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.