Well, Meta is now well on their way towards scrubbing news content from Canadians' Facebook feeds. It's being done incrementally; currently I can still see news posts on other people's timelines, but others are reporting that they can't see the ones on mine. Some of my friends say that it isn't limited to Canadian news sites either; apparently it's blocking links to foreign news sites, and even Wikipedia, at least for some users.
Some have pointed out that the Trudeau government's handling of the situation has been suboptimal. According to the CBC, Australia's legislation had enough flexibility to enable their country's news sites to make arrangements with Meta, while Canada's did not.
I can't help but wonder, though, if Meta has another agenda in mind as well. Several years ago it came out that the company was concerned that people weren't sharing enough "personal" content, and instead posting more of things like news. Most likely they figure that the data they get from people's personal posts and their friends' responses is more valuable as a marketing commodity than data about what kinds of news people post and read. And it's well known that they are not above conducting psychological and sociological experiments on their users. So maybe they've been waiting for a while to conduct an experiment in a nice controlled setting (e.g. limited to a country with a smallish population) on whether they get more of the stuff they want if they eliminate the competition from news posts. Doing such an experiment worldwide would be risky, because it might very well lead to a substantial drop in the number of active users, but they know darned well that Canadians will be less likely to drop Facebook if their friends and relatives in the rest of the world are still using it.
If nothing else, it's given me an incentive to reactivate this blog.
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