Roundup: Trying to use guilt on Meta

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As the wildfire situation intensifies, and more states of emergency are declared, Canadian heritage minister Pascale St-Onge has decided to try doubling down on using guilt to try and get Meta/Facebook back to the table to talk about the Online News Act, insisting that blocking news links puts lives in danger. I’m not sure I buy that—you can still directly access news sites, and they are easy to find, particularly the CBC and its local affiliates.

This, of course, led to yet another vapid re-litigation of the Act, and repeating many of the dumb arguments that don’t actually hit on the heart of the matter. There was the hand-wringing about “we trained people to go to Facebook for news,” which makes me wonder why we just don’t then retrain people to go directly to news sites or apps, while the discussion in the piece returns to the red herring about compensating for links. It’s not about compensating for links. It’s about compensating for Google and Facebook monopolizing the ad tech space and siphoning revenues from all links along the chain, and the Act providing transparency and fairness to the deals and negotiations that were already taking place. Which is also why stories about local media demanding the government capitulate to Meta’s bullying are particularly troublesome, because not only are they getting the narrative wrong (and the government needs to take a LOT of the blame for that one), but they’re saying that we should let web giants threaten sovereign governments if they don’t like what they’re seeing, and that’s especially troubling because these companies operate monopolistically and with impunity.

In the meantime, mendacious narratives about the legislation are also growing and becoming utterly grotesque, but between Poilievre and his Conservatives outright lying about the law, referring to it as government censorship and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the government’s own false narratives about the bill and the supposed theft of content (not true), we’re sinking into a morass that is seeing disinformation players taking the already distorted narratives and turning it into a funhouse mirror. This is all very, very bad, but none of the players in this want to describe things with a modicum of accuracy and reality, and that’s a very big problem.

Ukraine Dispatch:

A Russian missile struck Chernihiv in the north on Saturday, killing seven and wounding at least 129 people. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy went to the Netherlands for talks, and for confirmation that the Netherlands and Denmark would be turning over F-16 fighters to Ukraine at the appropriate time. Zelenskyy has also been talking to Sweden about acquiring Gripen jets as well.

Good reads:

  • The Cabinet retreat will get underway in PEI today, and housing will be a central focus (and Mike Moffatt has been invited to speak to them about it).
  • It’s the perpetual hope that maybe this time, the new minister of Veterans Affairs will fix what ails the department.
  • The RCMP’s new commissioner is hoping that he can turn around the Force’s recruitment and retention crisis.
  • Here is an exploration of why the housing industry is so slow to respond to the crisis, and what needs to be done to help speed it up.
  • As well, a look at the state of Indigenous housing after decades of underfunding, which the government trying to co-develop a strategy with the AFN around.
  • The Star has been doing polling around Pierre Poilievre’s likeability.
  • Conservative commentator Jamil Jivani has won the nomination in Durham for the upcoming by-election to replace Erin O’Toole.
  • Travel bans have been imposed in parts of southern BC because of wild fires.
  • BC and Yukon have resurrected talks to connect their power grids in light of the move toward cleaner electricity.
  • My weekend column wonders if it’s possible for all levels of government to sit down and figure out the housing crisis, if the healthcare talks are any indication.

Odds and ends:

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1692867258475823399

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