Facebook and Instagram users in Canada may need more pictures of babies, pets, and food, because in less than six months they won’t be able to share news links on those platforms.
Meta said it will impose that ban after Canada’s Parliament passed legislation(Opens in a new window) that will require large online platforms to compensate Canadian news sites in the next six months.
“Today, we are confirming that news availability will be ended on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada prior to the Online News Act (Bill C-18(Opens in a new window)) taking effect,” Meta says(Opens in a new window).
The Online News Act(Opens in a new window) sets up a system of mandatory arbitration between every “digital news intermediary” (defined as “an online communications platform, including a search engine or social media service” that makes news content available in Canada) and news outlets designated by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission(Opens in a new window) if “a significant bargaining power imbalance” exists between the intermediary and those outlets.
The bill defines making news available broadly enough to include just linking to it: reproducing “the news content, or any portion of it” or enabling access to it “by any means, including an index, aggregation, or ranking of news content.” It also defines “news outlet” broadly to cover any general-interest newsroom that employs at least two journalists in Canada and operates along recognized codes of journalistic ethics.
C-18 additionally imposes non-discrimination requirements on online platforms, to be enforced by the commission. The language there doesn’t address actions taken against news sites that spread misinformation, although it does let the commission consider whether a platform’s conduct matched its “normal course of business.”
Our government breaking the Internet is something that makes me rage.
You can’t just magic into existence a requirement that you owe someone else money because someone else does a thing at you.
It’s also so weird because there are these laws in place that allow us to cite portions of things without having to pay for anything. I think it’s even up to something like 25% of a publication that can be republished just for the purpose of citing it or criticizing it…
Wild that at this point you just won’t be able to share links.
You get someone who is both an authoritarian and an idiot and we see outcomes like these.
I wish the US government wasn’t a bunch of borderline afk idiots. There should be no way that we let a terrorist state enforce their illegitimate laws against American companies. Facebook should tell Castro Jr to pound sand, and the US government should back it up.
it could even be treated like a sort of human rights issue - you just have the right to share content from websites via links, and whatever stupid laws about how you owe us money now…! are invalid.
