Facebook’s Biggest C-18 Trauma: The U.S.

“In order to provide clarity to the millions of Canadians and businesses who use our platforms, we are announcing today that we have begun the process of ending news availability permanently in Canada.”

Rachel Curran, head of public policy for Meta Canada

Thanks Rachel. Glad we’ve got that straight. Big of ya. We have clarity.

Why? Well here’s where clarity gets a tad foggy.

Because the federal government wants you to pay for the content you use. You know, sort of like a steel company paying for iron and coal. Or a convenience store owner, buying an Oh Henry! from a wholesaler.

We could go through all the arguments about the media being important when a tornado trips through town or how to get help when a thunderous rainfall has you up to your ying-yangs in murky water. Or why your shares of Facebook just plummeted. And other arguments … too numerous to mention such as freedom of speech or, you know, democracy. Those are kind of givens unless you’re, say, a tin-pot dictator.

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What Facebook has done to a variety of sources varying from the CBC, the National Post and the Beaverton (yes, honest, the Beaverton) is running contrary to every particle of your agent’s acculturation over four decades in journalism. The Bulldog could take this argument further but you already know all these things and no doubt agree with them unless you’re against such fundamental principles as freedom of speech.

Why? Because Facebook has principles, too. Such as earning billions of dollars and paying out some millions of dollars to organizations that make it unbelievably wealthy. There’s a hill to die on.

And Facebook, if it had a brain that went beyond avarice, would realize that it’s a public utility. You know, kind of like Rogers and national cellphone coverage.

It’s rather like Hydro Ottawa saying something, between power outages, like: “In order to provide clarity to the hundreds of thousands of Ottawans and businesses who use our platforms, we are announcing today that we have begun the process of ending electricity availability permanently in the nation’s capital.”

And that’s it. Where’s the clarity in that?

But without Facebook saying it, you can figure it out. Facebook is more interested in making even more unfathomable amounts of money rather than honouring the basic principles on which society is based. That’s a nasty operation.

Perhaps the federal government could say this:

“In order to provide clarity to the millions of Canadians and businesses who use our platforms, we are announcing today that we have begun the process of ending Facebook permanently in Canada.”

There Facebook. You’ve got clarity.

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The problems with that, however, is that Facebook is so big, so rich and all-pervasive around the world that it probably wouldn’t care if it gave Canada any thought at all. Canada is just a rounding error in its global budget.

But there is one thing that Facebook should be worried about. If legislation such as Bill C-18 that requires Facebook to spend a tiny amount of its hideous wealth on product can spread all the way from Australia to Canada, how long will it be before it crosses the border to the behemoth to the south? Don’t think that the deeply troubled media in the U.S. aren’t looking like hawks at this issue in Canada as a solution to their massive financial woes. Furthermore, believe that the American pols want to keep the media happy. Votes, you know.

And the U.S. isn’t a rounding error in the Facebook budget.

Ken Gray

Digital illustration on front by AI generator Bing Image Creator.

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