Last chance to FIX BILL C-18!
action.openmedia.org
Bill C-18, the Online News Act needs major fixes to support a diverse and independent press!

This was OpenMedia’s fix Bill C-18 campaign. It’s unclear if any of this was fixed when it got passed.

Right now, most of the funding goes straight into the pockets of large broadcast media like Corus, Rogers and the CBC. Newspapers? Minority players. Local news that’s already disappeared? Zero help. Startup outlets? Not included. Effective news support should be concentrated on where news is fast disappearing, not on broadcast outlets that don’t need the help.2,3

What about press independence? As written, Bill C-18 hands enormous power to Big Tech and to the CRTC to secretly shape the type of news that gets made in Canada. News organizations enter into secret deals with platforms to get funding; there’s no public reporting on who receives funds, how much they’re receiving, or why some groups wind up approved while others are rejected.4 That’s not good enough. Transparency about who’s funding the news and how they reached their deal is vital for the public to maintain trust in the news industry.5 Any legislation must ensure that eligibility decisions are made publicly, transparently, and without government or platform pressure.

    • SpaceCowboyEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Basically sites facebook have been demanding news media sites to put more and more of their news stories into the summary preview. This is the internet, you know most people generally don’t bother reading the articles. If there’s a summary, it’s even more unlikely they’ll click to read the article. But if no one clicks through to the news site, they don’t load the ads there so the news site gets no money. They are loading ads on facebook, which is where they’re reading the article.

      The news sites can’t refuse facebook because facebook controls so much internet traffic.

      So the government steps in and requires facebook to share some ad revenue with the news sites. Facebook gets made and takes their ball home and isn’t displaying news at all now.

      openmedia is upset because the news sites they represent aren’t also going to get facebook ad revenue like other news sites. So basically “we want money too! sign this petition because government bad, big media bad!”

      My concern is I don’t want news sites (like the ones Ezra Levant runs) that exist solely to spread disinformation with a political agenda to profit off of this.

      Obviously it’s more complex than that, but that’s the gist of it.