Exhibit A on why getting your news from fb is a bad idea.
Ban Facebook from Canada entirely, I say.
how about we just use it for its intended use and not expect to rely on it for key information???
It’s intended use it to gather information on you and sell it to people who sell you things you don’t need.
that doesnt sound like a reliable news source…
Because there were and are few better more accessible news aggregation options. (Edit- for the general less technically minded folks).
Here we are on the fediverse trying to change that. Make sure you preach outside of the echo chamber.
Meanwhile I’ve seen this story all over Canadian Mastodon and Lemmy. I guess Meta just has to do business in India.
I tried to post several links to news on this topic to Facebook just now. Would not let me. Now all posts except ads are blank now. I guess that’s my “punishment”. Fuck you Facebook!
Have you been living under a rock? Canadian news isn’t allowed on Facebook because our government decided Facebook had to pay to host news links and they weren’t even close to making a deal before they signed it into law. It was a political stunt. Government gets to pretend they’re putting pressure on big tech, then they can blame big tech when their shitty terms aren’t accepted, then in a couple years when they make a deal they can act like they won.
FYI for Facebook to be exempt from C-18 they had to ban all news and not just Canadian news.
That’s not true, and doesn’t even make sense… how would the Canadian government force Meta and Google to pay non Canadian corporations for news?
If they have news content, regardless of where the organization is based, they are a “digital news intermediary”. As a digital news intermediary they are thus subject to the law and may be made to pay Canadian news organizations. Note that the law doesn’t make them pay for foreign news, but the presence of foreign news is enough to allow the CRTC to make them pay for Canadian news.
Michael Geist explains it here: https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2023/08/why-is-meta-blocking-all-news-links-because-bill-c-18-covers-all-news-outlets/
So they block Canadian news and don’t have to pay for Canadian news. It’s functionally the same regardless.
Yes but they also have to block foreign news too, not just Canadian news.
Ah I see what your saying, they geoblock all news for Canadians.
I tried posting a link from NPR also
You can’t share or view any news on Facebook, not just Canadian
To copy what I posted in the same thread on another instance (but conversation seems more relevant here):
So they received a take down request from the Indian government, mistook the users for being in India, followed the law that they’re required to follow in India, and when it was brought to their attention that those users were actually based in Canada they went back and allowed the posts. This doesn’t seem as malicious as people are making it out to be, they should probably work on their geo-blocking, but with 3 billion users in 150+ countries with their own local laws it’s probably safer to be aggressive when it comes to removing content when requested.
Really? Data harvesting company Meta didn’t know which country these posts originated from, on their own site? I have my doubts, to say the least.
Do you really want Frontline facebook moderation staff (or many levels between) having the ability to run the kinds of queries required to validate country of origin or other privacy-invading points of validations required?
I don’t.
And it takes time for those kinds of queries to reach the (very busy) desks of the purposefully constrained few, who can.
Assuming that this is all a decision that came from front line moderation, which I don’t accept but we’ll do so for the sake of this argument, yes, I think moderation staff should probably know whether a given post is actually subject to Indian law before removing it on those grounds.