this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Liberal bill requiring Google and Meta to pay for news content passes in Senate (www.ctvnews.ca)
submitted 2 years ago by terath to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Journalism is the bulwark that supports democracy in any society .... you have your politicians and leaders and if there is no one there to ask questions, you are left with just taking the word of everything they say for granted and trust everything they say

Journalists, real actual objective journalists that take no sides and report the relevant topics and leave the reader to decide on what to believe, have the thankless job of taking our leaders to task and make them accountable for everything they say and do.

When you place all that journalistic work in the hands of a corporation to control and manipulate .... it is a real danger to democracy.

Google, Meta and any other corporation should never be allowed to exercise any kind of control, manipulation or effect to any of the work that journalists produce and share

Once you allow a corporation that level of control .... any kind of democratic ideas in the country will slowly get eroded and washed away.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

When you place all that journalistic work in the hands of a corporation to control and manipulate .... it is a real danger to democracy. Google, Meta and any other corporation should never be allowed to exercise any kind of control, manipulation or effect to any of the work that journalists produce and share

It could be said that this happened years ago in Canada. Much of what is considered under this bill as Canadian journalism is largely owned by non-Canadian entities.

For example, Postmedia, who publishes the de-facto daily newspaper for many of the larger Canadian cities, is 66% owned by one american hedge fund. The papers have a Canadian presence, but their brand and ownership are much like a modern Tim Hortons, all Canadian trappings but profits that leave the country for an international investment firm.

So, at best, even if the bill redistributes some profits from tech-bros to their umbrella of qualifying Canadian news outlets, two-thirds of any amount paid would still return to the control of stakeholders in the United States anyway.

[–] Kecessa 3 points 2 years ago

Just to make things clear, two thirds of what's going to post media, not two thirds of all that's redistributed.

[–] terath 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Sure, I completely agree, but I don't think any of that has to do with this situation. I don't think anyone should even have to pay simply for an http link to another public website. That's what this is about.

If the news websites don't want people linking to their website for free then they should change their robots.txt so that they are not indexed and put stories behind a free login gate. Then they can negotiate to give headlines/summaries to Google or Meta or whoever.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The issue is that Google and Meta have positioned themselves as gatekeepers. They can decide which news sites they direct people to and which ones they don't. This gives them a lot of power over news media.

The result has been that despite having more information available to people than ever, people are more ignorant of the news than ever before.

The social media companies have made themselves de facto stewards of the the internet. If they were Canadian corporations, the government would have the power to break up their oligopoly over information. But since they aren't Canadian corporations, the only recourse is to tax them.

[–] terath 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yes agreed, but the problem is far wider than just Canadian news sources. The solution is not to try to tax them, because they will just disengage and make the problem worse. I don't have a good solution right now but if we were to pass regulation it should be something about automated recommendation systems (ai) not trying to make people pay to link to things.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

AI recommendation systems are even worse. They learn from the behaviour of people. Not everyone on the internet is trustworthy, so these AI algorithms are learning bad habits. It probably only takes around a 1000 person troll farm to manipulate a machine learning algorithm.

Who can devote 1000+ people to manipulating the machine learning algorithms that recommend content? Countries interested in disinformation campaigns to destabilize their adversaries. Hence C-11... need to have Canadians involved in those systems otherwise it's just going to be Russia, China, or whoever else is dedicated enough to poisoning the data that the machine learning algorithms are learning from.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Ok but link aggregators don't just link the url. They link the url, show a picture they scraped off the site, the headline (aka the most valuable piece of text) and then often the first paragraph or so of text.

It's pretty obvious that the revenue of news media has decreased as social media revenue has increased and it has really shown in the quality of non-public news organizations the world over.

[–] terath 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yes, and all that has been legal, and now it's not and they are choosing not to incorporate it. That's fine and their right. Law makers need to focus on the source of the problem not make nonsensical "patches" that don't work and instead only serve to further break the ideal of the internet.

We didn't need a law for news sites to stop Google and Meta copying headlines and summaries. The news sites could have done that easily on their own.

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

and now it’s not and they are choosing not to incorporate it

nonsensical “patches” that don’t work

you contradicted yourself. Which is it?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

This is good news purely because it means "news" and their atrocious comment sections will stay off my Facebook feed. I couldn't care less about media conglomorates getting their buck.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

Thank god. Their news feed algo is fucking poison to our society.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

This is great news indeed. Google and Meta are thieves.

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