After Canada Starts Taxing News Links, Canadians Are Upset That They Can’t Follow News Of Wildfires On Facebook

Let's start from the basics here: if you tax something, you will get less of it. That's how taxes work. If you want less of something, you add a tax to it. In Canada, some very, very clueless politicians (pushed by the news media) passed a tax on Facebook and Google linking to news. Both companies have long made it clear that news is not a revenue driver for either company, so Canada's decision to make it more expensive basically priced both companies out of the market, and both have announced a discontinuation of links to news for Canadian users.

Meta began removing links to news at the beginning of this month, and people are already realizing how messed up things are when you can't link. Up in Canada's Northwest Territories, there are wildfires happening, and people were relying on social media to share news... but they can't do that any more.

Like many in Canada's Northwest Territories, Poul Osted has been relying on social media to keep in touch with loved ones as they scramble to evacuate from nearby wildfires.

But Mr Osted said he has been left frustrated by his inability to share news articles on Facebook during the active emergency situation, due to Meta's ban on news content for Canadian users.

Instead we have to screenshot parts of a news story and post that as a picture," Mr Osted told the BBC.

Oftentimes this means you don't get the whole story, or have to go searching the web for verification."

I'm sure some will blame Meta for this, but this is 100% on the Canadian government. As we've explained over and over again, no matter what you think of Meta, this law is breaking one of the fundamental pieces of the open web: you never have to pay to link to someone.

Meta may be a terrible messenger for this, but we should be happy that the company is taking a stand here, even if it's doing it for selfish reasons. If link taxes like this are allowed to sweep the globe, the fundamental internet that we rely on will have changed in a very bad way. There is no way that these kinds of taxes stop at just news providers. Once other industries catch on, you can expect link taxes for all sorts of other struggling" industries.

If people are frustrated about not being able to share important information about wildfires, that's totally understandable, but they should be asking their government why they've made linking too expensive.

Meanwhile, others are complaining that Meta is blocking sites that aren't really news. This isn't a surprise. The same thing happened in Australia too, when that country launched its own link tax. I know when that happened some people got mad at Meta, but that was silly. When the penalty for not paying for a news link can be massive, you can bet Meta is (reasonably!) going to err on the side of overblocking.

And, as the company has to go through tons of sites to figure out which are and which are not allowed to be linked to, of course some borderline cases are going to get caught in the crossfire. According to this article, it includes things like a satire publications and a music radio station that doesn't really publish any news.

In both cases, it's fairly understandable. Both publications look pretty close to news, and there's no way for a human to carefully vet which news-looking-sites" are actually news vs. those that are not. At least this round of overblocking resulted in a funny situation:

The Beaverton, which describes itself as a satire and parody publication," was blocked by Meta on Facebook and Instagram a week ago after the technology conglomerate mistakenly lumped it in with news providers in Canada. Its readers, however, could once again see its content online by Thursday.

Luke Gordon Field, editor in chief of The Beaverton, said the blockingprompted him to act. The blocking was no joke, he said.

Field wrote an open letter to Meta threatening CEO Mark Zuckerberg with a fake lawsuit for defaming the publication by calling it a news organization. That letter was posted to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Then there's the music radio station:

Dan Lovranski, the volunteer host of Dr Mouth's Rock and Roll Lunch Party on CIUT 89.5 FM Tuesdays at noon, said CIUT-FM, the University of Toronto's radio station, is being blocked by Meta on Facebook and Instagram. He said CIUT-FM, which mainly produces music-based programming, is a community-based university-run radio station.

It's affecting a lot more things than just news agencies," Lovranski said on Tuesday.

Lovranski said he's amassed a global audience by promoting his show - rock and roll, lots of fun, loud and boisterous, crazy music" - on Facebook and Instagram. He said Facebook is a great promotional tool," but no longer.

Now, listeners cannot be alerted to the show on Facebook and cannot be given information on how todownload the show so that they canlisten to it later, he said.

Again, you could argue that this doesn't belong in the block, but Meta can't afford to make mistakes here, so a radio station seems close enough to news that you can understand why it would get blocked.

Don't like it? Complain to the Canadian government who pushed for and passed this very dumb link tax.