Move comes in response to Canadian legislation requiring internet giants to pay news publishers
Guardian staff and agencies Tue 1 Aug 2023 22.14 BST
Meta has begun the process to end access to news on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada, the company said on Tuesday.
The move comes in response to legislation in the country requiring internet giants to pay news publishers.
The findings suggest that Facebook users seek out content that aligns with their views.
Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, said the changes will roll out in the coming weeks.
Canada’s heritage minister, Pascale St-Onge, who is in charge of the government’s dealings with Meta, called the move irresponsible.
“[Meta] would rather block their users from accessing good quality and local news instead of paying their fair share to news organizations,” St-Onge said in a statement on Tuesday. “We’re going to keep standing our ground. After all, if the government can’t stand up for Canadians against tech giants, who will?”
Canada’s public broadcast CBC also called Meta’s move irresponsible and said that it was “an abuse of their market power”.
The Online News Act, passed by the Canadian parliament, would force platforms like Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and Meta to negotiate commercial deals with Canadian news publishers for their content.
The legislation is part of a broader global trend of governments trying to make tech firms pay for news. Canada’s legislation is similar to a ground-breaking law that Australia passed in 2021 and had triggered threats from Google and Facebook to curtail their services. Both the companies eventually struck deals with Australian media firms after amendments to the legislation were offered.
In the US, the state of California has also considered a similar law. In that case, too, Meta has threatened to withdraw services from the state if the legislation goes through.
On the Canadian law, Google has argued that it is broader than those enacted in Australia and Europe as it puts a price on news story links displayed in search results and can apply to outlets that do not produce news.
Meta had said links to news articles make up less than 3% of the content on its users’ feed and argued that news lacked economic value.
Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, had said in May that such an argument was flawed and “dangerous to our democracy, to our economy”.
I still don’t really get this law. I’m not one to defend big tech companies but everyone’s spent the better part of the past 20 years doing everything they could do their websites to appear at the top of search results. Now they’re mad they appear and want to be paid for the privilege of being made discoverable on the web?
If it wasn’t for search results, sites like lemmy/reddit and my android phone’s news feed I would not go to any of these sites to begin with, ever.
I assumed it was about sites that summarize from it like when Google gives you an excerpt at the top of results.
If the aggregation site publishes enough of the news story within the aggregation site itself that the reader never follows the link the news site never gets a chance to show them ads.
This whole problem is rooted in the idea that the internet should be paid for by corporate propaganda, so I don’t shed a tear for anyone on either side of this.
Let me pay $5 a year for a login and give me an rss feed for your news network. I am now the customer and not a sack of attention that you’re using a minimum viable product to sell to your corporate owners. It’s a win win.
If the aggregation site publishes enough of the news story within the aggregation site itself that the reader never follows the link the news site never gets a chance to show them ads
This has been proven repeatedly to not be the case, snippets increase clicks and drive traffic
The argument is also a hidden lie - the news sites control the display of snippets via robots.txt and related standards, they actively choose to make them available. Why? Because they drive traffic.
Try to get the c suite guys at a news Corp to admit reality is impossible tho.
I live in canada so my solution for news now will be to spin up some self hosted app that will scrape all the content and create an RSS feed that doesn’t require me to go to their website. Obviously not everyone can do this but it’ll overall be hurting the news sites more than anything, they literally advocated for a law that might ruin them.
“We’re going to keep standing our ground. After all, if the government can’t stand up for Canadians against tech giants, who will?”
Yes. How can those terrible tech giants advertise for news companies without paying them? What kind of monster doesn’t pay people for the privilege of advertising?
Based on my limited understanding after reading one article and listening to one talk show on public radio, the issue seems to be that the “tech giants” are displaying full (or nearly full) articles from news outlets without providing revenue to the content creator or links to the original article. If all news outlets disallowed full article replication through copywrite or other legal means, this whole thing would be over, but that’s hard to organize, so they ask the government to help.
To say that the tech giants are providing advertisements isn’t a fair representstill. They’re providing the whole product. The process of how we got here is outlined in Cory Doctrow’s “enshittification” essay. (I’d copy and paste the whole essay here just for irony’s sake, but I’m feeling lazy.
I’m not quite sure how to feel about this whole thing, especially when you consider that public libraries are doing the same thing.
Here’s a source that it does require paying for links (scroll to the bottom).
