Canadian government suspends advertising on Facebook, Instagram
Both Meta and Google have said they would remove Canadian news from their platforms to avoid having to compensate the news outlets.
Both Meta and Google have said they would remove Canadian news from their platforms to avoid having to compensate the news outlets.
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What if Canada became the first country to run it's own Federation?
Hear me out. There would be different pages for federal, provincial, municipal, news, but also ones for local events and hobbies. The big draw to Facebook was that you could reads news and see what your friends and neighbours had to say about it. I think that's a big part of what's missing with individual news stations.
Of course, we would have to put serious limiters on government input on the sites to make sure that we keep free speech. I don't even mean that in the sense of "I want to say hateful things!" but in the sense that I don't want heavy restrictions on the news that I see, especially not by any one political group. (Looking at you, elections time).
If Canada runs their own Federation separate from this one, they could still run ads to support the journalists.
There has to be a happy medium between "good luck finding news if you don't want to use a slow, buggy website" and "most of the profits go out of the country". There HAS to be.
Yes there does! Having bought subscriptions to a few of my favourite news sites, I'm struck by how much worse the experience is than something like google news. I'll need to figure out something, because I only just want news, not a digital version of the newspaper and i certainly don't want another 100 MB app.
Aggregation is a killer feature for news, and providers need to figure out how to make it work without a tech company eating their lunch. Either through activitypub or something else, but hopefully a public standard of some sort so they aren't beholden to a corporation.
The unix greybeard method would be to use RSS and Baysean scoring of articles. A competent emacs user can whip up their own solution in an afternoon.
As a Unix greybeard I haven't had time for that in decades!
Of course, we would have to put serious limiters on government input on the sites to make sure that we keep free speech. I donโt even mean that in the sense of โI want to say hateful things!โ but in the sense that I donโt want heavy restrictions on the news that I see, especially not by any one political group. (Looking at you, elections time).
You could set up a crown corporation similar to the CBC where it's given a mandate to do the things you want but has some amount of separation from government control, outside of funding.
