That sounds like a serious concern that the Canadian legislature should have taken into account before passing the Online News Act.
By imposing fees when a website user posts a link to a news article, the legislature thereby gave the websites a choice: ① Pay the fees, or ② stop doing the behavior that triggers the fees — namely, allowing users to post those links.
In general, when you impose a tax on some action, people do less of that action. People buy fewer cigarettes when the cigarette tax is raised. Raising gasoline taxes leads (eventually) to people opting for more fuel-efficient cars. And if you tax websites for carrying links to news articles, many of those websites will choose to stop doing that.
The core problem is that Canada is relying on the benevolence of a corporation from a foreign nation to deliver timely emergency warnings.
Federal, provincial, and territorial emergency management agencies have lots of non-social media ways of telling people to get out of Dodge, but for smaller updates on a situation that don’t need an alarm going off on everyone’s phone in a huge area social media and news are more reliable for reaching a large number of people. People don’t check government websites often enough, but they check twitter and Facebook a lot, and it’s repeatedly shown to be the method that gets the most attention from affected people.
A lot of these smaller updates are stuff like status of people’s homes, updates on the wildfire and suppression efforts, options for evacuees, reminding people to stay out of town, etc.
Actual emergency warnings that need urgent action result in every phone in the region blaring like they’re waking the dead. Those do not rely on the benevolence of foreign corporations.
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How is this an issue for Facebook but not Reddit?
I have no idea.
I feel like maybe I’m being a bit thick here, but there’s no way for people to go to… news sites?
The news ban is a direct result of a law Canada just passed, so I hope they’re not directing their ire primarily at Facebook.
How does it help those without Facebook though? It’s not like you can browse any of those links if you don’t have an account.
Sadly this is a good oppertunity to spread alternative platforms like Lemmy and Nostr for Canadians to get good news in a crisis.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Evacuees from the devastating blazes threatening Yellowknife say the ongoing fight between Meta, the owner of Facebook, and Canada’s federal government over who should pay for news has made it harder to spread life-saving information about the wildfires in the Northwest Territories.
Poitras says it’s bad enough having to handle the logistics of getting out in a hurry and worrying about what might happen to her home town while she’s gone, but the situation has been made worse by the ongoing fight between Big Tech and the Canadian government over who should pay for news.
The debate over Bill C-18, known as the Online News Act, may be an academic one in many parts of Canada, but not in the North, where people are dealing with an unfolding natural disaster while suddenly being unable to use one of the most popular communication platforms to share information about wildfire locations and evacuation plans.
A live news conference covered by Cabin Radio and CBC on Wednesday evening announced the evacuation of Yellowknife, but it wasn’t shareable on Facebook, prompting users like Poitras and others to try to get around the block by posting screengrabs of information instead of direct links.
“People in Canada are able to use Facebook and Instagram to connect to their communities and access reputable information, including content from official government agencies, emergency services and non-governmental organisations,” said Meta spokesperson David Troya-Alvarez.
She says the world is watching the Canadian dispute closely, as numerous other jurisdictions have similar laws planned, and Meta has clearly "decided to use Canada as a bit of a test population to try this out and see how far they can force the government to go before perhaps keeping or coming to the bargaining table.
The original article contains 1,512 words, the summary contains 275 words. Saved 82%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
