Rachel Curran, Meta Canada’s Head of Public Policy, has disclosed that the company has assembled a content-blocking team that is warming up to put an end to the availability of news on its social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram, in case the government’s online news bill passes.
Curran told the House of Commons heritage committee that Meta will remove news in a careful, responsible and transparent way.
Curran said: “It’s absolutely our intention to not make the same errors in Canada that we made in Australia.”
Recall that in 2021, Facebook blocked Australians temporarily from sharing news stories in response to a government bill that directed Google and Facebook to contribute to journalism.
As such, Australian news organizations could not post stories and people that tried to share existing news stories got notifications telling them they were blocked from doing so. Also, it blocked some government communications, including messages about emergency services and some commercial pages.
Curran said: “Some of the things that were mistakenly scoped in Australia, we’re working very hard to make sure we do not do that this time.”
According to her, the team is working to meet the definition of news and to not block government pages, emergency services or community organizations.
If passed, Bill C-18 would require that tech giants pay Canadian media companies for connecting to or otherwise repurposing their content online.
At present, the bill is at the committee stage in the Senate.Meta has previously said the legislation could make the company stop linking to news in Canada.
The company says below three percent of what people see in their Facebook feeds are posts with links to news articles and that a lot of its users feel that is already “too much” news.
During the House of Commons heritage committee, Liberal MP Lisa Hepfner said if journalism is blocked from Instagram and Facebook, users will be forced to get information elsewhere and it could lead to an increase in misinformation and disinformation.
But Meta said it’s a business decision.
Curran said: “We believe that news has a real social value. The problem is that it doesn’t have much of an economic value to Meta. That’s the real concern with this legislation.
“So if we are being asked to compensate news publishers for material that has no economic value to us. That’s where the problem is.”
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