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”.
As much as I hate meta/Facebook, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think these laws are right either. I don’t think you should have to pay to simply provide a link to another website. This runs antithetical to the whole idea and structure of the internet. If they’re taking the article or photos and republishing it on their own website that’s different and they obviously should have to pay for that. The linking to news sites is actually good for news sites though and increases profit for publishers by driving traffic to their sites, it doesn’t take profit away. The news publishers are free to have a paywall or put advertisements on the page being linked too and get revenue from that. This feels like publishers wanting to eat their cake and keep it too, they want big search engines and social media to link to their articles so the news sites get traffic and revenue from advertisements/subscriptions, and then they also want the search engines who created that traffic in the first place to pay for linking too? I think publishers are shooting themselves in the foot in the long run lobbying for these laws all for a pittance of cash.
This idea could also affect things like lemmy too eventually and make them impossible, if you need to pay to simply provide a link to a news story or other website.
This right here. It’s an extremely bad and extremely problematic precedent. Linking to other sites is a fundamental part of the web. If you have to pay to link to a site, then the web is broken.
If you as a site feel you should be paid, then charge the people coming through the link, not the people providing the link to you.
Honestly is there a downside from our perspective? News organizations will lose money in the short term, but this is meta throwing a tantrum.
Less clickbait news on social media is a good thing, less money for meta, less garbage, less engagement with social media hopefully
This isn’t meta throwing a tantrum, it’s the news site’s throwing a tantrum. They want social media and search engines to pay them for simply linking to their site. Social media and search engines drive traffic to news sites, these morons are shooting themselves in the foot and reducing their own revenue.
I get that, but it’s not just linking, we all know most people only read the headline, and on top of that sites like Google and FB will summarize the article now too which means a good chunk of people won’t click on it. I’ll compromise that both sides are throwing a tantrum and no one is willing to just stop and say “This is how we could compromise on it”.
Those summaries aren’t scraped for content from the main story or anything, they’re put in the page’s HTML explicitly so that there’s a little blurb that can be used for link sharing.
News websites fill out the “show this text when people share a link” fields and then get mad that the text gets shown when people share a link.
That’s fair, with the summaries and what not. This isn’t a game the news corps should be playing, though. If meta/Google actually deliver and hold out this time, they could tank the Canadian news market within a couple of months, forcing a reversal.
If less is good then why the person in the article whined?
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.
Interesting. So even the home state of the tech firms feels they are not doing their part to reimburse content producers.
These laws exist in Australia already, Facebook and Google claimed they’d pull out of the country and of course they just came to an agreement with almost all news companies and life moved on.
This happened to Europe ages ago. News companies were mad Google took a few lines from their news so they got a law instated that required Google to pay.
Google removed the news feature and only indexed news from countries that didn’t have such laws. Visits and ad revenue for news sites plummeted.
These news sites need Facebook and friends more than the other way around. If they don’t want their news to be indexed by other websites, a simple line in robots.txt will suffice for the companies these laws are directed at. Go ahead, add
Disallow *to your robots.txt and wait for Google/Facebook/Twitter to email you with an offer to make your content available.This is just a money grab by Rupert Murdoch and the other media giants. They want some of that delicious social media money.
I’m stocking up on popcorn, because no matter how this plays out, it’s going to be an interesting slow-motion trainwreck. (As for Murdoch and Meta, a plague on both their houses—I honestly don’t care who loses worst here.)
