The NWT government and city of Yellowknife are describing in tweets, Instagram messages etc. how to search key evacuation information on CPAC and CBC. The broadcast carriers have a duty to carry emergency information, but Meta and X are blocking links.
While internet access is reportedly limited in Yellowknife, residents are finding this a barrier to getting current and accurate information. Even links to CBC radio are blocked.
Can the Canadian government please just have an official platform for sharing this kind of information? Why are evacuation notices going on Facebook???
They do have these platforms, but many people have become dependent on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to link to information.
So the territorial government is literally posting on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter telling people how to search for CPAC Canada and CBC Radio so they can find the sites.
Compare that to the duty of all broadcasters in a public emergency to carry the key evacuation information on radio and television and tell people where to get more detailed emergency instructions.
@StillPaisleyCat @ImplyingImplications
It’s not a dependence in an addictive way. It’s in a community way, where all news is shared on community pages for the benefit of the community because they rely on each other for survival every day.
Agreed. But this is a societal dependence.
Too many clubs, churches and communities organizations, and small businesses found Facebook easier to maintain than websites, so many people became dependent on that platform.
The challenge is that governments have a duty to meet their constituents where they are, especially in emergencies. So they send out Tweets, ‘grams and posts directing people to the information on official sites.
Before the Internet, people would turn on their radios or televisions. That’s why in most jurisdictions (including the United States) broadcasters and cable carriers MUST carry emergency broadcasts, superceding regular programming. The wave of climate-related emergencies raise the question of whether internet aggregator platforms should be required to do the same.
As an aside, governments and public new sources maintain websites that are accessible. Due to a Canadian Supreme Court decision requiring government platforms to be accessible to persons with disabilities, Canadian new sites have user interfaces that are adaptive.
Remote communities in northern Canada operate differently than everything along the 49th parallel.
Stop using a wide brush to describe two completely different societies.
We can agree on remote communities having different circumstances, and social networks.
That said, I doubt that this would apply any less in the Okanagan communities where there are many people living on backroads and off the grid or in most of Canada outside the major metropolitan areas.
Not really. I’ve lived in Kelowna and also in remote Ontario regions. The only similarity is that there’s lots of trees.
Kelowna is a significant regional metropolitan area.
But get into the bush beyond Vernon or up to William’s Lake and you will find that people who used to rely heavily on CBC and other AM radio in a crisis are looking to their regular internet sources. If that’s where they get their information, then that’s where government’s need to make sure it’s available in an emergency.
So the territorial government is literally posting on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter telling people how to search for CPAC Canada and CBC Radio so they can find the sites.
And the problem is that they haven’t figured out how to hack into RSS feeds the same way?
Maybe getting the word out via Facebook, Instagram, and X is good enough? Outside of Podcasts, RSS is considered dead anyway. There are diminishing returns to consider.
The whole point in an emergency is to get the official guidance out to where people look first for information, not retrain them to go to official sites.
What you are suggesting is that Facebook and Twitter be legally required to push official emergency information from governments to the top. That would parallel what the broadcasters and cable carriers typically have to do. It makes sense, but given that they don’t seem to want to be obligated to carry government information except as paid advertising, this would require a new emergency system for internet platforms.
The point is that these alerts need to he on sites that people actually check.
I dont wake up every morning and scroll through the government’s PSA website. I do wake up and scroll my Lemmy news communities.
I get texts all the time for amber alerts that I can rarely assist with, why can’t an emergency message be sent over the same system?
CBC provides service in the north in numerous Indigenous languages, including through its Facebook pages which many in those communities rely on.
As a public broadcaster it has a duty to meet the needs of Canadians for essential information where they look not just in English and French on standard internet sites, or even their low bandwidth emergency ones.
@FireRetardant @library_napper
Because not everyone has a cell, leaves their phone on while they’re sleeping, has good reliable service, etc etc.
Most people browse facebook or instagram from their phone these days. I’m not saying that only a texting system should work in fact there should be several methods ranging from radio, tv, internet, and those updatable information signs over hwys.
IF the goal is to get as many people to see it as possible just hijack the DNS and point everyone to a government website with relevant information.
You mean something like a National Public Alerting System?
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Strikeout is a double TildeLike this: ~~
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Just doing my part
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The real issue is whether these apps should carry emergency alerts and information
Should they? Absolutely. Should they be forced to? I don’t think so.
But, it seems like an easy gesture of goodwill to do it, if there’s a system in place for it.
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Honestly Canada should join the Fediverse en mass, depending on shitty proprietary and predatory social media is a weak point for our democracy.
Canada should join the Fediverse en mass
We’ve had NNTP since the 1980s. What does the Fediverse offer Canadians that they didn’t already have offered to them with NNTP? There is probably a good reason why they don’t accept these distributed social networks en-mass.
we’ve had NNTP since the 80s
and I could find maybe one or two students on my uni campus that know what this is
and also, it’s not the 80s anymore
Did they offer to let them carry the links for free? Or are they using an emergency to demand a payday?
Love how FB gets to charge for bots to scrape their content, while they scrape everyone elses content for free.
Once again, THE LEGISLATION HAS NOT YET COME INTO FORCE.
Yelling is rude, but the repeated questions that seem to ignore that Meta’s blocking of links is preemptive is beginning to have the feel of sealioning.
Meta is not at risk of any tax if they unblock links during this emergency.
CBC is grasping at straws trying to put the blame on Facebook for the very bill they pushed through, that had very predictable consequences. Canadians news publishers have no one to blame for this but themselves.
The article basically reads as though they’re upset for not being paid by Meta during emergencies and sad they can’t profit as much off people glued to watching emergencies (it’s absolutely not because they’re truly concerned for the actual ppl facing the emergency). It’s quite tasteless for them to pull the misinformation card when news publishers aren’t always known to spread accurate or helpful information – they’re mostly there for the fear mongering. And Meta’s response on that front is the correct one: they’re not blocking government sites and government sites should be considered the sources of truth and information during emergencies.
That said, unrelated to news link sharing, there’s a larger discussion to be had around emergency broadcasts over the internet: should the government create legislation to have an emergency notification tool in place that can be triggered on Canadian websites and websites catering to Canadians (social media included)? Many institutions, including universities, have their own systems for doing exactly this so why can’t the government?
Facebook’s response was petulant and childish. This is not Canada’s fault any more than it was the fault of other countries who enacted the same regs.
Oh. You didn’t know there were others?
There’s only one country with even a remotely similar legislation, that being Australia. Facebook got the amendments it wanted before the Australian Code received royal assent.
If you’re going to cry foul about how Facebook is following the legislation Canada is putting in place, you’ll need to try harder than that.
The legislation isn’t even in place yet, and FB are acting like Trudeau just nut punched Zuckerburg.
FB didn’t want to talk. If they did, they would say they are in talks.
What FB wanted, was to be a bully and have the law repealed. Not have it adjusted.
Please stop rehashing the same dead argument over and over and whining about Facebook being a bully when they’re very clearly following the terms of the legislation and this outcome was very clearly predictable. News publishers are not victims of bullying, they’re victims of their own legislation. And no Meta never once asked for the bill to be dropped, they expressed concerns around wording and requested some amendments; so did Alphabet. Ask yourself why Meta is fine paying news organizations in Australia but not Canada.
Further, as others have already pointed out in this thread and in others on this topic, the bill has received royal assent. The only next step is the Coming into force, which will happen 180 days after that. So whether Meta pulls news now or in 180 days really doesn’t matter: the effects, the impacts and the results will be the same. Others have also given the extreme example that if a country that had no legislation around murder were to pass a bill making murder illegal, you wouldn’t run around murdering as many people as possible until that act came into force. It’s the same idea here.
Keep also in mind that the Online News Act grants the CRTC the ability to name any company it wants at any point as a “digital news intermediary”. So this act could have far reaching consequences on much more than Meta and Alphabet in the long term. And it’s very likely that any other platform they name will also drop Canadian news for the simple reason that Canadian News needs social media, but the reverse isn’t true at all.
“More than ever, this kind of dangerous situation shows how having more access to trustworthy and reliable information and news is vital for so many of our communities to be informed about the current emergency.”
Facebook isn’t trustworthy. Tech bros can’t be trusted.
It’s not like the internet has been removed. Social media isn’t the internet. News sites are still accessible. As is the whole internet. People need to get their head out of their asses already. This problem is farcical. Life threatening situation, ‘oh no my facebook is broken what will I do?!?11’. How did we even get to this point. The internet circa 90s and early 2000s is laughing their asses off at all this. PEBKAC.
Should they? Not if we punish them with fees for linking. I mean, imagine you’re trying to warn your neighbours about an approaching fire and a police officer pulls up to tell you that you’ll have to pay $50 for each neighbour you warn. I wouldn’t blame you if you stopped, I’d blame whatever law stopped you. Similarly here, I don’t blame Meta for not linking but I blame the government that will penalize Meta the moment any link points to a news outlet, emergency or not.
This is a bad take. I’m blaming Facebook for deciding they’d rather not have news than share the money they make off it with the people who need to be paid to make it.
I’m not engaging with this. Obviously facebook is monetized. I’m not gonna sit here and explain how advertising and the sale of your data makes a company revenue.
@ram
They monetize everything; cat pix, political rants, food reviews etc. And they don’t pay for that either.
FB is enduring zero loss for blocking Canadian news. Even the call for an ad boycott is a bust. The biggest losers are the very media sources that pushed for this crap law.
The tax and the legislation is at least a half a year from coming into force, the regulatory framework to operationalize it hasn’t even been published for public consultation.
Meta has started blocking preemptively. This is a power play protest about avoiding being subject to other countries’ law. That’s it.
While I’m sure there are some messaging aspects to doing it early, it’s worth pointing out that by January, unless the government repeals the law, Meta will be penalized for allowing links during emergencies. This specific law comes into operation regardless of whether the government has published any framework or not.
This is a power play protest about avoiding being subject to other countries’ law.
Meta is complying with this law. The idea behind the law was that Meta was stealing ad revenue from news organizations by linking to them, and that if they wanted to continue linking to them they needed to compensate news organizations. Meta has thus stopped ‘stealing’ the ad revenue. That’s complying with the law. It did exactly what it was expected to do, in the same way that when you tax cigarettes you expect some people to cut back on smoking. Even better, Meta stopped ‘stealing’ before the law even came into force!
Seriously it’s like there’s nothing they can do to satisfy their critics - they get accused of stealing news so they stop it, and then they get accused of harming news sites by not stealing.
Which is it? Is Meta beneficial to news organizations or harmful to them? If harmful then there’s no problem with Meta blocking news links. If beneficial, then maybe this is a dumb law that’s akin to the government putting a tax on exercising.
Perhaps we’d do better to look at the text of Bill C-18.
You seem to be saying that the law itself has already laid out that Meta is who it applies to.
Instead, it says that a list needs to be established.
List of digital news intermediaries 8 (1) The Commission must maintain a list of digital news intermediaries in respect of which this Act applies. The list must set out each intermediary’s operator and contact information for that operator and specify whether an order made under subsection 11(1) or 12(1) applies in relation to the intermediary.
Meta clearly sees that the law is intended to apply to digital platforms with significant market power such as it has. But it has not yet been designated.
Timing - coming into force - you are correct that there is a hard deadline at end of year.
180 days after royal assent (6) Despite subsections (1) to (5), any provision of this Act that does not come into force by order before the 180th day following the day on which this Act receives royal assent comes into force 180 days after the day on which this Act receives royal assent.
Basically, you are justifying Meta’s actions on the basis that it recognizes that a law it doesn’t like will apply to it in future.
From the text (very end of the bill):
180 days after royal assent
(6) Despite subsections (1) to (5), any provision of this Act that does not come into force by order before the 180th day following the day on which this Act receives royal assent comes into force 180 days after the day on which this Act receives royal assent.
The bill received royal assent on June 22nd, 2023, which actually means this law takes effect in December at the latest.
EDIT - I think we were updating our messages at the same time as I added the above before yours was finished.
I think it’s clear that Meta would be covered if it links to news given this section:
This Act applies in respect of a digital news intermediary if, having regard to the following factors, there is a significant bargaining power imbalance between its operator and news businesses:
(a) the size of the intermediary or the operator;
(b) whether the market for the intermediary gives the operator a strategic advantage over news businesses; and
(c ) whether the intermediary occupies a prominent market position.
7 (1) If this Act applies in respect of a digital news intermediary, its operator must so notify the Commission.
There’s doesn’t seem much room for Meta here - if they link to news they’ll be covered by this law. The only possible escape might be in Section 11 where it allow the Governor in Council to write regulations that exempt organizations, and if the government is going to exempt Meta they might as well just repeal the law.
Or Parliament may pass further legislation on accelerated calendar that will require Meta to carry links in declared emergencies much as cable companies and private broadcasters are now.
A fundamental question of the 21st century is, as internet media company replace legacy media companies, do they have the same responsibilities? Legacy media companies have the advantage they get to use a very limited piece of Canadian real-estate, that is the airwaves, and so the Government is in a good position to say “well if we’re letting you use our airwaves, we need you to do something for us” and this includes CanCon, emergency broadcast, etc.
But now those “airwaves” are becoming increasingly abandoned and everything is digital and going over wires, wifi, and cellular to the international internet. But the above thing about “broadcast” was always a hack. It was a workaround for the fact that basically we need the loudest voices in Canada to also help Canada out.
And now we’ve lost that justification, but we still have the need.
Imho, the justification was always BS. If you have a massive media-org with a giant-ass megaphone in Canada, you’ve got responsibilities. I don’t care if you’re a website or a news channel or a dead tree paper.
Re; “we need the loudest voices in Canada to also help Canada out”, speak for yourself. I’m tired of the loudest voices drowning out the reasonable ones. It’s these same loud voices that have polarized society and tanked trust in the media as a whole.
C-18 is all about helping Canada’s big media companies solidify their positions and inhibit innovative startups. Meta and Google helped level the playing field so they must be published.
Meta doesn’t own a megaphone, though. It is but a lowly sharecropper who works the land of Microsoft, Google, and Apple. They let Meta use their megaphones sometimes, but only when it is on good behaviour.
It seems what you are really looking for is anyone with a voice to relay any important messages they hear.
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!
Good bot
So what’s the situation on Lemmy? Who will pay for this article’s link to CBC?
Lemmy is neither large enough nor monetizing our views so it’s outside the scope of the legislation and the new regulations that will need to be written, formally consulted through the Canada Gazette process and then approved by Cabinet. Basically, what Lemmy’s doing is still fair use by a carrier.
As I understand it, the Canadian legislation is different than the Australian one in that the Australian version would just have had a minister name which companies would be subject to the tax.
Canada, having been in trade disputes with the US over ministerial designation processes that can be argued to lack transparency, went a different route that would make the tax come into effect for large platforms, monetizing content without paying the sources/creators.
Is monetization required for a site to qualify as a digital news intermediary though? It seems like there just needs to be an imbalance:
https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-assent
Application 6 This Act applies in respect of a digital news intermediary if, having regard to the following factors, there is a significant bargaining power imbalance between its operator and news businesses:
(a) the size of the intermediary or the operator;
(b) whether the market for the intermediary gives the operator a strategic advantage over news businesses; and
(c) whether the intermediary occupies a prominent market position.
What happens when a Lemmy instance gets too big?
The legislation talks in effect about market power and the benefit to the carrier itself. Without monetization, there wouldn’t be an issue.
If an instance is running ads on article summaries then it would be the owner of that instance
@StillPaisleyCat They don’t have any duty, unless you want to compel speech.
Consider that governments have access to emergency systems already; consider the amber alert and the emergency broadcast system.
Why expect non-contracted private companies to do this?Currently, private broadcasters and cable carriers have an obligation under their governing legislation to carry information in designated public emergencies. In return for their monetization of their platforms, they have a legal obligation to carry news and information without charge in such situations.
In the US, there is a similar emergency broadcast system.
As well, during the pandemic emergency, most private news sources took down their paywalls so that the public had the opportunity to get a diversity of news sources.
Contrast this with Meta, which is refusing to unblock links during the emergency, saying that people can just go directly to government websites. This runs directly counter to good emergency communications practice which is to get information to the places people usually look for it.
Meta is not being asked to do more than other carriers in a public emergency, but is refusing to back down, even though it is currently not subject to any tax penalties for monetizing the content provided by Canadian news sources.
Meta has built up an ecosystem where local news clients are dependent on its platform. Around Yellowknife, this includes Indigenous language news provided by CBC the public broadcaster and private internet broadcaster Cabin Radio. Both are using other distribution but many users are habituated to accessing these via Facebook.
