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Meta's news ban is preventing Canadians from sharing vital information about the wildfires ripping through western Canada (www.businessinsider.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Meta's news ban is preventing Canadians from sharing vital information about the wildfires ripping through western Canada::Canadians are calling on Meta to lift its news ban so they can share news about the wildfires in the Northwest Territories and British Columbia.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They told Meta that they had to pay to so much as host links to news sites on their platforms.

ie they had to pay to literally direct users to news sites, where news sites would make money off advertising to them, allowing the news sites to double dip. If anyone's got good PR, it's the news sites (would you believe it, the news sites have good connections with the press?)

There were ways to stop Meta from scraping news sites, but they decided to effectively stop them from even sharing news. They could've stopped the bill at purely "reproducing" news, but no, they got greedy and decided to make them pay for the privilege to give news sites free advertising. Why on earth would Meta agree to that, and why is it surprising that they just turned around and said no?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Also to be extra extra super clear, the news sites ALWAYS has control over the view of snippets and previews and indexing via HTML headers, HTTP headers, and robots.txt. They're just pretending they didn't have full control over how that was displayed.