Meta and Google are blocking links to news in Canada. The US might be next.
www.vox.com
The companies are protesting Canada’s new "link tax" law by pulling news links off their platforms.
    • j4k3@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      71·
      1 year ago

      Trying to post content just to help out and keep things going sure is a job for bots that don’t have to deal with responses

  • CaptainAniki@lemmy.flight-crew.orgEnglish
    62·
    1 year ago

    “It’s an interesting experience to be editor in chief of a news organization and yet locked out of your own news account and prevented from accessing the great work your teams produce for the platform every day,” Fenlon told Vox in an email.

    So you make content directly for instagram and not because you have journalistic integrity and a story to tell?

    “It also gave me a real glimpse of what the future might look like if Meta and Google make good on their threats to drop news from their platforms in Canada,” Fenlon said. “Our focus now is to ensure Canadians know where else they can go to get CBC journalism should they be suddenly cut off by Meta or Google, including by raising awareness of our free news app and websites.”

    Oh no! I have to do the marketing myself!!! The horror!!!

    The new Canadian law is modeled on a controversial Australian law, the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code, which went into effect in 2021. Google and Meta’s responses to that law were similar threats to pull links, but both companies ended up making payments to some news organizations. The Australian government estimates that news outlets got AU$200 million, although it doesn’t know that for sure — nor does it know how that money was distributed — because the companies were allowed to keep those figures private. Even so, other countries, like Canada, likely assumed they’d get similar results with similar laws and were less apt to take Google and Meta’s threats seriously.

    So it actually DOES work?

    I fail to see the issue.

  • NarrativeBear@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Canadian News agencies are really shooting themselves in the foot here, and then crying about it. This is a perfect example of them wanting their cake and eating it too.

    What Canadian News is concerned about is social media platforms are summerizing news content and news articles, this means users/consumers do not need to leave social media platforms (and read articles on the news site directly).

    This means news agencies do not get their add revenue on their own news sites. Instead social media sites get this add revenue instead. Thus profiting off content created by news agencies.

    Now where it’s really stupid, news agencies also want to prevent social media sites and maybe even search engines from providing links to news sites without paying a fee to the news agencies for doing so.

    This would prevent users on sites to follow a link (maybe even posted by a user) to a news site to read a article. Social media sites make no add revenue from linking as it directs users away from their site, but from summarizing articles and keeping users on their site they do.

    IMO whoever wrote this law does not understand the internet or how it work. They also fail to realize the internet is inherently built on linking to sites.

    I do agreed social media sites like Google/Facebook/twitter/instagram/Lemmy? should pay a fee when summerizing news articles for users especially if these sites benefit from increased add revenue of these articles, but also asking for payment when links are created is going to far.