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Canada demands Meta lift news ban to allow wildfire info sharing
(www.reuters.com)
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this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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Lol they didn't "ban" news, they refused to pay to make the news relevant. Canada basically banned news sharing on the internet. They can repeal the stupid law.
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
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.