everyone is crying and blaming the rich evil newspaper
| because the events are struggling with less attendance than
| before.
|
| It turns out that having free links to their stories all over
| social media really was beneficial to the media, and they were
| the ones who would be harmed the most by punishing social media
| companies for allowing it.
|
| I've even seen news organizations' official accounts posting
| obfuscated links to their stories to get around the ban. Why
| would they do that, if the core premise that uncompensated links
| are "stealing" were even remotely close to being true?
| SpecialistK wrote:
| Very well put. The whole legislation is completely backwards to
| how the web has always worked.
|
| I run a website. I can pay Google, MS, Meta, etc money to make
| my site show up higher in search results. Or gain an audience
| through SEO and organic growth, including on social media. I'm
| happy when someone shares a link to it, because that means more
| eyeballs on what I'm putting out. Then I can choose if and how
| to monetize it. By suggesting that this harms the publisher
| makes no sense. Why would anyone ever pay for Google sponsored
| search results if it's harmful to their business?
|
| The lobbyists and politicians have framed it as "using" or
| "stealing" the content, which is an outright lie: reproducing
| content without permission is already covered by copyright law.
| Many of these news sites even have abstracts and social cards
| specifically for preview when shared.
|
| The other analogy I like is "journalists drink coffee when
| writing. Starbucks has lots of money. Let's force Starbucks to
| give journalists free coffee, and a dollar out of their till
| whenever a journalist walks in."
|
| It's backwards! Offensively so!
|
| If these publishers didn't want their content on Facebook or
| Google, they can use paywalls, robots.txt, or referral blocks
| to stop it showing up. But none did - they just wanted to bite
| the hand that feeds for a few bucks, and we see how well that
| worked out for them.
| seryoiupfurds wrote:
| Yes! The only argument I could ever get out of supporters of
| this law was "but they're billion-dollar corporations, they
| should pay their fair share!"
|
| Well fine, then adjust the corporate tax rate however you
| like -- but don't be surprised when the corporations you just
| described as self-interested and greedy react in the obvious
| way to a brand new, explicitly created economic disincentive.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _" but they're billion-dollar corporations, they should
| pay their fair share!"_
|
| I don't think this is an invalid argument. This is arguable
| how _YouTube_ works. One thing that is very interesting
| about Meta is that they have side-stepped the need to
| actually invest in content. There 's nothing wrong with
| saying "my content drove eyeballs to your platform, so give
| me a cut of the ad revenue".
|
| I think the bigger issue is, we have decided the marginal
| cost of journalism is nearly 0
| Spivak wrote:
| YouTube pays because they're displaying copyrighted
| works. I don't think even the worst case-- displaying
| opengraph tags that sites have to opt into, meets the bar
| for reproduction of a copyrighted work. I mean we're
| talking about linking here.
|
| It's not that the marginal cost of journalism is a
| pittance, but that the _marginal value_ to a social
| network of links to a few news sites is actually zero. I
| would take a bet that if social networks just up and
| banned all external links period it would be at worst
| revenue neutral.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _YouTube pays because they 're displaying copyrighted
| works._
|
| I think this is a distinction without a difference.
| YouTube paid for content long before they got serious
| about IP. Similarly, TikTok had to adopt the same mindset
| with the Creator fund.
|
| More seriously, the reason why Google pays for content is
| not because they are billion dollar content, it's because
| the marginal cost for video is greater than 0, and if
| they didn't pay for it, the content simply wouldn't
| exist. However, news article pretty much spawn out of
| thin air. It exists despite the tech giants not paying
| for it.
| hackerbeat wrote:
| Pro photos cost a lot of money to use and FB just gets
| them for free. Why?
|
| Also, big news corps have lots of correspondents and
| offices around the globe, which are expensive too.
| seryoiupfurds wrote:
| > Pro photos cost a lot of money to use and FB just gets
| them for free. Why?
|
| a) Because the photographer uploaded it, granting a
| license to display it under the TOS
|
| b) Because someone else uploaded it without permission
| and Facebook is protected by DMCA safe harbor provisions
| so long as they remove it upon request
|
| > Also, big news corps have lots of correspondents and
| offices around the globe, which are expensive too.
|
| Lots of things are expensive without creating some
| obligation for an unrelated third party to pay you for
| it.
| hackerbeat wrote:
| FB should still not get all these things for free.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| > I run a website. I can pay Google, MS, Meta, etc money to
| make my site show up higher in search results. ... The
| lobbyists and politicians have framed it as "using" or
| "stealing" the content
|
| Cough, reddit.
|
| https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/08/01/1129247/reddit-
| ceo-...
|
| Same mistake? Note that "AI training" has now made an
| appearance. Ignore that Reddit has no ownership of the user-
| written content in the first place.
| talldayo wrote:
| > Ignore that Reddit has no ownership of the user-written
| content in the first place.
|
| I wouldn't be so sure about that. Reddit might not retain
| _sole_ ownership, but they certainly seem to own a copy:
| https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement
| Except and solely to the extent such a restriction is
| impermissible under applicable law, you may not, without
| our written agreement: license, sell, transfer,
| assign, distribute, host, or otherwise commercially exploit
| the Services or Content; [...] By
| submitting Your Content to the Services, you represent and
| warrant that you have all rights, power, and authority
| necessary to grant the rights to Your Content contained
| within these Terms. When Your Content is created
| with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a
| worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-
| exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use,
| copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of,
| distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and
| any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in
| connection with Your Content in all media formats and
| channels now known or later developed anywhere in the
| world.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| This is not really a dry cut. There are people that pay to be
| on a talkshow or in a newspaper or to perform in an event. Then
| there are people who get paid to do the same. It all has to do
| with the economics of the situation.
|
| In this case, those big newspapers were betting that they drive
| a large portion of Facebook engagement in Canada, so they
| wanted a cut. Facebook didn't think so. It's trying to find the
| answer to the question "How many people use Facebook because
| that's where they get their news?" vs "How many people get the
| news because they happen to be on Facebook?"
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| I think it's more apparent that this shows "for how many
| people Facebook is the internet to them".
| fmajid wrote:
| It was an attempt to replicate similar legislation in
| Australia. The difference is Rupert Murdoch is almighty in
| Australian politics and any retorsion of the kind Meta deployed
| in Canada would have been met with stern reprisals from the
| supine government. No media group has that kind of power in
| Canada.
| II2II wrote:
| One flaw with the comparison is that event organizers submit
| their upcoming events to the newspaper and may even agree to an
| interview if the newspaper thought it worthy enough to write
| their own blurb. In some cases the event organizers will be
| paying to appear in the events list. Notice how the event
| organizers are making most of the decisions. The incentives are
| also completely different. Those events lists are promotional
| tools in the eyes of event organizers. They benefit from being
| in them.
|
| With respect to news organizations and social media, they (or
| at least a subset of them) felt that social media companies
| were receiving a disproportionate benefit from their product.
| What resulted was a battle of the titans, where pretty much
| everyone loses out. It's important to remember that bit about
| titans. Both the news organizations and social media companies
| are taking their stance to benefit themselves, _not_ consumers.
| seryoiupfurds wrote:
| News organisations would routinely post links to their latest
| stories using their official social media accounts.
|
| Don't you think they would have stopped if they felt they
| were being harmed by it?
| hackerbeat wrote:
| What you don't consider is that FB is heavily profiting from
| professionally created content that takes a lot of money to
| create, with many users just skimming the headlines without
| ever clicking through.
|
| In short, just another billionaire profiting off of other
| people's work without ever paying for it.
|
| Those new AI companies, which are also conducting large-scale
| theft, are no different and should either seize operation or
| also start paying their fair share.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > In short, just another billionaire profiting off of other
| people's work without ever paying for it.
|
| Why are the news orgs unhappy after Facebook stopped doing
| it?
| hackerbeat wrote:
| How do you know they're unhappy?
| seryoiupfurds wrote:
| Because they're constantly posting articles whining that
| "Meta's news ban" is killing the media.
| hackerbeat wrote:
| Yeah, but Meta wasn't willing to pay for it.
|
| Why should power-hungry Zuck get everything for free when
| YouTube, for example, is giving everyone a cut?
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Well then this is great no? The billionaires and Facebook
| don't get to profit from the media. Since the law was passed
| on the premise that Facebook was basically stealing money
| from local media corporations, surely our national media
| industry is doing better now by not getting exploited like
| that.
|
| Yet I keep seeing sob stories after sob stories from the
| exact same media organizations that were vehemently pushing
| for this. Something about leopards and faces getting eaten
| comes to mind
|
| (Also, media corporations here are -in typical Canadian
| fashion- a handful of giants controlling basically most
| outlets. A part from the state sponsored/funded CBC. So
| there's basically no little guys in this fight, and Canadian
| corporations always try to pull this type of stuff to protect
| their little corporatist fiefdoms through the federal
| government)
| hackerbeat wrote:
| But why should FB get this content for free (including the
| images used)?
| seryoiupfurds wrote:
| They don't any more! This whole article is about how they
| go out of their way to prevent users from even posting
| links to it!
| jsnell wrote:
| Because the news organizations are giving it to FB, with
| the intent of FB using it in a way that gets users to
| click on the link, and all of this is disproportionately
| to the benefit of the news organizations.
| hackerbeat wrote:
| FB should give back more than just clicks. See YouTube.
| jsnell wrote:
| Yes, it would not make sense for the GP to consider that
| statement, since it was just made up for political purposes.
|
| There is no evidence of it being true, and some
| circumstantial evidence of it _not_ being true: namely, that
| FB was willing to block news from their site, and there was
| no obvious impact to e.g. their financials.
| hackerbeat wrote:
| I'm not following. What's been made up for political
| purposes?
| wkat4242 wrote:
| > Less news is being consumed by Canadians
|
| I don't think this is a bad thing tbh. I've also started reducing
| my news consumption years ago. First there was the pandemic where
| there was only bad news not worth watching. And now we have an
| extreme-right government in Holland so I'm simply disillusioned
| and I don't care what they do anymore.
|
| At the same time most news sites (like the mainstream nu.nl)
| require either payment or logging in with an account which I
| refuse so I'm just skimming the news headlines on the national
| state broadcaster (NOS) once a day or so.
|
| I still follow the local city news a bit because those things
| actually matter in my life. But not on social media, I've blocked
| all news outlets there (on the few i still check because I've
| greatly disconnected from socials since even before the
| pandemic). I simply don't care anymore.
|
| And guess what? I'm a lot happier for it. A lot less things to
| get angry about. I just spend my time talking to friends and
| people I do actually care about.
|
| I think it's because both socials and the regular news love
| promoting controversial topics because they get more engagement.
| People get all wound up and that makes them stay on the platform
| to argue and thus see more ads. I'm kinda done with that.
|
| And most news is really not that important anyway. My life is not
| noticeably changed by not knowing all but the most important news
| facts. I'm fine without it, most of it was just FOMO.
|
| Ps I really appreciate HN for not doing this. I still learn a lot
| of nice and interesting things here.
| pegasus wrote:
| > And now we have a fascist government in Holland so I'm simply
| disillusioned and I don't care what they do anymore.
|
| If that's indeed the case, it should be an alarm call for all
| citizens to start caring and getting politically involved even
| more than before. It's not like the world owes us not to go up
| in flames, and if it does, we shouldn't just sit down shaking
| our head in disappointment.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yeah it's really sad when our own minister of immigration was
| promoting the "displacement theory" :'(
|
| And I'm already politically active, I always was. But I the
| these people thrive on dissent just like social media does.
| Anger is a very strong emotion.
|
| Ps I have since edited the term fascist to extreme-right as
| it's a more appropriate description. Though both apply IMO.
| For example the party in question doesn't even permit
| members. It's all about the one guy who decides everything.
| nailer wrote:
| > If that's indeed the case
|
| It's not. The Netherlands remains a parliamentary
| representative democracy.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| > I don't think this is a bad thing tbh.
|
| I am quite sure this does not mean that Canadians consume less
| digital content. Just that is is not news (from Canadian news
| outlets).
|
| For a sovereign country this is catastrophic.
|
| It probably means that Canadians consume even more reddit style
| media, YouTube shorts or outright propaganda from foreign
| nations.
| soupbowl wrote:
| Canadians can watch most major news broadcasts on YouTube.
| Also we have our own state sponsored media and propaganda, is
| foreign propaganda guaranteed to be worse?
| seryoiupfurds wrote:
| >> Less news is being consumed by Canadians
|
| > I don't think this is a bad thing tbh.
|
| Less real news, but not necessarily less political content. And
| now you can't reply to misinformation with a link to a real
| news story.
| jen729w wrote:
| After doom-scrolling Covid all through 2020, I stopped reading
| all news at the start of 2021. I haven't deliberately visited
| the home page of a news organisation since.
|
| It's not a hard ban. I'll click a link someone sends me, not
| that people do that. I'll walk past my partner's iPad and look
| over her shoulder. Occasionally I'll pick up a print edition of
| the Economist.
|
| But, by and large, I don't 'read the news'. I can only
| recommend it. 'The news' as published on the majority of sites
| is mostly crap you don't care about. Even the reputable sites.
| And then when it's some big event that you are supposed to care
| about, that just makes you sad/angry/whatever.
|
| People say that I'm absolving myself of my responsibility to
| society. Nah. I vote (I have to, I'm Australian). My vote
| hasn't changed in 20 years, nothing I read is going to do that
| now. And I wasn't politically active before, so that hasn't
| changed.
|
| Just stop reading the news.
| create-account wrote:
| >First there was the pandemic where there was only bad news not
| worth watching.
|
| scaremongering people's amygdalas 24 hours a day for more than
| six consecutive months must have left a mental scar on people's
| minds and the newborn children
| tedunangst wrote:
| > Despite the ban, news organization content is still available
| on Meta platforms through work-around strategies like
| screengrabs, with 36% of Canadian users reporting encountering
| news or links to news on Facebook or Instagram. This arguably
| should make Meta subject to the requirements of the Online News
| Act.
|
| Until Facebook bans screenshots as well. Or maybe they can switch
| tactics to prosecute the users posting screenshots for copyright
| infringement. They're at least equally to blame, no?
| meiraleal wrote:
| Yeah. They could also pay for the news but that's outrageous,
| right?
| seryoiupfurds wrote:
| Why should they be obliged to pay for the news if they don't
| want it because it isn't valuable for them?
|
| Is it immoral not to buy the $15 hotdog at a sports stadium
| even if you decide you're not that hungry?
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| Seems like Meta could and should detect the image-of-article
| workaround. It's easy enough to use OCR and then match to a known
| news source.
| beej71 wrote:
| At FB scale, this seems like a non-trivial computational
| expense, meaning they'll do it if they're forced to.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I would imagine they have similar systems in place from back
| when ISIS used Facebook Live to stream beheadings.
| da768 wrote:
| People share links to linktr.ee pages and said page has a link
| to the news article. OCR would be no use unless Facebook
| started crawling links
| racl101 wrote:
| I'm a millennial, probably Facebook's original primary
| demographic, and I still have no idea where the hell you'd go and
| read the news on it. It's just not a place I think of when I
| think of getting the news of the day. That would be Reddit or HN
| instead. Heck, sometimes I even still kick it old school and go
| to Yahoo News. But never Facebook.
| seryoiupfurds wrote:
| It's when your friend/uncle posts a link to the latest headline
| about what Trump/Biden said today.
| howard941 wrote:
| I'm gen X in the US. I haven't seen any news on FB in the last
| few months other than what my connections post. Was news a big
| thing in Canada on FB?
| simonbw wrote:
| I believe it's referring to those links that your connections
| post.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Newsfeed.
| z5h wrote:
| Nevermind the quantity of news read. What about the quality and
| variety of news read?
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Canadian journalism is suffering - but Meta isn 't budging_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41131615
| cperciva wrote:
| There is no such thing as "Meta's News Ban". This is _the federal
| government 's_ ban on non-fee-paying websites sharing links to
| news stories.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| > ban on non-fee-paying websites sharing links to news stories
|
| There's a couple important caveats there that you're eliding.
|
| > made available by dominant digital news intermediaries and
| generates economic gain
|
| https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-charte/c18_...
| mewse-hn wrote:
| > _Canadians continue to learn about politics and current events
| through Facebook and Instagram, but through a more biased and
| less factual lens than before_
|
| [citation needed]
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| > Canadian news outlets have lost 85% of their engagement on
| Facebook
|
| Okay, but what kind of engagement? Because "engagement" alone is
| not a metric.
|
| > Less news is being consumed by Canadians
|
| Again: that's not a metric in and of itself, given that constant
| cries of information saturation. How much news is being consumed,
| and is that still to much?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| "Three quarters of the Canadian public are unaware of the ban"
|
| In other words most people don't care about the news and weren't
| paying attention anyway. Doesn't seem like much has been lost.
| nox101 wrote:
| I'd assume there are knock on effects. The people that did get
| news via FB no longer share it because they aren't getting it.
| So, even people that don't use FB become less informed. Like if
| one member of a family used to read news via FB and share some
| of it with the rest of the family.
|
| Note: I'm not saying whether that result is good or bad I'm
| only saying that not being aware of the ban doesn't mean
| nothing has been lost.
| jrgaston wrote:
| It's but one data point, so don't draw any conclusions, but my
| Canadian household's news consumption is unchanged. We get lots
| of news from the CBC, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, the Guardian,
| and the NY Times. Oh, and there's a local tv channel that has
| pretty good local (Vancouver Island) news.
| nightshift1 wrote:
| This is only a short summary. There is a couple of full reports
| on the main page of their website.
|
| Unfortunately, is is not very interesting because the study seems
| to rely almost completely on Facebook data. The effects on that
| platform were pretty predictible.
|
| There are obvious questions left unanswered:
|
| - What was the effect on direct traffic ?
|
| - What was the effect on paid subscriptions ?
|
| - Are people effectively less informed ?
| ipaddr wrote:
| This is positive. Media in Canada is concentrated by a few large
| orgs (Postmedia, Quebecor, Bell media, Rogers). Most independent
| newspaper, radio stations are being bought and speaking with the
| same voice. Deplatforming themselves is turning out to be a good
| thing for everyone else.
| pingou wrote:
| Canada also introduced the digital services tax recently:
| https://globalnews.ca/news/10604912/digital-services-tax/
| al2o3cr wrote:
| Re: people sharing screenshots of news sites
| This arguably should make Meta subject to the requirements
| of the Online News Act.
|
| LOL gotta get rid of that last 15% of engagement, I guess. Maybe
| ban even mentioning the NAMES of news outlets just to be sure /s
| vlovich123 wrote:
| > Almost one third of local news outlets are now inactive - The
| ban has reshaped the media landscape in Canada, with 212 or
| approximately 30% of local news outlets in Canada previously
| active on social media now inactive.
|
| Is this because these sites were already failing and failed
| regardless of the ban? Or did they see enough of a drop in
| engagement to matter? Or did this ban just help entrench the big
| players at the expense of the smaller ones and forced
| consolidation?
|
| In other words, it's hard to draw conclusions of a larger story
| just from raw data points.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| Local news in Canada is in dire straights. Consolidation has
| made it incredibly fragile or non existent in places, and the
| government's solution is to always turn on a faucet of $$$ to
| the entrenched media companies, only for them to back out or
| disappear after the money runs dry.
|
| The "outcome" of the bill and the deal with Google was
| essentially a slush fund for entrenched media companies in
| Canada. Instead of fostering competition, the government just
| funnels more money into old guard monopolies, as is tradition
| in Canada where monopolistic behaviour usually gets explicit
| government endorsement.
|
| Commentators and lawyers like Micheal Geist have argued for
| years at this point that the ban and deal are blatantly
| counterproductive to ensuring a functioning and competitive
| news and media ecosystem.
| bl4kers wrote:
| This statement is too ambiguous. They could mean inactive from
| social media or inactive as an organization.
| nailer wrote:
| > On August 1, 2023, in response to Bill C-18, Meta blocked
| Canadians from viewing, accessing, and sharing news article links
| on its platforms.
|
| What makes a piece of content a news article? Is all written
| content banned from Meta?
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Interesting point:
|
| > Despite the ban, news organization content is still available
| on Meta platforms through work-around strategies like
| screengrabs, with 36% of Canadian users reporting encountering
| news or links to news on Facebook or Instagram. This arguably
| should make Meta subject to the requirements of the Online News
| Act.
|
| I wonder if this will be a new argument from the news media
| lobbyists. It will loom as a new type of threat similar to
| removal of safe harbour protections : if web sites have to take
| full liability for what their users post and no amount of active
| measures to prevent infringing content are sufficient to relieve
| that, we arrive back at the end-game where user generated content
| is just not viable except for the giant monopolists that can pay
| off rights holders or defend against the liability.
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