Facebook does not care about you, does not care about anyone who uses the service. It only cares about it's bottom line.
There are no Girls on the Internet. As a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative, I'm Bridge Tad and this is there are no Girls on the Internet. It's been a deadly summer of historic wildfires in Canada. This year's wildfire season has seen the most areas burned in Canada's recorded history. And you'd think that during an emergency like deadly wildfires, people would be able to turn to social media platforms to stay informed on critical information. After all,
one in four Canadians get their news from social media. However, that is not the case, because when you go to a news outlets Facebook or Instagram page, or try to share a link about evacuations right now, it's all blanked out. That's because Facebook has pulled news content in Canada, an objection to the Online News Act, which would require social media platforms to pay news outlets.
Now.
This is a move.
Grounded in stunning cruelty and abdication of responsibility at a time of crisis, and it really shows exactly what companies like Facebook think of the people who use their platforms that make them rich. Indigenous communities in Canada have been the most deeply impacted by the wildfires. The Union of British Columbian Indian Chiefs has called on Facebook to lift its ban on sharing local news as wildfires rage. Because folks in smaller communities are dependent on social media to
get critical news updates. Grand Chief Stuart Phillips said social media has become a community organizing tool that has relied upon easy infrastructure for sharing news. We don't know the long lasting effect yet, but we already know that not being able to share news has communities disoriented and puts lives at risk. Government emergency websites and text notification warnings just don't have the same reach and up to date
information as social media does, and he's right. People have been trying to sort out workarounds like taking screenshots of images from news articles about evacuation and wildfire spread to post those on Facebook in an attempt to just try to keep their communities safe and informed. So why is
Facebook doing this money? Facebook is putting profit over people's lives and Paris Marx, hosts of the podcast Tech Won't Save Us, An editor of The Disconnect tech newsletter who lives in Montreal says this is not the first time that a tech company has shown just how little it cares about the people.
Who use it.
It's massive, Like looking at these fires, it's you know, you can't say that like climate change is not happening, and that climate change is not making the natural disasters that Canada is experiencing that many other countries are experiencing, you know, making it worse right, and seeing all of this happen like it started a few months ago when we really early fire season, and then it's kind of been like, you know, usually we might have a lot of fires in British Columbia one year, or might have
a lot of fires in Alberta another year. But this year it was kind of like we had a ton of fires in British Columbia, a ton in Alberta, a ton in Quebec, a ton in Ontario, a ton of Nova Scotia. It was just like all over the place. And it's still going right now. Northwest Territories, which is one of the northern territories in Canada, you know, two thirds of the population of that territory has been evacuated
because of wildfires. And in British Columbia, Colowna, which is kind of a popular kind of tourist vacation spot and you know, just kind of like a place that's in you know, a nice natural area. Part of it has been evacuated and part of it is under evacuation order. So you know, what we're experiencing with the wildfires this year is just shockingly bad and it is kind of a preview of where things are going and how the
effects of climate change. You know, I remember when I was younger, younger is in like, you know, ten or fifteen years ago, there would be like climate deniers and conservative politicians who would say, you know, climate change might be bad, it might be happening, but it's going to be okay for Canada because you know, we're a northern country and you know, we're going to have more arable land as a result, so we're going to be able
to feed the world and blah blah blah. You know, people who are in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry and stuff that they never talked about how the wildfires are going to get worse, and how the hurricanes are going to get worse, and how we're going to get more flooding, and so we see all of that and then, as you say, as all of that is happening this summer, we have Meta, which is kind of going to war against the new government regulation that is
similar to the regulations that passed in Australia a couple of years ago that would expect you know, Facebook, Instagram and Google to be paying money to news publishers because you know, they have the news on their platforms, they're running ads against that news people don't always click through to read the articles, but are still commenting on them and things like that on these platforms, and so there's a few that you know, we can debate whether that
is right or wrong, but that these platforms should be paying a certain degree to support these news publications that are going through a really difficult time right now because this is a public good and these companies have taken all the digital ad dollars that you know, these news
companies might have gotten otherwise. Right, So that is all happening, and that has basically meant that because Meta has cut off access to news on its platforms, then you know, all of these emergencies are happening and so people can't share what the news media is writing about all of these natural disasters, about the evacuations that are happening in
the Northwest territories. And when Meta is presented with this information and is presented with the fact that people are just taking screenshots of news articles and sharing them on social media because they can't share the article itself to make sure that their friends and family are informed about what's going on, Meta says, well, the government can still post updates, and people on the platform actually report that
they're happier now that we have taken news off. And I think the final thing I would say, because I know I've been talking for a little while, is just that you know, Meta is saying all this, Meta is blocking news on its platforms, But the reality is that the law is not even enforced yet. The law is
not going to be enforced for another few months. But Meta is still doing this and still won't allow news to go back on the platform, even in this moment where there's a ton of natural disasters happening in the country.
So I think that last point is really key. The law that Facebook objects to is not even an effect or being enforced right now, so Facebook could continue allowing news on their platforms, especially given that that we're in this emergency situation in Canada but they aren't. So it just feels to me like Facebook is putting profit and power and like dick swinging for lack of a better word, over people's actual safety and lives, the lives.
Of their users.
Absolutely, you know, it's undeniable, and they've done that many times.
Let's be clear, this is not a new thing. You know, if you think back to the genocides and memr if you think about all the revelations about you know, what they've been doing around the world, and how sure they might be interested in content moderation in places like the United States or Canada or the UK or whatever, where they have a lot of users and where the media is really paying attention if something goes wrong, but in many other parts of the world, they really don't care
nearly as much. And there's a lot of kind of human tragedy that results from the fact that Facebook does not really care about what happens on its platform. And so what we're seeing right now, as you say, is that this law is not actually enforce So if Meta did allow news on its platform right now, it wouldn't have to pay news publishers because the government is not
actually requiring this to happen. And I think that one of the really notable things is that in the Australian case, Meta did pull news off of Facebook because it was going to be required to pay, and that didn't take very long for Meta to reverse course and to start working through this government process to make these deals with the news publishers and to abide by the law. But in this case, a couple of years later, Meta is really not willing to do that in the way that
it was before. And I think that part of that is because Meta's kind of view on news and view of how its platform should work has shifted over that time. I think that, you know, two years ago or whatever, there was a much greater argument that maybe news was something that Meta needed to have on its platforms to
keep people engaged and to keep people interested. But I think now we've arrived at a point where Meta sees news as more of a liability that can kind of get people engaged in conversations and things like that that are more extreme or for whatever reason, kind of result in these discussions that it doesn't like on the platform. And it also feels that it doesn't make enough money
to justify having that on the platform. So, as I said, one of the things that's saying now that it's taken news off in Canada is that it says that users
are actually happier not having news on the platform. And this is not just about Canada, but about saying to all the other jurisdictions that are looking at Canada and trying to think about following suit with their own version of this, places like California, New Zealand and other places around the world, that don't you dare try this, because we'll do the same thing in your jurisdiction too.
There was a time that when you logged into Facebook, the thing that you scrolled was called the news feed, and it was full of news. But in twenty sixteen, social media platforms were increasingly scrutinized for a failure to keep misleading and an accurate news off of their platforms. Two years later, Facebook changed its algorithm and announced that we'd see twenty percent less news prioritize againstead content from
your friends and family. This move hurt news publishers, who up until then had been getting about ten percent of their traffic from Facebook alone had been jumping through hoops that Facebook set, like the infamous pivot to video that ended up being based on Facebook artificially inflating video metrics to make newsrooms think that all of us really wanted to be watching video instead of reading text. Newsrooms had built up and staffed entire strategies around what ultimately ended
up being a lie. In twenty nineteen, Facebook brought on former CNN news anchor Campbell Brown to head up news partnerships and start a dedicated newstab that the company said would be curated by journalists, but according to a report from The Australian, one of Campbell Brown's first orders of business was gathering news publishers in a meeting where she allegedly told them that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn't care about news and didn't want to rehash any of how
Facebook had wrecked all of their strategies, and that if their outlets didn't partner with Facebook they would quote die in hospice. So the outlets did, and Facebook started paying news outlets. According to a report from Facebook spent one hundred and five million dollars in three year content deals for news, plus another ninety million for news videos, including ten million for The Wall Street Journal, twenty million for
The New York Times, and three million for CNN. Today, Facebook seems to see news as more trouble than it's worth. They stopped paying news publishers last summer. And it's not just Facebook. Elon Musk has floated removing headlines from news articles shared on Twitter, a move that would surely make
the platform less friendly to news. This is yet another example of the rocky and sometimes opaque relationship that news publishers have had with social media platforms, where news outlets are ostensibly meant to be writing truthfully about these platforms, but also depend on those platforms for traffic and reach.
What do you think caused that shift where Facebook was like, actually, maybe we don't want to be in the news game, because I know that there was a time, at least in the United States where Facebook was prioritizing news in their feats. It was like you're going to see news. You're going to see less like your friends and family and like cat pictures or whatever, and more news. Do you have any sense of what caused that shift?
There's just been a general kind of shift in the past few years where meta has been facing kind of the backlash of having news on its platforms. There was decisions around news much more often than it did in the past. So when it came to like COVID misinformation, it had to put out a policy on that and make a decision around what it was going to do, and that kind of still pissed everyone off. Right. Liberals were still angry with it because things were still getting through.
Conservatives were angry because all of a sudden, they're kind of vaccine skeptic stuff and anti vax stuff was getting caught up in it, right, And then you look at Trump and you know, what are they doing with Trump?
Are they going to allow him on or not? And there was recent reporting from the Washington Post that after Elon Musk took over Twitter, Meta was actually moving forward with a ban on political advertising, I believe, and decided to not move forward with that because you know, the decisions that Musk made around quote unquote free speech and allowing right wing commentary onto the platform with something that has now affected other platforms as well, and their decisions
around how content is going to work. So that's not a full answer to what you're saying, but I think that it just sees news as not something that's essential to what it's doing anymore, and that there are other ways to get people engaged and get people looking at ads where it doesn't need that sort of content.
Let's take a quick break at our back as Canada burns from wildfires. Here in the States, California is also experiencing extreme weather like storms, droughts, and bloods, and similarly, in California, the California Journalism Preservation Act would have require tech platforms like Facebook and Instagram to give a cut up to seventy percent of revenue made on advertising news
content to local newsrooms. Both Facebook and Google have threatened a pulled news content in California if that legislation is passed. In Australia, after Facebook did temporarily remove news content back in twenty twenty one, eventually Facebook and Google caved and
worked out deals to pay news publishers. Bill Gruskin, a professor at Columbia University School of Journalism who has studied the Australia law, says that it generated nearly one hundred and fifty million dollars for news organizations and that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation was able to hire fifty new journalists in underserved parts of the country because of that law. Now, to be clear, I don't necessarily think that deals like
these are going to save journalism. It's much more complicated than that. But I do think the people who run big tech platforms, who have made so much money from news, should be invested in supporting a healthy journalistic landscape. I do think that what we're seeing now is Facebook trying to really send a signal to other countries, like the similar legislation in California. I think this is meant to really be a signal globally, like, do not tell us that we have to pay you, we'll pull out so
fast and you don't want that. Like, I think they're just trying to grandstand a little bit and sort of flex.
A little bit absolutely, and they can flex, right, because let's be real that a lot of our governments have become very reliant on Facebook and these other social media platforms in order to communicate with their citizens, their residents, what have you, right, the people who they want to communicate with, and that means that they don't always have
the channels to reach people directly. Because there has been a viewer or an acceptance that the way that we are going to communicate with people is through these social media platforms and that has just been kind of accepted for the past decade or so, right, and the media is in that camp as well, where the media, you know, certainly there's been like a shift to newsletters in the past few years and stuff like that, but in general, the media still reaches people through social media, or at
least reaches a lot of people that way. You know, it's overstated how much traffic Twitter sends to media websites, but it is the case that Facebook still sends or you know, has traditionally still sent a lot of traffic
to news and they have depended on that traffic. And so I don't think the reality is that they can't switch away from that, but that it will be an adjustment and there will be kind of a difficult period if everything just gets turned off and government and media were not kind of preparing for that having to happen
and haven't set up alternatives ahead of time. One of the things that we did see in Australia, and again like we didn't have a ton of time to actually judge the long term impacts but that when news was removed from Facebook, these like these publishers were able to adjust, and I believe it was I can't remember it was Australia or Spain, actually sorry, because Spain had a similar thing that they did as well, and Google News had blocked like News in Spain for a while and publishers
did kind of you know, we're able to make up the difference there. So I think that that's just to say. I think that there are examples where you know, these publishers and the governments can and their reliance on these social media platforms and don't need to be so reliant on them. But that takes real work and you know, a real commitment to do that, and I haven't really seen that commitment kind of in practice in the past
few years. And it seems rather that they would prefer to continue to be reliant on these platforms but also have them kind of abide by these regulations. And theoretically
these companies should be abiding by regulations. If a sovereign government decides that Facebook or Google or whatever should be abiding by certain regulations in their country, I think it's fair to say that, yeah, they should probably be doing that, because I you know, especially in a democratic country like the ones that we live in, I think we would expect that the government, which is ultimately the representative of the public, should be having the final say, not some
major corporation that's led basically dictatorially by Mark Zuckerberg, like news media.
Governments have had a complicated relationship with social media platforms because governments need social media to be able to communicate with people, but governments are also ostensibly meant to be
regulating these platforms and keeping them from harming us. And when emergencies like Canada's wildfires happen, like it or not, a lot of people are getting critical information from social media, and it reveals this problem of what happens when social media platforms, in the whims of the tech billionaires who run them, become such a big part of the infrastructure
of modern society. In a recent piece for The New Yorker, Ronan Pharaoh makes clear just how much of the infrastructure of public and civic life is being left up to the whims of individual tech leaders like El Writing in the past twenty years against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure and declining trust and institutions, must have sought out business opportunities in crucial areas where after decades of privatization, the
state has receded. The government is now reliant on him, but struggles to respond to his risk taking, brinksmanship and caprice. I really feel like this is a parable of what happens when governments become so reliant on privately owned social media platforms and platforms that are run by people who have made it clear time and time again they don't really care about people, They don't really care about anything
other than profit and power. What happens when governments become so reliant on those platforms to inform their citizenry, especially during times of emergency or harm.
Absolutely, and like it's not just platforms, right, Like we see it with Google and Facebook, et cetera. And we've seen it with Twitter to a certain new where some media companies were leaving the platform after Elon Musk took over and started really kind of going after certain media companies like the CBC in Canada and they decided not
to post on the platform for a while. And certainly there have been other examples of that, but you know, more recently, we've seen reporting in the New York Times and the New Yorker about the power that Elon Musk wields through Starlink and through his ownership of SpaceX, and through the ownership of the largest public charging or you know, the largest electric vehicle charging network in the United States, and these things were really downplayed, I think for a
long time the fact that Elon Musk was basically controlling the US rocket launch infrastructure and has really taken control of that and is kind of the primary means that the United States and many other countries get things into
space now because of SpaceX rockets. He also controls, you know, what is at almost half of the satellites that are active in orbit right now, which is just crazy to even think about, like that one person or one company controls that much of what is in outer space and has basically been given carte blanche to continue launching more
satellites by US regulators. And then, of course, on top of that, you know, as we're making this transition to electric vehicles, and again we can debate whether that's the best way to be doing it or whatever. He owns the major charging network through his superchargers that he has been allowed to build out in a way that's like very different from how automakers can't really own gas stations
or don't traditionally own gas stations. And now we're seeing that after the other automakers tried to collaborate on their own charging standard that was separate from Tesla's because Tesla has a proprietary standard, that many of these automakers in the United States are just adopting Tesla's standard because you know, Elon must controls so many chargers already and it's really difficult for them to catch up.
You had that piece that was called something like Elon Musks should not be put in charge of the night sky. People think like just thinking about and I think in the Ronan therapy so often Rodan Pharaoh's reporting is like, this guy is a bad guy. Let me show you all the things that he's done. But in that piece on Elon Musk, what I really took away from it was exactly what you said was that it's not just that Elon Musk is a bad guy.
It's that we have given we have.
Such little infrastructure that having one bad guy who is not great at decision making be in charge of it, that's not really just on him. It's the it's on our governments to allow that to be the standard.
Oh totally. Like it's a complete failure of government right to allow this to happen. And like it's not like they stood back and this just happened and they didn't notice it. Like they actively encouraged Elon Musk to amass this much power. You know, the media was involved in that as well. There were many other kind of you know, players who helped to kind of build Elon Musk into
the figure that he is. But you know, the United States made an explicit decision to move forward with the privatization of the space program and to de emphasize NASA's role within that because it was building a new rocket and the George W. Bush administration stopped it, and the Obama administration continued the move toward or excuse me, the George W. Bush administration ended the Space Shuttle program or
set a date for it to end. The Obama administration ended the work that NASA was doing on a new kind of rocket launch capability and instead said we're going to rely on the private sector to do this. And that is part of what allowed this transition to SpaceX
and to reliance on Elon Musk to happen. Then, of course, regulators allowed him to put all those satellites in the sky, you know, American regulators deciding that an American company can put all of these satellites up that are effectively going to block a lot of other countries from doing something similar instead of like an international body having to approve
something like this. And then on top of all that, of course, you know, all of the investment and kind of subsidies that he received with Tesla and to build that out. So we have this really serious problem where the government for many decades has been slowly kind of reducing state capacity, reducing what it does and leaving that to the private sector. And that has allowed someone like Elon Musk to be in this position of power that
he's in. And of course we talk about Elon Musk, but like we're talking about with Meta, and like we're talking about with all these other companies, they have assumed real positions of power, real kind of bottlenecks around society and throughout the economy, and that has a lot of serious impacts on you know, on the wider public.
I mean, that's such a good point that it's really not like I was interested to talk to you about Meta and the Canadian news media ecosystem. But it's really not about the one company Meta or the one company Twitter or Elon Musk. I wonder, like, do you think that these US based companies should have such an impact global? Like what does it say Is it fair that like the US based company Meta can have such a big impact on Canada's news media ecosystem.
Yeah, I obviously don't. Yeah, yeah, And I feel like I can sometimes get criticized for this as well, right, because one of the things that I try to point out sometimes is that, like, if you're an American and you're in the United States, maybe it doesn't seem so egregious that there are all these large American companies that have such a significant role in so many countries around the world. Amazon, Google, Facebook, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
But when you're not in the United States, it feels like you have very little control over your own society and your own economy and what is going on in it. When you're always at the whims of these major companies that are foreign owned and controlled, and when your governments try to regulate them, like in the case of what the Canadian government is doing now with Meta and Google. They basically fight these regulations tooth and nail and try to ensure that they don't have to you know, follow
through on it. And I would argue that this was you know, if we go back to like the nineties, when the Internet is being privatized, the message that we have is that as the Internet is going global, and as these companies are going global, it's bringing like democracy
and freedom and economic opportunity to everybody. And I push back on that, and I would say, like, we never really got those things, you know, to a large degree, but what we did get was the expansion of like American control and American power through these companies and through
the expansion of internet infrastructure. And this is like the political economy piece that is often not brought into the critiques of like the tech industry and it's kind of connections to government, right because it was presenting itself as separate from government and like, you know, oppositional to government.
And there are there are ways that that is true, but at the same time, it's you know, it is helping to kind of expand the influence of the American government around the world, and that ensures that once you have kind of free flows of capital, once you're not allowed to put kind of protectionist measures on your own economy, it's pretty much impossible for you to create effective competitors to these large American companies that you know, we're able
to corner these markets well before, you know, any kind of domestic company was able to do anything similar, and they can never really reach the scale that an American company can because it starts in such like a large
market to do these sorts of things, right. And so part of the reason that we're finally starting to see a shift away from you know, the US focus on you know, deregulation and allowing these tech companies to do whatever they want is that Chinese tech companies are finally kind of competing with them and potentially trying to you know,
benefit from this infrastructure that they set up. And now we see America moving forward with protectionist measures after so many years of saying no, like everything should be free and open and whatever, right, but now they want to stop the Chinese companies from moving into the space that American tech companies occupy. And so that's part of the reason why we see these.
Shifts more after a quick break let's get right back into it.
US run platforms like Facebook, Amazon, and Google have had such a big hand in shaping the entire world, and increasingly, I think lawmakers are interested in keeping it that way, a kind of digital tech enabled colonialism. It's so hard for me to follow the conversation between lawmakers around TikTok, where it's just so obvious to me that, like, what they actually want is for US owned big tech companies
to be the only game in town. They don't want, Like they can talk all their talk about data privacy and national security, but I just it just seems so obvious to me that what they're actually saying is, like, we want it to be American companies. It's okay if if Amazon and Facebook and Google and Twitter are the ones who are doing it, but we want to make sure that it's America exactly exactly.
Like, you know, it's bad if TikTok steals your data and content moderates in a way that the American government doesn't like or whatever, But if Facebook is doing it, you know, in China or anywhere else around the world, it's completely okay or any of these other American companies, right, Because what's important is the continued dominance of American tech companies and ensuring that Chinese tech companies cannot move into the American market, but ideally not globally as well, and
are confined to the Chinese market where, you know, the Chinese government has successfully put in protectionist measures, again not just for economic reasons, but also for kind of political reasons, right,
let's be clear about that. But it also ensured that they were able to actually build a domestic tech industry in a way that many other countries have not been able to do because their companies were protected from competition from foreign American giants that would have just kind of eaten up their market share and not allowed them to kind of build up their own domestic capacities.
There's a kind of libertarian attitude that bubbles up in conversations about social media platforms blocking news in Canada. One that posits that this is all the Canadian government's fault and that the government has no place regulating a private company like Facebook and should have just stayed out of it, or describing the law that forces social media platforms to pay for news as a kind of government enforced link tax.
Paris says that these arguments are all rooted in the idea that tech companies should basically be able to do whatever the heck they want with no government oversight or consequences.
I think pernicious narrative that's happening in Canada right now, and it's a good reflection of, you know, kind of these general narratives that we have around the tech industry and critique of the tech industry that we see in the United States that are much more kind of libertarian focused, right that kind of say it's it's illegitimate almost for the government to try to regulate these tech companies because you know, there are these longstanding narratives that are associated
with the tech industry that the government is bad and even though the companies are bad, the companies are not as bad as like government, right because government is like
the ultimate evil. And so I think what we see in Canada right now is that there is there are different ways to look at these laws that the government is trying to enforce against Meta and against Google, and I'm critical of them because I don't like the idea that the news media is going to be tied to Google and Facebook and have revenue that is coming from them.
Because I think that creates an incentive not to want to hold these companies to account for what they're doing, right, And it also makes them dependent on foreign companies that you know, anything could happen to them in the coming years, and I think we would want them to kind of be dismantled to a certain degree, But this creates an incentive not to have that happen because you're setting up
this revenue stream. Whereas the other form of critique, and the one that I would say is more dominant, is for people to say, actually, it's bad that the government is moving into this space at all, is trying to regulate these foreign tech companies, and is doing so with and I would say that these are very disingenuous arguments. With a link tax, right, which is against the fundamental nature of the very internet. You can't tax a link
because that's essential to how the Internet works. And I think ultimately, like you know, you can certainly read the bill in a way where it looks like a link tax, but I think that the actual goal of what the government is trying to achieve is not that at all,
and they've been very clear about it. But I think that you get these disingenuous arguments that are very beneficial to the tech companies, but that are laundered through particular experts who are at arm's length from the tech companies and who would even say that they are critical of the tech companies, but are ultimately kind of forwarding arguments that are in the tech company's favor even though they
act like they are opponents of the tech companies. And that's why we see that whenever stories about this Canadian news bill come up, you have a lot of people replying to it saying, actually, this is the government's fault, not meta's fault, that there's no news on these platforms, and it's like, I'm sorry, but you have taken the complete wrong message from the criticism of these companies.
So that's something that truthfully has created struggle for me on how to thoughtfully cover this issue because it does seem like an issue that it's the government's fault, but also the tech companies are at fault. It's difficult to cover it in a way that is thoughtful and tells
the whole story. Have you found that too, because of all of these different talking points, the blame being put on the government in a way that's laundering the message for tech companies, and it makes it kind of difficult to have a thoughtful conversation about what's actually happening.
I think the difficulty is that we always seem to want to try to narrow these things down into like very simple narratives that everyone can understand and that like, you know, there's not much complexity to it. But the reality is that all of these things are very complex,
right if you actually dig into the details. And so it's easy just to say, oh, the government is bad, you know, we shouldn't be doing this, or to say the tech companies are bad and we should be setting up this framework where they need to support the news media companies. And let's be clear, like Canadian news media companies in many cases suck. They're really terrible because of like the legacy of just you know, decades of funding
difficulties and mergers. And you know what, our biggest newspaper chain is owned by a US hedge fund right now, so you know that they are not actually incentivized to
provide good journalism. It just creates a bunch of right wing newspapers that like you know, are not really interested in in providing good journalism to Canadians, not to say that the journalists working there are are not doing their best in a really difficult situation, right, And so I think that it's it's easy to like take those kind of perspectives. It's much more difficult to say, listen, there is a serious problem with news media in Canada. We
do need to address it. It's probably not the best way to do it to make these news media companies linked to these tech companies and like create a direct stream of revenue from them. But that doesn't mean that the government is illegitimate in trying to set up some kind of, you know, way to regulate these companies or some way to address what's happening in the news media environment. It should just be done in a different way so you're not creating these kind of really bad potential, you know,
incentives as a result of it. And so that's more difficult to argue because it takes a longer amount of time than just saying government bad or metabad. I would be more uh, you know, inclined to say metabad and then try to expand on why there's more complex But yeah, I think you can see how that happens.
Thank God, we are podcasters and like newsletter writers, so that we have a little more space than like a tweet to boil this down listen. So I know that you're not, like I think of tech won save us and disconnect blog as like very future forward often like you know, prophetic about what's next. I know you're not a fortune teller, but what do you think is on the horizon for Canada? And like what would you like to see as the future of news and media in the country.
Yeah, so those are two different things, right, Like, I think ultimately what's going to happen is that this framework is going to be put into place where the tech companies are going to have to pay the news publishers. I think it's entirely possible that Meta keeps news off of its platforms and just doesn't doesn't engage with this scheme.
I think it's much more likely that Google finds some form of accommodation with the government so that they do still make agreements with the news publishers and pay them some degree of money to still have news on its platform, because I think news is still more important to the Google Search engine and the Google News product than news is to you know, Facebook and Instagram, right, So I think that is ultimately what we're going to see happen.
And you know, there'll be some people angry about that, and I don't particularly like it, and it's not going to solve the problems in Canadian media, but you know, that's that, right. I think like if we were thinking kind of bigger picture about what I would want to see is you know, I think that we can recognize that the business model of media makes absolutely no sense
right now and is fundamentally broken. I would like to see things like maybe attacks on the revenue of Google and Facebook, like attacks on digital ad revenue that then goes into a fund that can fund journalism, and then maybe the government sets up some kind of funding mechanism that could maybe even have some degree of public input in order to publicly fund good, investigative and local journalism, which is something that we're lacking in Canada right now
because of the degree of cuts that have happened. And I think one thing that is important to remember, as I'm sure many of your listeners are, you know, in the United States, is that Canada does have a large public broadcaster called the CBC. And I think that you know, the CBC is decently funded, but when you compare it to other public broadcasters in Europe and other parts of the world other than the United States, it's not funded
nearly as well as some of those other ones. And I think that one kind of immediate way that we can start to heal the glims of journalism in Canada and kind of the news deserts that have arisen around the country is really to increase the budget of the CBC so that they can do more local reporting and more investigative journalism, as the private media market has been
really unable to provide those things. You know, there are other bright spots with like independent media and like left wing media that have been kind of getting started in Canada, but of course they always face funding challenges that are even worse in Canada than the United States because the market is so much smaller, right, So I think that ultimately, because of the nature of the Canadian media market and just the way that Canada works, that we do need
some sort of like a public funding mechanism and a government solution if we're ever going to address the problems in Canadian media. The government is trying to solve that just by you know, connecting news publishers to Google and Facebook, and I you know, I'm worried that that's not going to produce what we actually want, but it looks like that's the direction we're headed for now.
Ultimately, Facebook just does not care about any of us. The wildfires have already killed at least eleven people and displaced thousands. If Facebook were to bring back news to the platform, even temporarily, just to help mitigate the harm of this nightmare, they wouldn't even have to pay anything to do it, because the law requiring Facebook to pay news publishers is not yet in effect.
What Meta has decided to do in Canada really shows us that this is a platform that does not care about its users. It does not really give a damn about the people using the platform. You know, users of Facebook right now are being evacuated from their homes in places in Canada are under threat from wildfires. They are finding workarounds to share information through the platforms that they are dependent on. Because let's be clear, you know a lot of regular people do rely on Facebook and do
still use Facebook. And I think it's very smug when I see kind of people who are more kind of techy and in the tech conversation saying like why would people look at news on Facebook and stuff like that, Like these are not your macedon users. These are not to people going to seek out the decentralized alternatives to
the web and stuff. These are people who signed up to Facebook, like over a decade ago and are still using it even as it declined because that's where all their friends are, and even as it's gotten worse, like they haven't really gone anywhere else. And I don't think that they should be punished because that is how they use the web, and that is how they've been taught to use the web. And so I think that, you know, we need to be more critical of Meta and of Facebook.
We were doing that for a while and then everyone seemed to start to praise Mark Zuckerberg recently because he
launched a Twitter competitor. So you know, I think that we need to keep up to kind of the the critical views on this on this company, because yes, it's happening in Canada right now, and people in Canada are being affected, and Meta doesn't care because it has what two or three billion more users that will look at the ads on its platform even if some of the Canadian users die in wildfires, and so it doesn't care about that, but it's going to do this, and other
jurisdictions as well as places like California and New Zealand and you know, other parts of the world try to move forward with something similar. Facebook does not care about you, does not care about anyone who uses the service. It only cares about its bottom line. And I think that we should recognize that much more because it's not just
the case with Facebook. It's the Facebook, it's the case with many of these tech companies, and you know, they've been kind of light off the hook with this stuff for a bit too long. I think absolutely.
I'm so glad you mentioned that I hate how people are, like, well, maybe it's a good thing that people aren't getting their news from Facebook. Tell that to like my mom, who like that especially gets her news, Like I'm like, you don't have to like it. You might think that it's not good, like it just is like you don't have like,
you don't have to like it. But that doesn't mean that they don't deserve information that could actually save their lives, because that is how they show up to the media ecosystem exactly.
And that's why we've seen people sharing screenshots of news articles on Facebook so that their friends and family can see what is happening, can get the updates about evacuations and wildfires and things like that, because they can't actually share news articles and Facebook is stopping them from doing that. So you see that people are finding ways around, you know, the kind of the barriers that Facebook has put up
for them. And I'm sure that people will find other ways of getting information ultimately, but let's be clear that Facebook made this change very recently, and all of a sudden, you know, in the middle of a summer where a lot of people are facing difficulties across Canada and certainly you know in other parts of the world, but Canada is where they shut off news, and so it's made it more difficult for those people to get kind of
potentially life saving information. And Facebook doesn't care about that, even though the law is not actually in effect and it would not be charged if it let people share news right now, but it has decided it won't do that.
Well, one thing I can say is that I will always put my faith in the resilience of people. Everyday people to find those workarounds even as tech billionaires are trying to make it so much harder for them. They shouldn't have to do this, to be clearer. But people are resilient and people are always going to find a way. It's the one thing I'll always believe in. Yep, me too, got a story about an interesting thing in tech. I just want to say hi. You can reach us at
Hello at tegody dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tengody dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me bridget Toad. It's a production of iHeartRadio, an unbossed creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Almado is our contributing producer. I'm your host,
bridget Toad. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple podcast For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.