Canada

The biggest question the news media blackout in Facebook that I can see is ...

How did we arrive at a point where we rely on one billion dollar corporately controlled foreign company that does not benefit us have a near monopoly on how we share, intake, gather and read news media?

The problem is not Facebook

The problem is in how we use the internet and social media systems

The technology should be serving us

We shouldn't be giving so much power to corporate entities to spoon feed us the technology and control the information that makes our democracy possible.

This paragraph here is probably the real meat of the question:

Gizmodo spoke to half a dozen student journalists and station managers who say the ban on news links, intended to hurt big-name publishers, has instead hamstrung their vital ability to fundraise, recruit volunteers, or engage in community outreach. (...) And the Online News Act, intended to boost Canada’s local news, seems instead to have increased the hardships of the nation’s most local outlets.

I can see this going in one of two ways:

1- The numerous small companies push the government into giving in to Meta 2- The small companies are ignored by both sides and, sooner or later, migrate to new platforms to stay in touch with their communities.

My dream is that 2 happens, because that'd lead to zuckerbot having less power in Canada, as less people would rely on meta stuff, but I'm afraid 1 is more likely to happen. A very harsh wakeup call to what a lot of privacy-minded people were preaching for years, to not "depend so much on social media" (which was always easier said than done for smaller companies who needed reach) and something I wish could've been avoided

I wish the govt went a step further and deleted its facebook and instagram presences.

Get. Off. Of. Facebook.

Everyone.

I do not have twitter or facebook but I still read the news every day. The news is not facebook or twitter. Both these companies could shut down tomorrow and I could still read the news like I always have.

This is a good thing. People will need to find alternative sources for news. I don't see a problem.

They can use Artifact news app. They have a tab dedicated to canadian news and recently added the ability for users to share links to anything on the app

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, “We 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.

This whole thing was 100% predictable. Meta doesn't need news to populate users' feeds. Why the fuck would Meta pay $60MM/y for content they don't need and that doesn't materially benefit them?

This whole plan was ass-backwards to begin with. C-18 is terrible legislation.

If they wanted to fund news publishing with tech company profits, then they need to introduce decoupled taxes and grants. Add a (digital) advertising tax, then put in local news grants where any journalist who can prove they've created a minimum amount of local/Canadian news content that meets whatever standards they set gets a grant. Restrict it to small non-profits and registered new agencies (or whatever).

I must be missing something, because this all seemed obvious to me since this was introduced, and I've seen lots of other people saying the same things. Maybe there's some legal reason why a straight advertising tax wouldn't work? Surely, there must be some reason they went down this path over the more obvious and simpler one?

Meta's Canadian News Blackout is barely effecting anyone and they're fucking pissed at how easily Canadians have moved on. As a nation we're probably saving millions of dollars in therapy costs by not being constantly bombarded with negativity illegally scraped from actual Canadian journalists.

Meta's policy is only against linking to off-site news publications, not textual/graphical content. The latter is all that is needed to present the news. There is no issue here for student journalists outside of them thinking that they should be able to use Meta properties to build their own personal brand, but that's what paid advertising is for.