ITT: people happy that Canadians won’t see local news as often, just because they perceive this as hurting Facebook.
You can hate Facebook and understand that this is a shitty law. To be fair, if you aren’t in the loop on what the law is, it’s easy to accidentally think it’s a reasonable law. When I first heard of it, I assumed it was just preventing companies from stealing articles and keeping news sites from getting clicks. After all, that’s a real problem and a totally reasonable solution.
But nope, the law actually prohibits linking to a news site without having an agreement to pay them. Yes, linking. I really hope it’s obvious how dumb such a law is. They wrote the law to only apply to super big corporations. Otherwise this post would have had to pay Global because you linked to it. Similarly, copying any part of the article in any amount also needs to pay them. Even the headline and tagline that Lemmy shows. It’s hypocritical that anyone cheers this on when this very post wouldn’t comply with the law.
And nothing of value was lost. If you are getting your news via Facebook you are doing it wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_News_Act doesn’t only apply to facebook… it’s extremely broad, unenforceable, and likely to be repealed
Can this happen everywhere, please?
This was done in Europe, several times, over the last 15 years or so. The process goes like:
- News sites in [country] claim Google/Facebook/Lemmy and any other news aggregators are “stealing” their content
- A bunch of out of touch lawyers get lobbied into “making them pay”
- Aggregators stop linking to news sites in [country]
- News sites in [country] realize that most of their visits were coming from aggregators, revenue from ads plummets
- Panicked backpedaling ensues, law gets reverted
- Aggregators start linking again to news sites from [country]
This year it’s Canada’s turn… and I fully expect the cycle to make the rounds back to European countries in a decade or two.
This means all governments around the world should impose similar laws so Facebook / Google will finally fxxking pay the news organisations they helped destroyed.
Are you saying Beehaw is destroying news organizations? Because the law is the same for all: “pay us for any link with an excerpt of our news”, like the link with a title up top.
Anyways, after all these years, and all these countries, it should be proof enough that link aggregators help news sites by driving traffic to them, not destroy them.
This is nothing else than some cunning lawyers getting news sites onto a hype train based on a tale they know is false, but they will get paid for defending, then tearing down, in one more country.
This is not great at all. You’ll just have pseudo “news” organizations fill the void.
Your crazy uncles won’t stop sharing articles, but instead of coming from Fox News, they’ll be coming from AI spin-offs of infowars and AI Epoch times.
Oh, great. I was really hoping we left all the pseudo-intellectual corpo-shills in the speddit botscape.
Oh great, I was hoping we left all the sarcastic non-comments that attack people and adds nothing to the discussion in the speddit botscape.
Can we not?
Hey man, tell you what- you keep your corpo-shilling somewhere else and I’ll keep my ‘sarcastic non-comments that attack people and add nothing to the discussion’ elsewhere. Deal?
And to add something to the discussion- without FB crazy uncles will no longer be actively receiving the kind of insanely targeted shit that comes with FB. Sure, they’ll get some targeted shit other places but FB is on a crazy level far and above most everyone else in that field. Everything else they’ll have to look for more. And a lot of people won’t do that because that’s extra work they’re not used to. Less people will be radicalized by The Algorithm.
That’s not how any of this works.
Removing the Canadian news from Facebook doesn’t hurt Facebook one bit. It’ll just hurt Canadians by preventing them from seeing news from local sources.
Facebook never needed news to keep people engaged. They just need content, and they don’t give a shit whether that content reflects reality or not, nor do they care of the content came from Canada.
But hey, I’m the corporate shill right? Whatever helps you sleep better at night.
