Canada demands Meta lift news ban to allow wildfire info sharing::The Canadian government on Friday demanded that Meta lift a “reckless” ban on domestic news from its platforms to allow people to share information about wildfires in the west of the country.
I don’t agree with the solution the government came up with, but the problem still exists and I don’t understand it well enough to come up with an alternative solution.
Making news is expensive, and good quality news (not mucked up by corporate interests) needs a way to fund that work. We don’t want news to be an outlet for corporations investing in a mouthpiece. So traditionally this was done through advertising.
Now people barely ever click through to the websites so the advertising doesn’t work. Meanwhile the places where people ARE seeing the news do have ads. The content is produced by one party, and the profit goes to another.
The problem exists and needs a solution, but I don’t know what it might be. Australia brought in a similar law successfully and Facebook/Google came to a deal. Canada might also be able to do that?
The other long term solution IMO is to make the platforms obsolete with things like Mastodon and Lemmy. That might take some time though
Even on the fediverse the articles are sctaped and pasted. Or bot summarized.
Both significantly reduce the likelihood I click through.
And that’s forgetting the significant demo that’s trying to stay ad-free.
If people aren’t clicking through to read the details, the investigative journalism no matter how good is ineffective. So if the summarization one or two sentences is enough for most people then they don’t need more in-depth reporting
There ARE other downsides to this law, outside of the hissy fit Facebook is throwing.
For example, smaller independent news companies don’t have the bargaining power to come to a fair agreement with Facebook, like the larger organizations can. A solution to that might be to have some standard rates set up, but again, don’t know enough about it
The solution is for people who care about the news to start paying some small amount of money to support responsible news. Look at NPR or PBS but fuck paying corporate news outlets to bait me with outrage porn.
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Well, I think the government at the core has a small point, network effects drive these sites, and the news being there draws people to them, which draws news to be there. But they frame it as one sided, and the fact is the news benefits from being on Facebook way more than Facebook benefits from people sharing news. People are on Facebook, the news is irrelevant if people can’t share it with each other in their lives, but Facebook doesnt become irrelevant without it. The government stepped out of line here and are doing anything and everything in their power to avoid admitting it, even resorting to propaganda. This is a shakedown for a failing industry that the government needs to continue to exist for it to control public narrative, that’s tye long and short of it.
Personally I’m of the opinion that all news is propaganda, and so I consume none of it. The fact that every news organization is parroting the government line about Facebook being a meanie and blocking the news tells me who controls the news and/or where power lies. If something’s important enough for me to need to know it, someone in my life will tell me. So I’d disagree with you that this needs a solution.
I do like your other long term solution, I don’t use Facebook either.