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Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

nationalpost.com

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Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#131

Post by TimPC »

babypuncher wrote: post #67
BluePen7 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because our government doesn't understand technology and generally gets fleeced anytime they encounter it. Remember the Phenix pay system? It was an IBM project that was supposed to save us 70 million a year, instead they paid IBM an additional 2+ BILLION to try and fix the broken crap they'd delivered. Never even worked, they're currently taking bids to replace it already. 80% of public servants had pay issues, many…

Sounds to me like you should fix those problems rather than just giving up altogether. The idea that there is something fundamental about governments that maeks them incapable of doing these things correctly is nonsense.

The people don’t believe in paying for competence in government employees. Then they are shocked and outraged when bottom 10% compensation leads to bottom 10% performance. If you want to hire someone to do product management for a nine figure government project maybe you should pay more than $90k to the product manager if you want it to be managed properly. The government gets exactly what it pays for in these roles.

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#132

Post by xdennis »

babypuncher wrote: post #60
foogazi wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And those news sources have their costs but don't see any income? Don’t those news sources have ads too ? How are they making income from local views?

Because very few people click through to the article, they just read the headline, summary, and comments on Facebook. Facebook is capturing most of the economic value generated by these articles.

That happens with everything. People talk about movies without having seen them, discuss what woodworking tools are best with no intent to buy them, and the relative value of random sports cars without ever being able to afford them.

If newspapers would be able to charge people for referencing an article, then why shouldn't Lamborghini be able to charge people who talk about the Aventador?

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#133

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

jszymborski wrote: post #35

I disagree with a lot of C-18 as-is, but I can't pretend like I'm not happy to see the fed gov't not spending ad dollars on Meta.

Me too. I think this law is ridiculous, but honestly I'm quite happy with all of its impacts. I view news link-sharing on social media as a negative for both news and social media. It drives news sites into hyping inflammatory and polarizing issues, and turns social media sites into a den of divisiveness and fearmongering. In the old days, Facebook was mostly photos, friends' statuses, event announcements, groups, and unsolicited poetry. If this is a step in that direction, then great!

And as for Google, if this helps people realize that other search engines actually exist, that's great too!

All unrelated to what the bill was actually aiming for, of course.

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#134

Post by brailsafe »

dmix wrote: post #75
regimeld wrote: post #11

As a Canadian, I find the current government's policy on the internet to be very 1990's. I fully support Google's and Meta's decision to remove Canadian news from their platforms. This is a complete "own-goal" by the government.

Probably the biggest self-own in recent memory. I feel bad about the journos/web teams who have to suffer as a consequence of the current gov and the rich Canadian media aristocracy who pushed this through. But I can't say it's going to immediately impact my life. I'm not a particular fan of any of the Canadian media sites besides maybe the hyper local ones like CP24. Nor would I touch the Canadian subreddits with a…

I feel similarly, but I do actually like CBC content usually. It's deeply ironic in my mind that one of the meme mantras of the PCs is defunding the CBC, good job literally every other voting MP except the PCs

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#135

Post by brailsafe »

ipaddr wrote: post #81

I've never seen anyone appearing less qualified in parliament or interviews. Pablo Rodriguez isn't being roasted for his foolish responses and the Canadian media is losing credibility by taking sides. Seeing less national cartel linked media stories will do everyone good. The government not advertising on social media is positive.

Hmm... have you seen the environment minister's interviews? Not great.

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#136

Post by brailsafe »

Tyr42 wrote: post #47
jamincan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the issue that Facebook/Google don't just share the link, they share the content behind the link as well?

The text of the bill includes "indexing" and "ranking" as equivalent to displaying. So even making them searchable (with just links) would cost FB/G. Also, the thumbnail/blurb is usually in the html head tag for use like this. You can literally set it to "click through to learn more" instead of a summary and FB would respect that.

and there are platform-specific head tags that give publishers control over how it appears it various contexts

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#138

Post by graeme »

brailsafe wrote: post #135
ipaddr wrote: post #81

I've never seen anyone appearing less qualified in parliament or interviews. Pablo Rodriguez isn't being roasted for his foolish responses and the Canadian media is losing credibility by taking sides. Seeing less national cartel linked media stories will do everyone good. The government not advertising on social media is positive.

Hmm... have you seen the environment minister's interviews? Not great.

Funnily enough the current environment minister Guillebeault was the previous heritage minister who crafted this bill. It didn't get through on his term and then Rodriguez took over.

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#139

Post by stan3223 »

gruez wrote: post #4
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #2

I'm not sure I'd want my government spending money on ads anyway.

The government needs to get out messages to its citizens. If ads on facebook is more cost effective than sending out mailers or whatever, why shouldn't they spend money on facebook ads?

Social media companies are really in business of personal data collection. Based on younger generation being so switched on about news I think 'news' are really being force fed into your social feed (rather than you fetching the news). Governments spending tax payer money with these companies are really approving this sort of unethical behavior.

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#140

Post by kevincox »

regimeld wrote: post #11

As a Canadian, I find the current government's policy on the internet to be very 1990's. I fully support Google's and Meta's decision to remove Canadian news from their platforms. This is a complete "own-goal" by the government.

I'm also Canadian and feel the same. I don't like Google or Meta but this is just the media trying to be greedy. If the incoming likes from Google were harmful they would have configured a robots.txt. They are just trying to lobby laws to get extra money. But they were too full of themselves to realize that they need Google and Meta at least an order of magnitude more than Google or Meta needs them.

The same thing happened in Australia and as soon as Facebook blocked links they cried uncle. Maybe if these news articles actually did research rather than focusing on clickbait headlines they would have learned about that.

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