The entire city of #Yellowknife is being evacuated. This is unprecedented and terrifying.
And thousands of citizens aren’t aware because Meta continues to block news in the country.
This is what happens when citizens are convinced to use an American multinational corporation as their community’s primary communications channel — a corporation that couldn’t give two shits about anything except its “fiduciary duty” to shareholders.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/nwt-wildfire-emergency-update-august-16-1.6938756
Regarding the blocking of Canadian news, can we at least place the #blame where it belongs?
#Canadian #Legacy #Media convinced the #government of #Canada to pass a law forcing #Facebook and #Google to pay to show snippets of, and #link to, Canadian news articles.
So Facebook and Google had a choice: they could continue to do this, and pay for the privilege, or they could stop linking to it. There was no third option.
We forced the choice on them; blame our #politicians.
@cazabon @tod that is the dumbest bullshit I've ever heard.
They were told to pay for the commercial content they were using for free.
They chose to block it rather than pay.
Our politicians did the right thing.
Meta, and their supporters, are just greedy assholes who think they can steal other people's work and profit off it.
@tomcrinstam You know it is very easy for newspapers to not show up in Google, right? Include a small file and you're not indexed. Nobody will find your news.
So, why do you think news websites have an SEO department to show up high in Google instead of excluding themselves?
Because Google brings them value, eyeballs, not the other way around.
@petrichor7020 For the same reason an author will promote their book but still object to someone else giving copies of it away for free as a perk to their own customers without paying for it.
@tomcrinstam @petrichor7020 The news companies themselves post their own stories to Facebook. They can hardly cry theft after giving their own content away.
