Meta has proven over and over that it CANNOT be a source of trusted information. I don’t know about the other provinces, but BC has pretty good IT services in my experience, let the information technology people solve information problems. They should be doing everything they can to get people onto official sources of info where rumors and politics don’t compete with critical information. When I’m evacuating I should never be using an app that has parody news accounts.
X, Meta et al. Should never have become primary sources of government announcements, and now we are seeing exactly why.
If the Canadian government thinks social media should pay for journalism, they could just raise tax revenue from social media and spend the proceeds on journalism.
Instead they create this mechanism which basically lets the social media company walk away very narrowly if they don't like the economics, and then they start crying and pissing their pants when the social media company...walks away. And then the media in this story brags about how they "undermine" Facebook by...continuing to participate and drive engagement on Facebook.
Ay ay ay.
Every business can walk away if they don't like the economics.
How can Canada tax social media companies? They're not Canadian. I guess they can tax commerce that takes place on social media companies or ad sales, but that's really just taxing their own citizens.
If journalism is a public good whose supply is below an optimal level, why wouldn't the government just fund it regardless? Although I personally prefer as little state influence over media as possible.
Meta has Canadian offices and does business in Canada. Even if they were doing business purely across the border, it doesn't mean that you aren't subject to Canadian law. It is perfectly possible to go after foreign entities, especially if you are the government going after large multinationals.
In any case, the rule isn't that social media companies would be taxed. It is that they have to pay new sources for copyrighted content that they display on Meta sites. In other words, if Meta displayed a CBC article, they would have to pay the CBC for the content. Meta decided that they didn't want to pay for other people's work.
> If journalism is a public good whose supply is below an optimal level, why wouldn't the government just fund it regardless? Although I personally prefer as little state influence over media as possible.
Just like the US, and many other western countries, Canada has taxpayer funded news, the CBC, which is independently run. With smaller markets, journalism doesn't necessarily pay as an industry, but it is seen as a public good. The US is a big enough market that multiple high quality news companies can profitably cover it nationally, and locally. This just isn't true in Canada. We have an area bigger than the US, with a population the size of California, with a GDP about 2/3 that of California. It's really hard to make money covering such a large territory when the money is tighter, and the costs are higher.
This was never about a lack of journalism, this was about paying for journalism.
