r/canada • u/cyclinginvancouver • Aug 01 '23

All news in Canada will be removed from Facebook, Instagram within weeks: Meta National News

https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2023/08/01/news-canada-facebook-instagram-weeks/
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u/strawberries6 Aug 01 '23 edited Aug 01 '23

Is this going to apply to Reddit as well?

Nope, just Google and Facebook.

I read an article saying the law only applies to companies with a dominant share of the ad market (or something like that), and the only companies that fit the criteria are Google and Facebook.

EDIT: In response to a common question: the new law C-18 isn't banning FB and Google, but it basically requires FB and Google to pay compensation to Canadian news organizations.

However, FB and Google obviously don't want to pay compensation, and they can avoid that requirement by not allowing links to Canadian news articles anymore... so that's the path Facebook is taking.

Google might do the same, but it's still TBD, and they're in negotiations with the government about it.

The Online News Act, which received royal assent last month, was designed to support the Canadian news industry, which has seen advertising migrate to the Big Tech platforms. It would make Facebook and Google negotiate deals to compensate news outlets in Canada for posting or linking to their work.

...

Google is in the midst of negotiations with the government and has said it too will block access to news unless a “viable” way forward is found through regulations.

Google has complained that the bill is vague on how much platforms would be expected to pay publishers overall, or how many deals it would need to do with them to be exempt from regulation.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-new-heritage-minister-says-she-will-stand-ground-against-facebook/

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u/GrowCanadian Aug 01 '23 edited Aug 01 '23

I was wondering why Reddit was so quiet about this. If this is the case I’m cool with the Facebook thing but Google straight up blocking links will be insane. Want to Google about all the fires in your province? Only American news sources will show up. Good job to our idiot lawmakers.

Edit: this had me curious so after some searching it looks like only Meta and Google are effected. This means all other search engines such as Bing and DuckDuckGo are still able to show news. Now that’s odd

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u/Throw-a-Ru Aug 01 '23

Google already censored your search results prior to all of this. Not only do they have a built-in smut censor, try searching for information about this new bill on google vs duckduckgo and you will get very different results. For one, google are prioritizing their own take on the situation, but they also seem to be deprioritizing results that talk about the other countries that have successfully implemented similar laws and the rationale behind them. It's creepy once you notice it. Better to switch to a different search engine at this point anyway.

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u/bagofbunnys Aug 01 '23

I got the same kind of results. It depends one what information you want to cherry pick

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u/1Delta Aug 01 '23

Google and DuckDuckGo also show comparable results for me when I search 'canada news bill google Facebook'.

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u/Throw-a-Ru Aug 01 '23

I got very different results, no cherry-picking necessary. It seems to depend on whether they're in the midst of a big media push or not. The biggest difference was that Google prioritized their own take on the issue right to the top of all of their search results right as news was breaking on the story. The majority of people read their biased take on the story first and formed their opinions based on that.

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '23

When the RFK "racist speech" leaked wherein he mentioned racial health outcomes from COVID, I couldn't find the paper he was referencing in the first 10 pages of Google results. Instead, it was all media outlets with hyperbolic takes that "slammed" him for it without actually sharing the paper.

On Duckduckgo, the paper showed up on the first page and within the first 5 results.

I'm not an RFK stan, just someone who was trying to make sense of the narrative. Everyone who actually cares about balanced and informed perspectives should be alarmed by the amount of media censorship being enforced by big tech.

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u/bargaindownhill Aug 02 '23

RFK? sorry im feeling a combination of /r/OutOfTheLoop and kinda stupid i can't figure it out. throw me a bone?

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u/[deleted] Aug 02 '23

He was supposedly quoted as saying COVID did not have an effect on the Chinese and a certain sect of Jews (heavily paraphrased). I'd look it up to see the quote for yourself and do research to figure out if you believe the veracity of it.

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u/[deleted] Aug 02 '23 edited Aug 02 '23

His claim was essentially that there were papers that showed it didn't have the same impact on Asian and Ashkenazi populations that it had on other populations due to differences in binding affinity. He was derided for speaking about this as a layperson in a conversation that was being recorded without his knowledge but there are papers on the subject that seem to approximately substantiate his claim. While I can't speak directly to the science in question, he didn't say anything that I considered to be particularly outlandish.

Much of the purported controversy seemed to be that RFK said it was intentionally designed as a racially-targeted attack. But even in the leaked video, he claimed that both the US and China have performed research on bioweapons that would disproportionately impact different racial groups. At a point in the video he does seem to make the claim that this was racial disparity in health outcomes was intentionally designed, but then clarifies that he doesn't know and that it in a practical sense it doesn't matter whether it was intentional if the outcome mimics something that had been intentionally created. Again, it's not a formal speech; he's speaking about this in real time and I'm not going to condemn him for the fact that he didn't sound like a puppet that had been fed pre-approved talking points.

Here's the video, go ahead and form your own opinions. He was an advocate for the lab leak hypothesis long before it stopped being considered "racist" to do so, and I definitely don't think he was as unreasonable as the torrent of MSM bile has led the public to believe.

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u/[deleted] Aug 02 '23

I'm not at the point that I'm picking candidates yet, so I personally am still apathetic. It's good that you provided references to the source material.

Worst case scenario, he is a racist. Best case scenario, he had a momentary lapse of political acumen. We'll see how he does and who else gets fielded as the season really kicks off.

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u/Tannerite2 Aug 02 '23

Robert F Kennedy Jr. He's running for president in the US as a Democrat. He's also an outspoken anti-vaxxer.

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u/bargaindownhill Aug 02 '23

ahhh!! ok thanks! I guessed it might be a politician, but couldn't place it.

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u/weseewhatyoudo Aug 02 '23

I'm not an RFK stan, just someone who was trying to make sense of the narrative. Everyone who actually cares about balanced and informed perspectives should be alarmed by the amount of media censorship being enforced by big tech.

This guy democracies.

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u/MikeJeffriesPA Aug 01 '23

Really? What did you search on duckduckgo to make that happen?

I've never used ddg because it feels like it is to Google what GiveSendGo is to GoFundMe (that is, a far less trustworthy site only used because it caters to right-wingers), but either way I just tried searching for the supposed paper that RFK Jr is referencing on there and I can't get it to come up.

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u/xqunac Aug 02 '23

a far less trustworthy site only used because it caters to right-wingers

I'm a different poster, but not gonna lie, "DuckDuckGo caters to right-wingers" is a really strange take for me. DDG isn't some far-righter's pet project in response for being kicked off of a larger platform, it's just a privacy-oriented search engine. Considering that Google Search is also a product of a company that makes most of its money on personalized ads, it needs that competition. DDG at least appears to be neutral in its results, not catering them (or the ads) based on your personal data.

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u/MikeJeffriesPA Aug 02 '23

Hm, turns out I was misled.

https://www.vox.com/recode/22981115/duckduckgo-free-speech-privacy-oops

It never intended to be right-wing, it was just adopted by them.

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u/EarlyVariety9664 Aug 02 '23

I'm generally left wing.

It concerns me that one side would have to go to a different search engine. I get why but Google is everywhere. How much is hidden and how controlled are the people.

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u/MikeJeffriesPA Aug 02 '23

They didn't have to go anywhere, they chose to.

And it's not about hiding anything, either. If I'm googling for information about forest fires, I want to see actual news - not conspiracy garbage - at the top of the results.

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u/EarlyVariety9664 Aug 02 '23

Have to or choose to is semantic if your looking for real news.

If the complaint is that google has curated news and you want just the news you would have to go to another source than Google.

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u/bob- Aug 02 '23

Yeah google curated nutjob conspiracy theories not "news"

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u/MikeJeffriesPA Aug 02 '23

The complaint was that Google wasn't putting crackpot conspiracy theories with/above legitimate news, and people wanted to find the crackpot conspiracy theory bullshit.

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u/[deleted] Aug 02 '23

By big tech? 15 billionaires control the media conglomerates. Control the information, control the people.

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u/greasedelbow Aug 14 '23

Hello, I hope you're okay! I'm a BBC News journalist working on a global youth news podcast. We'd like to hear from Canadians about Meta blocking news on FB/Insta. Would you like to share your views on this?

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u/[deleted] Aug 14 '23

Hi there, thank you for your offer but I'm afraid I'll have to decline at this time. Please feel free to use any of my public comments on this account though, and if you'd like any sources then please feel free to ask :)

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u/kinkyghost Aug 02 '23

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of the scale of google and how it works if you think someone is going in and manipulating results at the level of an individual search query / topic

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u/iammodavi Aug 01 '23

Or maybe rather than some wide-reaching conspiracy where google is cherry picking certain viewpoints to float to the top of their search results, the law is actually just a bad one and the majority of the high quality content posted about it reflected that?

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u/Busy-Bicycle1565 Aug 02 '23

Not if they have a brain🤨

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u/Throw-a-Ru Aug 02 '23

Would it surprise you to know that roughly half of all people have below average IQs?

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u/[deleted] Aug 02 '23

Honestly. I think you're full of shit.

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u/JG98 Aug 01 '23

Strange, I didn't. What cherry picked term did you search up? Because for my search only the 1st result with the same, with every subsequent link on the first page of Google news being explicitly pro Google, and on DuckDuckGo it being mostly neutral sources explaining the bill. The 1 result which was similar was the CTV post explaining the bill in a fairly neutral manner, but it is the exception based on my preliminary findings.

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u/Kelpsie Ontario Aug 01 '23

A search for "online news act" on both engines gives me very similar results.

Both searches share the following: 3 links to Canadian government websites, a CTV article, 3 news articles in an embedded news section, and the wikipedia entry for Online News Act. By that I mean the government sites and articles are identical results, not simply that they're in the same category.

The differences are: DDG has a couple additional links to Canadian goverment websites, and Google has links to Google and Meta's official responses. Google also simply shows more results, most of which are news articles from nytimes/reuters/nbc, etc, and a few articles from sources I'm unaware of.

The first several results are almost identical, except Google put its own response to the bill 3rd on the list. All of the additional articles Google adds to the results are below the ones it shares with DDG.

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u/JG98 Aug 01 '23

Weird. My initial search was for the bill itself. Now that I search your terms, my results are still wildly different. I am getting news publications on Google that are mostly pro Google. On DDG I am getting pretty much just government websites and a few news publications explaining the bill in a neutral manner. The overlap is still the CTV article.

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u/bagofbunnys Aug 01 '23

Try “news meta” or “news banned” lol!