With Canada passing the controversial Online News Act on Thursday, Meta today announced to drop news content from it’s Facebook and Instagram in the country.
The act would supposedly force Meta to pay Canadian news publishers for their content on the platform, which the social media company disapproved of. So to avoid the risk of violating the new act, Meta has ultimately pulled the plug for news on it’s social platforms.
Pulling the News Content Down
For starters, Canada’s Online News Act is a law that forces companies like Meta and Google to reimburse news publications for using their content on their respective platforms. Meta strongly objects to this and the company threatened to dump it’s news section altogether if forced.
And standing on it’s words, Meta has done precisely that – pulled out the news content from all it’s platforms – as Canada enacted the Online News Act this week. The Canadian parliament upheld the new law and asked intermediaries like Meta to pay a part of their revenue to these news publications.
Earlier this month, Meta said it was working on a software-based solution to address the Online News Act (C-18) and it could have fallen through, or maybe it wasn’t ready, the company has pulled news content from Facebook and Instagram today. It further said;
“We have repeatedly shared that TO comply with Bill C-18, passed today in Parliament, content from news outlets, including news publishers and broadcasters, will no longer be available to people accessing our platforms in Canada.”
This isn’t the first time Meta faced such a situation, it did the same in Australia too. In 2021, the Australian government passed a similar bill to reimburse it’s local news publications – triggering Meta to do the same thing as it does now in Canada. Google, on the other hand, is yet to make any decision on this.
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