Student publications and nonprofit community outlets are caught up in a drawn-out battle between the Canadian government, big-name publishers, and Meta.
On the broadcasting side, community radio stations, a category that includes college stations, are required by law to dedicate 15% of their airtime to spoken work content.
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She posted a screenshot of what she saw: a message from Facebook reading, “We reviewed your Page and determined it is a news outlet. In response to Canadian government legislation, content from news outlets can’t be shared in Canada… If you believe we got this wrong, you can request another review in 6 months.”
So, Canadian law allows Facebook/Meta and web publishers to remove news content, while regulating local radio stations to help customers get news content? Sounds like Facebook needs much more regulation so it will stop skirting the law and be forced to either simply abandon Canadian operations or perform in its function as a communications platform in a faithful manner.
There’s a difference between scraping news organizations, summarizing it, and then presenting it on your site (which is what Google/Meta do, and what the regulation was meant to make them pay for), and having to pay for user shared content.
Forcing Meta/Google to pay for the first case I don’t have an issue with, the second one though seems rather silly.
No. Meta created Open Graph so that they don’t have to do that. It lets the publications define the summary (among a long list of other attributes). All of the major Canadian publications are using Open Graph.
If they don’t want to give so much information, they can… stop providing the information. Classic case of management spending too much time in Ottawa and not enough time talking to the workers.
Stop being pedantic. It was very clear what the effect of the regulations would be. We’ve seen the same scenario play out previously. The media industry decided to push for it anyway, and pikachusurprisedface when it turned out to bite them on the ass.
Pedantry is warranted in this case because Facebook was siphoning away millions of dollars of revenue from news outlets by scraping stories and regurgitating them without attribution or proper royalties. I’ve been quite pleased by this legislation in how much it’s allowed second tier news services like the Sun and Straight to actually get a fair share for their reporting.
That’s pretty inaccurate. Like Google, news outlets could set automated policies regarding how much scraping and summarising was allowed. The publishers wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
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So, Canadian law allows Facebook/Meta and web publishers to remove news content, while regulating local radio stations to help customers get news content? Sounds like Facebook needs much more regulation so it will stop skirting the law and be forced to either simply abandon Canadian operations or perform in its function as a communications platform in a faithful manner.
You seem to have it the wrong way around. It’s the regulations that are forcing Facebook to remove news content.
No regulation is forcing Facebook to remove news content. They’re removing it because they don’t want to pay for having it.
There’s a difference between scraping news organizations, summarizing it, and then presenting it on your site (which is what Google/Meta do, and what the regulation was meant to make them pay for), and having to pay for user shared content.
Forcing Meta/Google to pay for the first case I don’t have an issue with, the second one though seems rather silly.
No. Meta created Open Graph so that they don’t have to do that. It lets the publications define the summary (among a long list of other attributes). All of the major Canadian publications are using Open Graph.
If they don’t want to give so much information, they can… stop providing the information. Classic case of management spending too much time in Ottawa and not enough time talking to the workers.
Maybe it’s silly, but that’s beside the point. Facebook is not being forced to remove news, they decided to not pay for it.
Stop being pedantic. It was very clear what the effect of the regulations would be. We’ve seen the same scenario play out previously. The media industry decided to push for it anyway, and pikachusurprisedface when it turned out to bite them on the ass.
Sure, it was predictable and self inflicted.
But I think saying “Facebook was forced” is factually wrong in a meaningful way, hence to me deserving of correction.
Pedantry is warranted in this case because Facebook was siphoning away millions of dollars of revenue from news outlets by scraping stories and regurgitating them without attribution or proper royalties. I’ve been quite pleased by this legislation in how much it’s allowed second tier news services like the Sun and Straight to actually get a fair share for their reporting.
That’s pretty inaccurate. Like Google, news outlets could set automated policies regarding how much scraping and summarising was allowed. The publishers wanted to have their cake and eat it too.