this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

On the broadcasting side, community radio stations, a category that includes college stations, are required by law to dedicate 15% of their airtime to spoken work content.
...
She posted a screenshot of what she saw: a message from Facebook reading, β€œWe reviewed your Page and determined it is a news outlet. In response to Canadian government legislation, content from news outlets can’t be shared in Canada... If you believe we got this wrong, you can request another review in 6 months.”

So, Canadian law allows Facebook/Meta and web publishers to remove news content, while regulating local radio stations to help customers get news content? Sounds like Facebook needs much more regulation so it will stop skirting the law and be forced to either simply abandon Canadian operations or perform in its function as a communications platform in a faithful manner.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You seem to have it the wrong way around. It's the regulations that are forcing Facebook to remove news content.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

No regulation is forcing Facebook to remove news content. They're removing it because they don't want to pay for having it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Stop being pedantic. It was very clear what the effect of the regulations would be. We've seen the same scenario play out previously. The media industry decided to push for it anyway, and pikachusurprisedface when it turned out to bite them on the ass.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Sure, it was predictable and self inflicted.

But I think saying "Facebook was forced" is factually wrong in a meaningful way, hence to me deserving of correction.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Pedantry is warranted in this case because Facebook was siphoning away millions of dollars of revenue from news outlets by scraping stories and regurgitating them without attribution or proper royalties. I've been quite pleased by this legislation in how much it's allowed second tier news services like the Sun and Straight to actually get a fair share for their reporting.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That's pretty inaccurate. Like Google, news outlets could set automated policies regarding how much scraping and summarising was allowed. The publishers wanted to have their cake and eat it too.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

There's a difference between scraping news organizations, summarizing it, and then presenting it on your site (which is what Google/Meta do, and what the regulation was meant to make them pay for), and having to pay for user shared content.

Forcing Meta/Google to pay for the first case I don't have an issue with, the second one though seems rather silly.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

which is what Google/Meta do

No. Meta created Open Graph so that they don't have to do that. It lets the publications define the summary (among a long list of other attributes). All of the major Canadian publications are using Open Graph.

If they don't want to give so much information, they can... stop providing the information. Classic case of management spending too much time in Ottawa and not enough time talking to the workers.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Maybe it’s silly, but that’s beside the point. Facebook is not being forced to remove news, they decided to not pay for it.