He didn't ban news on their platforms in Canada. He disabled links to news platforms because the Canadian government passed a bizarre law that forced them to pay news agencies for the privilege of hot linking to them.
this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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If one company is able to profit from the content/product produced by another, the original company should be fairly compensated. That’s what the law was about, and Facebook decided they didn’t wanna play that game.
The problem with that theory is that 99% of news are not by the company running the news website either. Not to mention that they wouldn't get any traffic if nobody was allowed to link to them.
That certainly does sound like a problem for Facebook, and that’s why they told Canada to fuck off and stopped publishing Canadian news.
That doesn’t make it right, and it’s certainly pretty shitty on that part of Facebook, who could easily afford to pay for the content that they make so much money from.
What about search engines? These provide links as well.
And what about this link from OP, should Lemmy world have to pay for OP posting a link to this news article.
Could you imagine if a telephone book had to pay you or your business to list your business phone number.
Google does pay Canadian news companies to show their content.
Part of the issue is that Facebook and Instagram can show news stories without linking out to them, so users don’t get the opportunity to see the news companies’ ads or to sign up for a subscription.
What I can imagine is a fair and equitable ecology of media sharing. While some commercial producers - as well and indie ones - would offer their content for free linking (perhaps with a daily/weekly quota), others may work out mass licensing deals with the platform owner. , Even many more others may work out, individualized compensation agreements that fall somewhere in between.
So, FB would pay an annual licensing fee to all of the content producers whose content it profits from.
FB is already built on hundreds of more complex systems that the one required for tracking license payment obligations.
Just a FYI, Canadian news agencies wanted social platforms like Facebook to pay for linking to their news articles.
The argument from Canadian news agencies was that by social platforms sharing links on their social platforms, social platforms were directly increasing their sites user traffic and benefiting with increased ad revenue. News agencies argued this decreased their own ad revenue by decrease site traffic.
Most people know a link directs a individual to the original site of the content. Since Facebook and other social sites did not want to pay a link fee they simply had chosen to remove links to Canadian news sites (as requested)
By removing links to these sites on social platforms like Facebook, news agencies decreased their surface area of exposure. Thus news agencies decreased the amount of individuals being directed to their site and news articles.
Simply put, Canadian news agencies wanted their cake and eat it too.
Now search engine like Google search for example were exempt from this mandate because they only link to the article or external site. The irony in this is real.
Obviously sites like Facebook "condensing a news article automatically" and presenting it on their own site, without a user needing to navigate away from Facebook as a example is a different issue and a valid point.
Though please be aware, generally when a link shows up on Facebook and gets formatted with a picture and a paragraph underneath it. This feature is controlled directly by the external sites integration with Facebook or social platform, and they can choose how much of the link is condensed or shown.
Also please note, some of the "Canadian news agencies" that were lobbying for this to pass are actually USA owned, and masquerading as Canadian.
Though please be aware, generally when a link shows up on Facebook and gets formatted with a picture and a paragraph underneath it. This feature is controlled directly by the external sites integration with Facebook or social platform, and they can choose how much of the link is condensed or shown.
This is what seals the deal for me as the news companies being in the wrong here.
Yup, and FB feed is horrible since then. Now a shit load of alternative pages are spam publishing all kind of fake news and far-right stuff. Everything is anti-left, bash liberal, bash quebec, bash woke, bash electric cars, etc.
Anyone want to guess where his money really comes from?