It's not that they don't have services available to notify people, it's just that people don't use those services. Even if they do use those services, they don't check them hourly like some may check Facebook.

Even if they hosted a mastodon instance, less people would probably see that than the services they already maintain. It's just not mainstream enough yet.

Honestly I would be happy if most of their comms where available under several Mastodon accounts I could subscribe to. No account needed even!

Pretty much spot on, just missing one thing. The way the law is written is that it also disallows direct links (these would forward individuals to news sites and generate add revenue).

Whomever came up with this law just does not understand the internet is built on links.

Media companies were complaining about social sites summarizing news content, therefore users would not have to go directly to a news site (lost revenue for media companies). Instead social sites were generating ad revenue themselves with more "active" users.

That's kind of right although I somewhat disagree with #2. It's not so much that Facebook is causing people to not visit news organizations websites that's hurting news organizations, but more so that there are so many ways to advertise to consumers now (largely through Facebook & Google) that the news organizations are struggling to get advertisers to pay them top $ to advertise with them like they used to. Basically, even if Facebook had banned news from day 1 of its existence and consumers had never expected to find it on Facebook, the fact that advertising has become cheaper would itself hurt news organizations that relied on advertising revenue.

yeah we have that, I think je was referring to people's general search on social media for recent news updates rather than actual government alerts

Did it fail? Defeat only comes when they rollback regulation without extracting some cash from Meta & Google. Until then, the arm wrestling is on.

It's obviously hyperbole

I hate the flags, the lifted pickups, the freedom stickers and anti-vax bullshit, but I finally have to agree, fuck Trudeau. Depending on Facebook to SAVE THE LIVES OF YOUR CITIZENS is absolutely ignorant.

They passed a law that said big companies have to PAY to post links to articles.

On the surface it was to go after places like Google News that would summarize an article, link to it for attribution, but people would rarely visit the original article fueling the advertisements that funded the media.

However to nobody's surprise, the government cocked up the legislation for the problem. They made a law that required the to pay for links, so the big companies just went... Ok, no links, no bill.

Obviously they didn't think this through, they wanted money to flow from Google/FB to Canadian media for a real problem, but in the effort to seek a way to tap the money for taxes, over legislated without understanding the problem and ended up with no links, no taxes.

So the liberal government

Which other government would it be? It's okay to just say The Government when they're the elected ones ... unless this is less a question and more Question Period?

Apparently Meta would have to pay for any news shared. If it’s so important to the government I’m not sure why they don’t just foot the bill or make an exception. Why can’t they offer the wildfire news and tell Meta ok no need to pay for news from our government website?

Edit: never mind I see in the article that users can already access info from a gov site.

Honestly, fuck both the government for being complacent for too long and letting Facebook get into this position at the expense of the media, and Facebook for being a privacy hellhole siphoning everything it can.

And double fuck the gaslighting bullshit when the REASON Facebook and others dropped actual news is because the government told them they'd have to pay for linking news articles.

It 100% reeks of politics.