As wildfires spread, Canadian leaders ask Meta to reverse its news ban
Seems like a lot of vitriol and misunderstanding in these comments, so a few thoughts as someone directly affected by the McDougall Creek fire.<p>Imagine you run a business, doesn’t matter what kind. Prospects look up your service on, say, Google, where Google in many cases now shows them enough of an extract of your content so that they may never even have to click through to your page to learn about what you do. So you can never analyze, ab test, tag, sign up, retarget or monetize these otherwise-visitors who are no longer clicking through.  Effectively Google can be argued to be leveraging your content to make their own page stickier at your expense, eg to sell more ads. How would this make you feel? Turns out many people have a real problem with this, in 2019 I realized this at a telco conference where Rand Fishkin in a keynote was advocating people take this to their members of congress.<p>Firstly, Bill C18 is not even in effect yet. Secondly, its primarily concerned with the intermediaries reproducing the copyrighted news content or summaries&#x2F;extracts on their own sites, which is the same situation as above where visitors never come to your site because your content is being reproduced&#x2F;extracted&#x2F;summarized elsewhere outside of your control. The matter of links to news articles is one interpretation of the secondary concept of “facilitating access” but as already explained in some of the comments here, thats not actually the core driver of this bill and Meta etc are refusing even to participate in the drafting of the regulations around that despite being invited to do so.<p>On the ground, here is what is happening today:  neighbours evacuated or on alert are posting questions in private neighbourhood groups, on everything from food access, water use to garbage collection, and when answers are behind news articles, Meta is stopping other neighbours from posting links to those articles in response. (Incidentally, use of news in private discussion groups is something specifically exempted by C18).<p>This “interference” is purposeful by Meta as a calculated protest against a bill that is not yet in effect and isn’t about that use case.  Yes, some might call this kind of behaviour bullying.<p>They can of course do what they want, they’re not under any obligation to let anyone communicate anything.  Its really just a reminder to everyone that they’re driven entirely by self interest and not the interests of whichever communities they choose to operate in.  By implication this makes them unreliable as an emergency communication utility or as a foundational element of community fabric.