Canada’s Heritage Minister redoubled her calls for Meta to end its ban on Canadian news content on Facebook and Instagram on Saturday as thousands of Canadians continued their rush to escape wildfires ravaging British Columbia and the Northwest Territories.
The Canadian government required that Facebook pay to link to news when they passed the Online News Act. Are they walking that back now? Or are they offering to pay those fees?
Of course not, it’s clearly Meta’s fault that Meta is obeying that law. Why would the negative consequences of that law be the fault of the people who passed the law in the first place?
I’m certainly not happy about all these wildfires, but I do have to admit to a certain amount of schadenfreude aimed at the government over how they so quickly illustrated just how dumb this law is.