Canada

To the surprise of absolutely no one.

If you can't share real news people will just share fake news instead.

If you want people to consume quality news from somewhat reputable sources, you don't make it a pain and disincentivize the main sources of traffic from sending traffic that way.

Reliable news are important and they do need funding, but that's the absolute worst way to go about it. Of course if you put barriers people will cheap out and get what they can get for free. That's why we need government funded news like CBC, BBC and others. It's an essential public service, treat it like one instead of trying to let private companies do what's most profitable. Quality reporting isn't profitable, shocking headlines are.

Facebook users engage with information about politics, two unpublished studies shared with Reuters found.

Get it through peer review then write an article about it.

In Canada, where four-fifths of the population is on Facebook, 51 per cent obtained news on the platform in 2023, the Media Ecosystem Observatory said.

Does that imply 80% of Canadians are active on Facebook? Looking around, it seems like the 80% is accurate, but I assumed that a lot of those accounts were inactive.

This is bad news, because now there's more evidence that Facebook allowing news sharing can be argued as a free-of-charge service providing social value, which weakens the claim that Meta owes news orgs anything.

Congrats to CBC for their journalistic integrity by reporting on information against their interest I guess. I imagine their angle is to shame Meta for the degradation of news sharing, but I'm sure they know the other angle is equally obvious.

I still think the link tax should happen though. Canada should be bolder in their legislation: pay for the links or remove the service altogether instead of hiding just news. As of today, Meta is still making millions from our eyeballs with ads and that's what matters to them.

Global corp acts in own interest.

K