Crazy thought, wild idea, hear me out..

What if people stopped getting their news from Facebook

Only people who are mad are the lazy people who seriously cant be assed to actually read the news and want it spoon fed to them in the form of clickbait headlines shared by anti-vax aunt suzy

Create a law that singles out specific players in a monopoly to pay other players in a falling monopoly (look who owns nearly all news media in Canada).

Make the law NOT about summarizing and ad funding but about linking which is fundamental to how the internet works and how all sites get found.

Facebook / Google links to Canadian news isn't valuable enough to them for the hassle so they turn them off, it really was the expected outcome.

Facebook et al want the advertising dollars without any of the costs of reportage. This is a ham-fisted attempt to rectify the situation. I'm fine with it.

The government should up the ante by making Facebook "publishers" under the law. Make them responsible for all of the libel, slander and defamation posted to their sites. Make them responsible for their lack of moderation, and the fallout it's been causing.

Boycott Zuckerberg. Boycott Billionaires.

I am no fan of Meta.

But..

This is maybe 10% meta's fault, but 90% the government's.

The law they passed was completely ridiculous in that it would force meta and others to pay Canadian news companies for each link posted. A concept that anyone with an understanding of either the internet or economics could have told you would lead to the situation we are in now.

Any business would react the same way and the have publicly been saying this is what they would do since the law was in the planning/proposal phase. Experts have likewise predicted this. But the government here seemed to think that nobody would dare defy the 'mighty' Canadian government. The fact is we have a smaller population than California alone, and it's not worth it for meta or other companies to comply with this law.

It's almost like the feds here watched the "Canada wants some of that internet money" episode of South Park and thought "great idea!!"

How exactly did our democracy manage, between 1867 and whenever the fuck Facebook came by?

There's been too many articles about how bad it is that Meta and Google are going to stop carrying news, and not nearly enough on how to find news without Meta and Google. And, really, C-18 kind of disincentivizes news sites bringing up alternatives since the point was to get news sites paid, and Meta's and Google's competitors won't have to pay them.

If you can't find the news without an algorithm you won't understand it anyway and I don't mind if don't take part in any elections.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The policy came in retaliation for a new law, the Online News Act, created in an effort to help shore up revenue at Canadian journalism outlets by forcing intermediaries such as Meta and Google’s parent company Alphabet to chip in.

The company has described the legislation, Bill C-18 – passed on 18 June – as “unworkable” and argued that the only way to comply with the law is to “end news availability for people in Canada”.

Timothy Caulfield, a University of Alberta professor who researches health and science misinformation, said that even before the passage of the new law, social media and online forums were a dominant force in spreading unproven therapies and conspiracy theories about conventional medicine.

But Ahmed Al-Rawi, the head of the Disinformation Project at Simon Fraser University, said limiting news access on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram compromises those investments.

Al-Rawi also said the inability to link to news could lead more people to share screenshots, which are easy to doctor using image-editing software or AI technologies.

Al-Rawi also noted that Canada’s federal parties – including the ruling Liberals, the architects of C-18 – are still spending on Facebook ads, even after the bill’s passage.

I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Canadian here. I think the law is stupid. It's literally free advertising. I use Google News to see a bunch of local and national news sources in one spot. I only see the article headlines. If I want to see anything, I have to click and go to the full article. The news companies aren't paying anything to get aggregated and they get free traffic to their site.

In regards to the quoting pieces of the article they're linking to in search results, the brief snippets they provide often have barely any information at all or cut off before the information you want to see, so you have to click on the results anyway.

Our government is just inept when it comes to the internet.

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