If you've become accustomed to "getting your news from Facebook" in recent years, you may have noticed a lack of coverage of the recent wildfires in Northwest Territories and B.C. when scrolling your timeline recently.
Despite a plethora of breaking news stories about out-of-control wildfires in recent weeks (first the devastating blazes in Hawaii, then multiple fires near Yellowknife and West Kelowna causing mass evacuations) you won't be able to see stories about these incidents on your Facebook feed. That's because earlier this month, Meta, the parent company for Facebook and Instagram, decided to block stories from Canadian news outlets appearing on Canadians' social media pages.
This decision by Meta was in response to Canada's federal government's Online News Act, or Bill C-18 – a new piece of legislation that aims to negotiate compensation for Canada's news publishing companies when their links to stories are shared across Facebook. Meta (a company that, according to Google has a market cap or net worth of $743 billion on the NASDAQ) has argued that arrangement is unsustainable for them.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took aim at Meta earlier this week, criticizing the online giant for "putting corporate profits ahead of people's safety" and calling their ban on Canadian news "inconceivable."
Quite frankly, the prime minister is right in this instance. In situations like the fires in the Northwest Territories and the Okanagan, there is a crucial need for up-to-date local information to be accessed and shared. Most citizens who do not work in the media are not privy to the various news releases and updates that get sent out to news outlets regularly throughout emergency situations. They rely on journalists to disseminate that information as these emergencies unfold. And more often than not in recent years, people have taken to Facebook to access those stories.
Yet due to their qualms with Bill C-18, Meta is preventing those stories from being accessed or shared via their biggest platform. And yes, that's inconceivable.
