August 29, 2023 • 45 mins
It’s been a historic year of wildfires in Canada. But as thousands in the country are trying to safely evacuate, Canadians can’t use Facebook or Instagram to get even basic information about what’s happening because Facebook has banned all news content in the country. Bridget talks with the always insightful Paris Marx about what it means and why it matters for Canadians, Americans, and democracy around the world.
Paris’ podcast Tech Won’t Save Us is one of our favorites. Listen here: https://techwontsave.us/
Paris’ Disconnect Newsletter: https://www.disconnect.blog/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Facebook does not care about you, does not care about
anyone who uses the service. It only cares about it's
bottom line.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
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
(00:32):
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
(00:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Now.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
This is a move.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
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
(01:30):
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
(01:50):
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
(02:13):
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
(02:34):
that a tech company has shown just how little it
cares about the people.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Who use it.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
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
(02:59):
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
(03:23):
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
(03:44):
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
(04:05):
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,
(04:26):
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
(04:46):
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
(05:07):
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,
(05:30):
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
(05:52):
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
(06:12):
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
(06:33):
where there's a ton of natural disasters happening in the country.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
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
(06:58):
power and like dick swinging for lack of a better word,
over people's actual safety and lives, the lives.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
Of their users.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
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
(07:29):
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
(07:50):
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
(08:10):
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,
(08:30):
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
(08:50):
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
(09:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
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
(09:50):
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
(10:11):
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
(10:32):
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
(10:57):
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.
(11:18):
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
(11:38):
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.
(11:59):
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?
Speaker 1 (12:05):
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
(12:28):
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
(12:51):
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
(13:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
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,
(13:51):
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.
(14:12):
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
(14:33):
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,
(14:53):
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
(15:14):
fast and you don't want that. Like, I think they're
just trying to grandstand a little bit and sort of flex.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
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
(15:41):
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
(16:02):
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
(16:24):
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
(16:48):
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
(17:10):
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
(17:31):
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
(17:53):
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
(18:13):
news media.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
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,
(18:37):
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
(18:57):
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.
(19:22):
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
(19:43):
so reliant on those platforms to inform their citizenry, especially
during times of emergency or harm.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
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
(20:14):
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
(20:35):
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
(20:57):
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
(21:17):
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
(21:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
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
(22:14):
was exactly what you said was that it's not just
that Elon Musk is a bad guy.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
It's that we have given we have.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
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
(22:59):
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
(23:21):
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,
(23:43):
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
(24:03):
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,
(24:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
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?
(25:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
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
(25:31):
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
(25:53):
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
(26:14):
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
(26:37):
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,
(26:59):
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
(27:22):
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
(27:43):
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
(28:04):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
Shifts more after a quick break let's get right back
into it.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
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,
(28:58):
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
(29:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
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
(29:53):
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
(30:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
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
(30:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
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
(31:33):
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
(31:55):
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
(32:16):
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
(32:36):
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
(32:57):
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
(33:18):
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,
(33:41):
and it's like, I'm sorry, but you have taken the
complete wrong message from the criticism of these companies.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
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
(34:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
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,
(34:40):
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
(35:02):
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
(35:27):
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
(35:49):
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
(36:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
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
(36:47):
the horizon for Canada? And like what would you like
to see as the future of news and media in
the country.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
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
(37:16):
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
(37:36):
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
(37:56):
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
(38:18):
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,
(38:42):
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
(39:04):
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
(39:25):
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
(39:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
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
(40:28):
news publishers is not yet in effect.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
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
(40:52):
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,
(41:15):
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
(41:36):
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
(42:01):
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
(42:21):
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
(42:42):
for a bit too long. I think absolutely.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
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,
(43:05):
because that is how they show up to the media
ecosystem exactly.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
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
(43:31):
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
(43:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
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,
(44:34):
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,
(44:56):
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.
Facebook does not care about you, does not care about
anyone who uses the service. It only cares about it's
bottom line.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
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
(00:32):
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
(00:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Now.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
This is a move.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
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
(01:30):
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
(01:50):
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
(02:13):
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
(02:34):
that a tech company has shown just how little it
cares about the people.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Who use it.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
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
(02:59):
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
(03:23):
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
(03:44):
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
(04:05):
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,
(04:26):
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
(04:46):
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
(05:07):
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,
(05:30):
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
(05:52):
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
(06:12):
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
(06:33):
where there's a ton of natural disasters happening in the country.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
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
(06:58):
power and like dick swinging for lack of a better word,
over people's actual safety and lives, the lives.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
Of their users.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
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
(07:29):
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
(07:50):
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
(08:10):
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,
(08:30):
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
(08:50):
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
(09:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
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
(09:50):
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
(10:11):
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
(10:32):
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
(10:57):
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.
(11:18):
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
(11:38):
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.
(11:59):
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?
Speaker 1 (12:05):
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
(12:28):
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
(12:51):
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
(13:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
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,
(13:51):
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.
(14:12):
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
(14:33):
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,
(14:53):
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
(15:14):
fast and you don't want that. Like, I think they're
just trying to grandstand a little bit and sort of flex.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
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
(15:41):
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
(16:02):
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
(16:24):
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
(16:48):
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
(17:10):
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
(17:31):
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
(17:53):
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
(18:13):
news media.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
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,
(18:37):
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
(18:57):
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.
(19:22):
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
(19:43):
so reliant on those platforms to inform their citizenry, especially
during times of emergency or harm.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
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
(20:14):
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
(20:35):
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
(20:57):
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
(21:17):
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
(21:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
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
(22:14):
was exactly what you said was that it's not just
that Elon Musk is a bad guy.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
It's that we have given we have.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
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
(22:59):
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
(23:21):
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,
(23:43):
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
(24:03):
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,
(24:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
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?
(25:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
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
(25:31):
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
(25:53):
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
(26:14):
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
(26:37):
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,
(26:59):
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
(27:22):
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
(27:43):
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
(28:04):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
Shifts more after a quick break let's get right back
into it.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
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,
(28:58):
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
(29:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
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
(29:53):
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
(30:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
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
(30:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
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
(31:33):
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
(31:55):
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
(32:16):
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
(32:36):
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
(32:57):
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
(33:18):
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,
(33:41):
and it's like, I'm sorry, but you have taken the
complete wrong message from the criticism of these companies.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
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
(34:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
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,
(34:40):
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
(35:02):
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
(35:27):
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
(35:49):
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
(36:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
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
(36:47):
the horizon for Canada? And like what would you like
to see as the future of news and media in
the country.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
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
(37:16):
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
(37:36):
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
(37:56):
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
(38:18):
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,
(38:42):
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
(39:04):
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
(39:25):
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
(39:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
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
(40:28):
news publishers is not yet in effect.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
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
(40:52):
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,
(41:15):
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
(41:36):
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
(42:01):
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
(42:21):
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
(42:42):
for a bit too long. I think absolutely.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
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,
(43:05):
because that is how they show up to the media
ecosystem exactly.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
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
(43:31):
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
(43:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
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,
(44:34):
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,
(44:56):
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.
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