The Canadian government on Friday demanded that Meta lift a "reckless" ban on domestic news from its platforms to allow people to share information about wildfires in the west of the country.
This is stupid. I don’t use Facebook and I’m certainly no fan of Meta, but they didn’t ban news links for the fun of it - they did it in response to the Canadian government making them pay news agencies for news links that gets shared on their services.
I think that’s a stupid law, but the Canadians are entitled to do that if they want to. But that means they’ve intentionally increased the cost to Meta of permitting news links, and Meta has made a commercial decision based on this, which it’s also entitled to do. Meta isn’t a charity or a public sector agency and to expect this company (of all!) to behave like one is ludicrous.
This is stupid. I don’t use Facebook and I’m certainly no fan of Meta, but they didn’t ban news links for the fun of it - they did it in response to the Canadian government making them pay news agencies for news links that gets shared on their services.
I think that’s a stupid law, but the Canadians are entitled to do that if they want to. But that means they’ve intentionally increased the cost to Meta of permitting news links, and Meta has made a commercial decision based on this, which it’s also entitled to do. Meta isn’t a charity or a public sector agency and to expect this company (of all!) to behave like one is ludicrous.
This is pure cakeism.