There Are No Girls on the Internet - Canada is burning and Facebook’s ban on news adds fuel to the fire

Episode Date: August 30, 2023

It’s been a historic year of wildfires in Canada. But as thousands in the country are trying to safely evacuate, Canadians can’t use Facebook or Instagram to get even basic information about what���s happening because Facebook has banned all news content in the country. Bridget talks with the always insightful Paris Marx about what it means and why it matters for Canadians, Americans, and democracy around the world.    Paris’ podcast Tech Won’t Save Us is one of our favorites. Listen here: https://techwontsave.us/   Paris’ Disconnect Newsletter: https://www.disconnect.blog/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Facebook does not care about you. It does not care about anyone who uses the service. It only cares about its bottom line. There are No Girls on the Internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. It's been a deadly summer of historic wildfires in Canada. This year's wildfire season has seen the most areas burned in Canada's recorded history. And you'd think that during an emergency like deadly wildfires,

people would be able to turn to social media platforms to stay informed on critical information. After all, one in four Canadians get their news from social. media. However, that is not the case, because when you go to a news outlets Facebook or Instagram page or try to share a link about evacuations right now, it's all blanked out. That's because Facebook has pulled news content in Canada, an objection to the Online News Act, which would require social media platforms to pay news outlets. Now, this is a move grounded in stunning cruelty and abdication of responsibility at a time of crisis, and it really shows exactly what companies like Facebook think of the people who use their platforms that make them rich.

Indigenous communities in Canada have been the most deeply impacted by the wildfires. The Union of British-Columbian Indian Chiefs has called on Facebook to lift its ban on sharing local news as wildfires rage because folks in smaller communities are dependent on social media to get critical news updates. Grand Chief Stuart Phillips said, Social media has become a community organizing tool that has relied upon easy infrastructure for sharing news. We don't know the long-lasting effect yet, but we already know that not being able to share news has communities disoriented and puts lives at risk. Government emergency

websites and text notification warnings just don't have the same reach and up-to-date information as social media does. And he's right. People have been trying to sort out workarounds, like taking screenshots of images from news articles about evacuation and wildfire spread to post those on Facebook in an attempt to just try to keep their communities safe and informed. So why is Facebook doing this? Money. Facebook is putting profit over people's lives. And Paris Marks, host of the podcast Tech Won't Save Us,

an editor of the Disconnect Tech Newsletter who lives in Montreal, says this is not the first time that a tech company has shown just how little it cares about the people who use it. It's massive. Like, looking at these fires, it's, You know, you can't say that like climate change is not happening and that climate change is not making the natural disasters that Canada is experiencing that many other countries are experiencing, you know, making it worse, right? And seeing all of this happen, like it started a few months ago when we had a really early fire season. And then it's kind of been like, you know, usually we might have a lot of fires in British Columbia one year or we might have a lot of fires in Alberta another year. But this year it was kind of like we had a ton of fires in. British Columbia, a ton in Alberta, a ton in Quebec, a ton in Ontario, a ton in Nova Scotia. It was just like all over the place and it's still going. Right now, Northwest Territories, which is one of the northern territories in Canada, you know,

two-thirds of the population of that territory has been evacuated because of wildfires. And in British Columbia, Colonna, which is kind of a popular kind of tourist vacation spot and, you know, just kind of like a place that's in, you know, a nice natural area. Part of it has been evacuated and part of it is under evacuation order. So, you know, what we're experiencing with the wildfires this year is just shockingly bad. And it is kind of a preview of where things are going and how the effects of climate change. You know, I remember when I was younger, younger as in like, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, there would be like climate deniers and conservative politicians who would say, you know,

climate change might be bad, it might be happening, but it's going to be okay for Canada because, you know, we're a northern country and, you know, we're going to have more arable land as a result, so we're going to be able to feed the world and blah, blah, blah, you know, people who are in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry and stuff. But they never talked about how the wildfires are going to get worse and how the hurricanes are going to get worse and how we're going to get more flooding. And so we see all of that. And then as you say, as all of that is happening this summer, we have meta, which is kind of going to war against a new government regulation that is similar to the regulations that passed in Australia a couple of years ago that would expect, you know, Facebook, Instagram and Google to be paying money to news publishers because, you know, they have the news on their platforms. They're running ads against that news. People don't always click through to read the articles but are still commenting on them and things like that on these platforms.

And so there's a view that, you know, we can debate whether that is right or wrong, but that these platforms should be paying a certain degree to support these news publications that are going through a really difficult time right now because this is a public good. And these companies have taken all the digital ad dollars that, you know, these news companies might have gotten otherwise, right? So that is all happening And that has basically meant that because Meta has cut off access to news on its platforms, then all of these emergencies are happening until people can't share what the news media is writing about all of these natural disasters,

about the evacuations that are happening in the Northwest territories. And when meta is presented with this information and is presented with the fact that people are just taking screenshots of news articles and sharing them on social media because they can't share the article itself to make sure that their friends and family are informed about what's going on, META says, well, the government can still post updates and people on the platform actually report that they're happier now that we have taken news off. And I think the final thing I would say, because I know I've been talking for a little while,

is just that, you know, meta is saying all this. Meta is blocking news on its platforms, but the reality is that the law is not even in force yet. The law is not going to be enforced. for another few months. But meta is still doing this and still won't allow news to go back on the platform, even in this moment where there's a ton of natural disasters

happening in the country. So I think that last point is really key. The law that Facebook objects to is not even an effect we're being enforced right now. So Facebook could continue allowing news on their platforms, especially given that we're in this emergency situation

in Canada, but they aren't. So it just feels to me like Facebook is putting, profit and power and like dick swinging, for lack of a better word, over people's actual safety and lives, the lives of their users. Absolutely. You know, it's undeniable. And they've done that many times. Let's be clear, this is not a new thing. You know, if you think back to the genocides in Myanmar, if you think about all the revelations about, you know, what they've been doing around the world and how sure they might be interested in content moderation in places like the United States or

Canada or the UK or whatever, where they have a lot of users and where the media, is really paying attention if something goes wrong, but in many other parts of the world, they really don't care nearly as much. And there's a lot of kind of human tragedy that results from the fact that Facebook does not really care about what happens on its platform. And so what we're seeing right now, as you say,

is that this law is not actually in force. So if meta did allow news on its platform right now, it wouldn't have to pay news publishers because the government is not actually requiring this to happen. And I think that one of the really notable things is that in the Australian case, Meta did pull news off of Facebook because it was going to be required to pay. And that didn't take very long for Meta to reverse course and to start working through this government process to make these deals with the news publishers and to abide by the law.

But in this case, a couple of years later, Meta is really not willing to do that in the way that it was before. And I think that part of that is because Meta's kind of view on news and view of how its platform should work has shifted over that time, right? I think that, you know, two years ago or whatever, there was a much greater argument that maybe news was something that Meta needed to have on its platforms to keep people engaged and to keep people interested. But I think now we've arrived at a point where meta sees news as more of a liability that can kind of get people engaged in conversations and things like that that are more extreme or for whatever reason kind of result in these discussions that it doesn't like on the platform. And it also feels that

it doesn't make enough money to justify having that on the platform. So as I said, one of the things it's saying now that it's taken news off in Canada is that it says that users are actually happier not having news on the platform. And this is not just about Canada, but about saying to all the other jurisdictions that are looking at Canada and trying to think about following suit with their own version of this, places like California, New Zealand and other places around the world, that don't you dare try this because we'll do the same thing in your jurisdiction too. There was a time that when you logged into Facebook, the thing that you scrolled was called the news feed, and it was full of news.

But in 2016, social media platforms were increasingly scrutinized for a failure to keep misleading and an accurate news off of their platforms. Two years later, Facebook changed its algorithm and announced that we'd see 20% less news, prioritizing instead content from your friends and family. This move hurt news publishers, who, up until then, had been getting about 10% of their traffic from Facebook alone, and had been jumping through hoops that Facebook set, like the infamous pivot to video, that ended up being based on Facebook artificially inflating video metrics to make newsrooms think that all of us really wanted to be watching video instead of reading text.

Newsrooms had built up and staffed entire strategies around what ultimately ended up being a lie. In 2019, Facebook brought on former CNN news anchor Campbell Brown to head up news partnerships and start a dedicated news tab that the company said would be curated by journalists. But according to a report from the Australian, one of Campbell Brown's first orders of business was gathering news publishers in a meeting where she allegedly told them that Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, didn't care about news and didn't want to rehash any of how Facebook had wrecked all of their strategies, and that if their outlets didn't partner with Facebook, they would, quote, die in hospice. So the outlets did, and Facebook started paying news outlets.

According to a report from Verge, Facebook spent $105 million in three-year content deals for news, plus another $90 million for news videos, including $10 million for the Wall Street Journal, 20 million for the New York Times, and $3 million for CNN. Today, Facebook seems to see news as more trouble that it's worth. They stopped paying news publishers last summer. And it's not just Facebook. Elon Musk has floated removing headlines from news articles shared on Twitter, a move that would surely make the platform less friendly to news. This is yet another example of the rocky and sometimes opaque relationship that news publishers have had with social media platforms, where news outlets are ostensibly meant to be writing truthfully about these platforms, but also depend on those platforms for

traffic and reach. What do you think caused that shift where Facebook was like, actually, maybe we don't want to be in the news game? Because I know that there was a time, at least in the United States, where Facebook was prioritizing news in their feeds. It was like, you're going to see news. You're going to see less of like your friends and family and like cat pictures or whatever and more news. Do you have any sense of what caused that shift? There's just been a general kind of shift in the past few years where meta has been facing kind of the backlash of having news on its platforms or decisions around news much more often than it did in the past. So when it came to like COVID misinformation, it had to put out a policy on that and make a decision around what it was

going to do. And that kind of still pissed everyone off, right? Liberals were still angry with it because things were still getting through. Conservatives were angry because all of a sudden their kind of vaccine skeptic stuff and anti-vac stuff was getting caught up in it, right? And then you look at Trump and, you know, what are they doing with Trump? Are they going to allow him on or not? And there was recent reporting from the Washington Post that after Elon Musk took over Twitter, Meadow was actually moving forward with a ban on political advertising, I believe, and decided to not move forward with that because, you know, the decisions that Musk made around quote-unquote free speech and allowing right-wing kind of commentary onto the platform was something that has now affected other platforms as well and their decisions around how content is going to work. So that's not a full answer to what you're saying, but I think that it just sees news as not something that's essential to what it's doing anymore,

and that there are other ways to get people engaged and get people looking at ads where it doesn't need that sort of content. Let's take a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smigel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL, Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel

help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The yard birds, right?

That's the name. The Harvard Yard. They're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

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Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano, and our podcast Point Game is about defying the odds. Like LeBron heading into the playoffs without Luca and Austin Reed. And finding ways to win no matter what.

He's the smartest player to ever play the game. His IQ is at a level that we're. we've never seen before. And he knows. Without Luca and Austin Reeves, I got to manipulate the game. We get a player's perspective on the challenges of the playoffs.

I think Joker's going to be exhausted this series because when they don't have Rudy in the lineup, he has to really guard guys like Nas Reid. He has to guard Julius Randall. And then he has to give us everything he gives us on the night-to-night basis on offense. And when IT's friends stop by, like Quentin Richardson, we dive into some playoff history too.

Steve Nass would get that thing. That man, hell get the flying. He running up the court, licking his fingers, why he got the ball. Like, after you go through a training camp with that, I said, you figure it out real quick. Get your ass up and down the court, and you're going to get the ball. So listen to Point Game on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. At our back. As Canada burns from wildfires, here in the States, California is also experiencing extreme weather like storms, droughts, and floods.

And similarly, in California, the California Journalism Preservation Act would require tech platforms like Facebook and Instagram to give a cut, up to 70% of revenue made on advertising news content to local newsrooms. Both Facebook and Google have threatened to pull news content in California if that legislation is passed. In Australia, after Facebook did temporarily remove news content back in 2021, eventually Facebook and Google, caved and worked out deals to pay news publishers. Bill Gruskin, a professor at Columbia University School of Journalism, who has studied the Australia law, says that it generated nearly $150 million for news organizations and that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation was able to hire 50 new journalists in underserved parts of the country because of that law. Now, to be clear, I don't necessarily think that deals like these are going to save journalism. It's much more

complicated than that. But I do think the people who run big tech platforms who have made so much money from news should be invested in supporting a healthy journalistic landscape. I do think that what we're seeing now is Facebook trying to really send a signal to other countries. Like the similar legislation in California, I think this is meant to really be a signal globally. Like, do not tell us that we have to pay you. We'll pull out so fast and you don't want that. Like, I think, they're just trying to grandstand a little bit and sort of flex a little bit. Absolutely. And they can flex, right?

Because let's be real that a lot of our governments have become very reliant on Facebook and these other social media platforms in order to communicate with their citizens, their residents, what have you, right? The people who they want to communicate with. And that means that they don't always have the channels to reach people directly because there has been a view. or an acceptance that the way that we are going to communicate with people is through these social media platforms. And that has just been kind of accepted for the past decade or so, right? And the media is in that camp as well, where the media, you know, certainly there's been like a shift to newsletters in the past few years and stuff like that. But in general, the media still reaches people through social media or at least reaches a lot of people that way. You know, it's overstated

how much traffic Twitter sends to media websites, but it is the case that Facebook still sends or has traditionally still sent a lot of traffic to news, and they have depended on that traffic. And so I don't think the reality is that they can't switch away from that, but that it will be an adjustment and there will be kind of a difficult period if everything just gets turned off and government and media were not kind of preparing for that having to happen and haven't set up alternatives ahead of time. One of the things that we did see in Australia, and again, like we didn't have a ton of time to actually judge the long-term impacts. But that when news was removed from Facebook, these publishers were able to adjust.

And I believe it was, I can't remember it was Australia or Spain, actually, sorry, because Spain had a similar thing that they did as well. And Google News had blocked like news in Spain for a while. And publishers did kind of, you know, were able to make up the difference there. So I think that that's just to say. I think that there are examples where, you know, these publications, and the governments can and their reliance on these social media platforms and don't need to be so reliant on them. But that takes real work and, you know, a real commitment to do that. And I

haven't really seen that commitment kind of in practice in the past few years. And it seems rather that they would prefer to continue to be reliant on these platforms, but also have them kind of abide by these regulations. And theoretically, these companies should be abiding by regulations. If a sovereign government decides that Facebook or Google or whatever should be abiding by certain regulations in their country, I think it's fair to say that, yeah, they should probably be doing that. Because especially in a democratic country, like the ones that we live in, I think we would expect that the government, which is ultimately the representative of the public, should be having the final say, not some major corporation that's led basically dictatorially by Mark Zuckerberg.

Like news media, governments have had a complicated. relationship with social media platforms. Because governments need social media to be able to communicate with people. But governments are also ostensibly meant to be regulating these platforms and keeping them from harming us. And when emergencies, like Canada's wildfires happen, like it or not, a lot of people are getting critical information from social media. And it reveals this problem of what happens when social media platforms, in the whims of

the tech billionaires who run them, become such a big part of the social media. infrastructure of modern society. In a recent piece for the New Yorker, Ronan Farrow makes clear just how much of the infrastructure of public and civic life is being left up to the whims of individual tech leaders like Elon Musk, writing, in the past 20 years against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure and declining trust in institutions, Musk has sought out business opportunities in crucial areas, where, after decades of privatization, the state has receded. The government is now reliant on him, but struggles to respond to his risk-taking brinksmanship and caprice. I really feel like this is a parable of what happens when governments become so reliant on privately owned social media platforms and platforms that are run by people who have made it clear time and time again.

They don't really care about people. They don't really care about anything other than profit and power. What happens when governments become so reliant on those platforms? to inform their citizenry, especially during times of emergency or harm. Absolutely. And like, it's not just platforms, right? Like, we see it with Google and Facebook, et cetera. And we've seen it with Twitter to a certain degree where some media companies were leaving

the platform after Elon Musk took over and started really kind of going after certain media companies like the CBC in Canada. And they decided not to post on the platform for a while. And certainly there have been other examples. of that. But, you know, more recently we've seen reporting in the New York Times and the New Yorker about the power that Elon Musk wields through Starlink and through his ownership of SpaceX and through the ownership of the largest public charging or, you know, the largest electric vehicle charging network in the United States. And these things were really downplayed, I think, for a long time. The fact that

Elon Musk was basically controlling the U.S. rocket launch infrastructure and has really taken control of that and is kind of the primary means that the United States and many other countries get things into space now because of SpaceX rockets. He also controls, you know, what is it almost half of the satellites that are active in orbit right now, which is just crazy to even think about. Like that one person or one company controls that much of what is in over space and has basically been given carte blanche to continue launching more satellites by U.S. regulators. And then, of course, on top of that, you know, as we're making this transition to electric vehicles, and again, we can debate whether that's the best way to be doing it or whatever. He owns the major charging network through his superchargers that he has been allowed to build out in a way that's like very different from how automakers can't really own gas stations or don't traditionally own gas stations. And now we're seeing that after the other automakers tried to collaborate on their own charging standard that was separate from Tesla's because Tesla has a proprietary standard.

that many of these automakers in the United States are just adopting Tesla's standard because Elon Musk controls so many chargers already and it's really difficult for them to catch up. You had that piece that was called something like Elon Musk's should not be put in charge of the Knights guy. Like just thinking about, and I think in the Ronan Farrow piece,

so often Rodan Farrow's reporting is like, this guy is a bad guy, let me show you all the things that he's done. But in that piece on Elon Musk, what I really took away from it was exactly what you said was that it's not just that Elon Musk is a bad guy. It's that we have given, we have such little infrastructure that having one bad guy who is not great at decision making be in charge of it. That's not really just on him. It's on our governments to allow that to be the standard. Oh, totally. Like, it's a complete failure of government, right, to allow this to happen. And like, it's not like

they stood back and this just happened and they didn't notice it. Like, they actively encouraged Elon Musk to amass this much power. You know, the media was involved in that as well. There were many other kind of, you know, players who helped to kind of build Elon Musk into the figure that he is. But, you know, the United States made an explicit decision to move forward with the privatization of the space program and to de-emphasize NASA's role within that because it was. building a new rocket and the George W. Bush administration stopped it and the Obama administration continued the move toward or excuse me, the George W. Bush administration ended the space shuttle program or set a date for it to end. The Obama administration ended the work that NASA was doing

on a new kind of rocket launch capability and instead said we're going to rely on the private sector to do this and that is part of what, you know, allowed this transition to SpaceX and to reliance on Elon Musk to happen. And of course, regulators allowed him to put all those satellites in the sky. You know, American regulators deciding that an American company can put all of these satellites up that are effectively going to block a lot of other countries from doing something similar instead of like an international body having to approve something like this. And then on top of all that, of course, you know, all of the investment and kind of subsidies that

he received with Tesla and to build that out. So we have this really serious problem where the government for many decades has been slowly kind of reducing state capacity, reducing what it does and leaving that to the private sector. And that has allowed someone like Elon Musk to be in this position of power that he's in. And of course, we talk about Elon Musk, but like we're talking about with meta and like we're talking about with all these other companies, they have assumed real positions of power, real kind of bottlenecks around society and throughout the economy. And that has a lot of serious impacts on, you know, on the wider public. I mean, that's such a good point that it's really not, like I was interested.

to talk to you about meta and the Canadian news media ecosystem, but it's really not about the one company meta or the one company Twitter or Elon Musk. I wonder, like, do you think that these U.S.-based companies should have such an impact globally? Like, what does it say? Is it fair that, like, the U.S.-based company meta can have such a big impact on Canada's news media ecosystem? Yeah, I obviously don't. Oh, surprise, surprise. Yeah, yeah. And I feel like I can sometimes get criticized for this as well, right?

Because one of the things that I try to point out sometimes is that like if you're an American and you're in the United States, maybe it doesn't seem so egregious that there are all these large American companies that have such a significant role in so many countries around the world, Amazon, Google, Facebook, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But when you're not in the United States, it feels like you have very little control over your own society and your own economy and what is going on in it. When you're always at the whims of these major companies that are foreign-owned and controlled, and when your governments try to regulate them, like in the case of what the Canadian government is doing now with META and Google, they basically fight these regulations, tooth and nail, and try to do. to ensure that they don't have to, you know, follow through on it. And, and I would argue that this was, you know, if we go back to like the 90s when the internet is being privatized, the message that we have is that as the internet is going global and as these companies are going global, it's bringing like democracy and freedom and economic opportunity to everybody. And I push back on that. And I would say, like, we never really got those things, you know, to a large degree.

But what we did get was the expansion of like American control and American power through these companies and through the expansion of internet infrastructure. And this is like the political economy piece that is often not brought into the critiques of like the tech industry and its kind of connections to government, right? Because it was presenting itself as separate from government and like, you know, oppositional to government. And there are there ways that that is true. But at the same time, it's, you know, it is helping to kind of expand the influence of the American government around the world. And that ensures that once you have kind of free flows of capital, once you're not allowed to put kind of protectionist measures on your own economy,

it's pretty much impossible for you to create effective competitors to these large American companies that, you know, were able to corner these markets well before, you know, any kind of domestic company was able to do anything similar. And they can never really reach the scale that an American company can because it starts in such like a large market to do these sorts of things, right? And so part of the reason that we're finally starting to see a shift away from, you know, the U.S. focus on, you know, deregulation and allowing these tech companies to do whatever they want is that Chinese tech companies are finally kind of competing with them and potentially trying to, you know, benefit from this infrastructure that they set up. And now

we see America moving forward with protectionist measures after, you know, so many years of saying, no, like, everything should be free and open and whatever, right? But now they want to stop the Chinese companies from moving into the space that American tech companies occupy. And so that's part of the reason why we see these shifts. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL. Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel,

help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group.

The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yard. But they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged. One erection.

Listen to humor me with Robert Smygel and Friends on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message.

Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-8-4-I-Hart. What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas.

And I'm C.J. Toledano, and our podcast Point Game is about defining the odds. Like LeBron heading into the playoffs without Luca and Austin Reed. And finding ways to win no matter what. He's the smartest player to ever play the game. His IQ is at a level that we've never seen before. And he knows without Luca and Austin Reeves, I got to manipulate the game. We get a player's perspective on the challenges of the playoffs.

I think Joker's going to be exhausted this series because when they don't have Rudy in the lineup, he has to really guard guys like Nas Reid. He has to guard Julius Randall. And then he has to give us everything he gives us on the night-to-night basis on offense. And when IT's friends stop by, like Quentin Richardson, we dive into some playoff history too.

Steve Nash would get that thing. That man, hell get the flying. He running the court, licking his fingers, why he got the ball. Like, you go through a training camp with that, Isaiah. You figure it out real quick. Get your ass up and down the court, and you're going to get the ball. So listen to Point Game on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get right back into it.

U.S. run platforms like Facebook, Amazon, and Google, have had such a big hand in shaping the entire world. And increasingly, I think lawmakers are interested in keeping it that way, a kind of digital tech-enabled colonialism. It's so hard for me to follow the conversation between lawmakers around TikTok, where it's just so obvious to me that, like, what they actually want is for U.S. owned big tech companies to be the only game in town. They don't want, like, they can talk all their talk about data privacy and national security. But it just seems so obvious to me that what they're actually saying is like, we want it to be American companies.

It's okay if Amazon and Facebook and Google and Twitter are the ones who are doing it. We want to make sure that it's America. Exactly. Exactly. Like, you know, it's bad if TikTok steals your data and content moderates in a way that the American government doesn't like or whatever. But if Facebook is doing it, you know, in China or anywhere else around the world, it's completely okay or any of these other American companies, right? Because what's important is the continued dominance of American tech

companies and ensuring that Chinese tech companies cannot move into the American market, but ideally not globally as well and are confined to the Chinese market, where, you know, the Chinese government has successfully put in protectionist measures, again, not just for economic reasons, but also for kind of political reasons, right? Let's be clear about that. But it also ensured that they were able to actually build a domestic tech industry in a way that many other countries have not been able to do because their companies were protected from competition from foreign American giants that would have just kind of eaten up their market share and not allowed them to kind of build up their own domestic capacities. There's a kind of libertarian attitude that bubbles up

conversations about social media platforms blocking news in Canada, one that posits that this is all the Canadian government's fault, and that the government has no place regulating a private company like Facebook and should have just stayed out of it. Or describing the law that forces social media platforms to pay for news as a kind of government-enforced link tax. Paris says that these arguments are all rooted in the idea that tech companies should basically be able to do whatever the heck they want with no government oversight or consequences. I think pernicious narrative that's happening in Canada right now. And it's a good reflection of, you know, kind of these general narratives that we have around

the tech industry and critique of the tech industry that we see in the United States that are much more kind of libertarian focused, right? That kind of say it's illegitimate almost for the government to try to regulate these tech companies because, you know, there are these longstanding narratives that are associated with the tech industry that the government is bad. And even though the companies are bad, the companies are not as bad as like government, right? Because government is like the ultimate evil. And so I think what we see in Canada right now is that there is, there are different ways to look at these laws that the government is trying to enforce against meta and against Google. And I'm critical of them because I don't like the

idea that the news media is going to be tied to Google and Facebook and have revenue that is coming from them because I think that creates an incentive not to want to hold these companies to account for what they're doing, right? And it also makes them dependent on foreign companies that, you know, anything could happen to them in the coming years. And I think we would want them to kind of be dismantled to a certain degree. But this creates an incentive not to have that happen because you're setting up this revenue stream. Whereas the other form of critique and the one that I would say is more dominant is for people to say, actually, it's bad that the government is moving into this space at all, is trying to regulate these foreign tech companies, and is doing so with, and I would say that

these are very disingenuous arguments with a link tax, right, which is against the fundamental nature of the very internet. You can't tax a link because that's essential to how the internet works. And I think ultimately, like, you know, you can certainly read the bill in a way where it looks like a link tax, but I think that the actual goal of what the government is trying to achieve is not that at all, and they've been very clear about it. But I think that you get these disingenuous arguments that are very beneficial to the tech companies, but that are laundered through particular experts who are at arm's length from the tech companies and who would even say that they are critical of the tech companies, but are ultimately kind of forwarding arguments that are in the

tech companies, even though they act like they are opponents of the tech companies. And that's why we see that whenever stories about this Canadian news bill come up, you have a lot of people replying to it saying, actually, this is the government's fault, not meta's fault, that there's no news on these platforms. And it's like, I'm sorry, but you have taken the complete wrong, like, message from the criticism of these companies. So that's something that truthfully has created struggle for me on how to thoughtfully cover this issue because it does seem like an issue that It's the government's fault, but also the tech companies are at fault. It's difficult to cover it in a way that is thoughtful and tells the whole story.

Have you found that too? Because of all of these different talking points, the blame being put on the government in a way that's laundering the message for tech companies, and it makes it kind of difficult to have a thoughtful conversation about what's actually happening? I think the difficulty is that we always seem to want to try to narrow these things down into like very simple narratives that everyone can understand. and that like, you know, there's not much complexity to it. But the reality is that all of these things are very complex, right? If you actually dig into the details. And so it's easy just to say, oh, the government is bad.

You know, we shouldn't be doing this. Or to say the tech companies are bad and we should be setting up this framework where they need to support the news media companies. And let's be clear, like Canadian news media companies in many cases suck. They're really terrible. because of like the legacy of just, you know, decades of funding difficulties and mergers and, you know, what our biggest newspaper chain is owned by a U.S. hedge fund right now. So you know that they are not actually incentivized to provide good journalism.

It just creates a bunch of right-wing newspapers that, like, you know, are not really interested in, in providing good journalism to Canadians, not to say that the journalists working there are not doing their best in a really difficult situation, right? And so I think that it's easy to like take those kind of perspectives. It's much more difficult to say, listen, there is a serious problem with news media in Canada. We do need to address it. It's probably not the best way to do it to make these news media companies linked to these tech companies and like create a direct stream of revenue from them. But that doesn't mean that the government is illegitimate in trying to set up some kind of, you know, way to regulate these companies or some way to address what's happening

in the news media environment. It should just be done in a different way. So you're not creating these kind of really bad potential, you know, incentives as a result of it. And so that's more difficult to argue because it takes a longer amount of time than just saying government bad or meta bad. I would be more, you know, inclined to say meta bad and then try to expand on why there's more complex. But yeah, I think you can see how that happens. Thank God we are podcasters and like newsletter writers so that we have a little more space than like a tweet to boil this down. Listen, so I know that you're not like I think of Tech Won't Save Us and Disconnect Blog as like very future forward, often like, you know, prophetic about what's next?

I know you're not a fortune teller, but what do you think is on the horizon for Canada? and like what would you like to see as the future of news and media in the country? Yeah, so those are two different things, right? Like, I think ultimately what's going to happen is that this framework is going to be put into place where the tech companies are going to have to pay the news publishers. I think it's entirely possible that meta keeps news off of its platforms and just doesn't engage with this scheme. I think it's much more likely that Google finds some form of accommodation with the government

so that they do still make agreements with the news publishers and pay them some degree of money to still have news on its platform because I think news is still more important to the Google search engine and the Google News product than news is to Facebook and Instagram, right? So I think that is ultimately what we're going to see happen. And there'll be some people angry about that and I don't particularly like it. And it's not going to solve the problems in Canadian media. But that's that, right? I think, like, if we were thinking kind of bigger picture about what I would want to see, is, you know, I think that we can recognize that the business model of media makes absolutely no sense right now and is fundamentally broken.

I would like to see things like maybe attacks on the revenue of Google and Facebook, like attacks on digital ad revenue that then goes into a fund that can fund journalism. And then maybe the government sets up some kind of funding mechanism. that could maybe even have some degree of public input in order to publicly fund good investigative and local journalism, which is something that we're lacking in Canada right now because of the degree of cuts that have happened. And I think one thing that is important to remember, as I'm sure many of your listeners are in the United States, is that Canada does have a large public broadcaster called the CBC. And I think that, you know, the CBC is decently funded, but when you

compare it to other public broadcasters in Europe and other parts of the world, other than the United States, it's not funded nearly as well as some of those other ones. And I think that one kind of immediate way that we can start to heal the problems of journalism in Canada and kind of the news deserts that have arisen around the country is really to increase the budget of the CBC so that they can do more local reporting and more investigative journalism as the private media market has been really unable to provide those things. You know, there are other bright spots with like independent media and like left wing media that have been kind of getting started in Canada, but of course they always face funding

challenges that are even worse in Canada than the United States because the market is so much smaller, right? So I think that ultimately because of the nature of the Canadian media market and just the way that Canada works, that we do need some sort of like a public funding mechanism and a government solution if we're ever going to address the problems in Canadian media. The government is trying to solve that just by connecting news publishers to Google and Facebook. And I'm worried that that's not going to produce what we actually want. But it looks like that's the direction we're headed for now.

Ultimately, Facebook just does not care about any of us. The wildfires have already killed at least 11 people and displaced thousands. If Facebook were to bring back news to the platform, even temporarily, just to help mitigate the harm of this nightmare, they wouldn't even have to pay anything to do it because the law requiring Facebook to pay news publishers is not yet in effect. What meta has decided to do in Canada really shows us that this is a platform that does not care about its users. It does not really give a damn about the people using the platform. You know, users of Facebook right now are being evacuated from their homes in places in Canada are under threat from wildfires. They are finding workarounds to share information through the platforms that they are dependent on because let's be clear.

You know, a lot of regular people do rely on Facebook and do still use Facebook. And I think it's very smug when I see kind of people who are more kind of techy and in the tech conversation saying like, why would people look at? at news on Facebook and stuff like that. Like these are not your Mastodon users. These are not the people going to seek out the decentralized alternatives to the web and stuff. These are people who signed up to Facebook like over a decade ago and are still using it even as a decline because that's where all their friends are.

And even as it's gotten worse, like they haven't really gone anywhere else. And I don't think that they should be punished because that is how they use the web. And that is how they've been taught to use the web. And so I think that, you know, we need to be more critical. of meta and of Facebook. We were doing that for a while. And then everyone seemed to start to praise Mark Zuckerberg recently because he launched a Twitter competitor. So, you know, I think that we need to keep up to kind of the critical views on this company because, yes, it's happening in Canada right now and people in Canada are being affected. And meta doesn't care because it has, what, two or three

billion more users that will look at the ads on its platform, even if some of the Canadian users die in wildfires. And so it doesn't care about that, but it's going to do this in other jurisdictions as well as places like California and New Zealand and other parts of the world try to move forward with something similar. Facebook does not care about you,

does not care about anyone who uses the service. It only cares about its bottom line. And I think that we should recognize that much more because it's not just the case with Facebook. It's the case with many of these tech companies. And, you know, they've been kind of led off the hook with this stuff for a bit too long, I think. Absolutely. I'm so glad you mentioned that.

I hate how people are like, well, maybe it's a good thing that people aren't getting their news from Facebook. Tell that to, like, my mom who, like, that's where she gets her news. Like, you don't have to like it. You might think that it's not good. Like, it just is. Like, you don't have to like it, but that doesn't mean that they don't deserve information that could actually save their lives because that is how they show up to the media ecosystem. Exactly.

And that's why we've seen people sharing. screenshots of news articles on Facebook so that their friends and family can see what is happening, can get the updates about evacuations and wildfires and things like that because they can't actually share news articles and Facebook is stopping them from doing that. So you see that people are finding ways around, you know, the kind of the barriers that Facebook has put up for them. And I'm sure that people will find other ways of getting information ultimately. But let's be clear that Facebook made this change very recently. And all of a sudden, you know, in the middle of a summer where a lot of people are facing difficulties across Canada and certainly, you know, in other parts of the world, but Canada is where they shut off news.

And so it's made it more difficult for those people to get kind of potentially life-saving information. And Facebook doesn't care about that, even though the law is not actually in effect. And it would not be charged if it let people share news right now. But it has decided it won't do that. Well, one thing I can say is that I will always put my faith in the resists. of people, everyday people to find those workarounds. Even as tech billionaires are trying to make it so much harder for them, they shouldn't have to do this, to be clear,

but people are resilient and people are always going to find a way. It's the one thing I'll always believe in. Yeah, me too. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello at tangoati.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoody.com. There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative.

Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, check out the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends.

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