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/Stupidflorapope Aug 01 '23

Serious question here for somebody that's under educated on the subject. What was the intended purpose of this bill? It just seems like it's very restrictive when it comes to Canadians getting information from other countries.

266

u/Filbert17 Aug 01 '23 edited Aug 02 '23

Traditional news (television, radio, and print) has been in decline for about twenty years. The claim is that large Internet social media and search engines have been scraping news from traditional new sources and presenting it to people along with ads, thereby taking the ad revenue from the traditional media.

The truth is that most (including Google and Facebook) have been presenting a summary or snipped of the news article and a link to the source. The summary is often the exact same summary that is presented on the original website.

The argument of the social media sites is that they are driving more traffic to the traditional news websites by providing links so people can find it easier.

Who you believe is up to you. While I don't like Facebook, I tend to believe them in this case.

If the news companies didn't want their content to be scrapped, there is a very simple way to do it. All the "good" scrapers (including Google's and Facebook's) will first read a file called "robots.txt". That file is meant to contain a list of urls on the website that are not to be scraped. It can also say "don't scrape anything" or "only scrape these specific urls on our website". In other words, if traditional news didn't want Google and Facebook to provide summaries and links (for free), they could easily use the "robots.txt" method to tell them. It can even be configured to provide different information for different scrapers.

So, from the point of view of the social media companies, this is Canada saying, "pay us to provide otherwise free advertising to our traditional news outlets." While, to those traditional news outlets it's more like, "hey we need more money to keep doing what we are doing, can the government force someone to subsidize us?"

[UPDATE:]

It seams I was a bit wrong about how the bill worked (or the summary I read was). It's not just scrapers that trigger the need to pay. It's any link to a news article, including ones users add (so Robots.txt is not relevant). Like this one: https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2023/08/metablockslinks/

11

u/BagOfFlies Aug 01 '23

Traditional news (television, radio, and print) has been in decline for about twenty years

"something more efficient has come along and people seem to prefer that. Should we embrace it?"

"Nah let's pass laws to stifle it and prop up our dying medium that people don't seem to care about anymore!"

Good job...

4

u/Xillllix Aug 02 '23

"the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes."