Canada wildfire evacuees say Facebook's news ban 'dangerous' in emergency situation

Technology@lemmy.world – 68 points – 11 months ago

Canada wildfire evacuees say Facebook's news ban 'dangerous' in emergency situation::The ongoing fight between tech company Meta and the federal government over subsidizing news publishers means links to news sources are being blocked on sites like Facebook and Instagram. Wildfire evacuees in the Northwest Territories say that's making it harder to share life-saving information during an emergency.

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Maybe govts need to take responsibility for communicating with their residents, rather than relying on 3rd party private companies.

What about cell phone emergency alerts and also radio and TV emergency broadcasts? Also most towns and cities I've been to have loud emergency horns as well. I kind of wonder why they don't use those more. Also this is the US, but I would be shocked if Canada didn't have something similar setup?

That's pretty low bandwidth or reach, though. They need to come up with a modern solution already.

It's not really relying on 3rd party private companies exclusively, since all the other methods of communicating are also running. The wider conversation is around reaching the subset of the population that only use that 3rd party private company to communicate. The government is still responsible for reaching those people, and it's also responsible for keeping the 3rd party private company regulated.

Also this particular story isn't as worrisome because only Canadian news organizations were removed. Wildfire coverage from other countries should still show up.

Copying another comment I saw:

Not really emergency notifications but news, which tbh isn’t as important in this case because non-Canadian news orgs aren’t affected and are covering it too. So there isn’t an immediate risk I don’t think.

As for the main point: The problem is that a subset of the population ONLY gets information through one platform. The only way to reach them is through that platform, and not reaching them means excess costs when you have to rescue/treat/otherwise deal with the fallout. It’s also the government’s job to inform people and keep them safe.

At the same time, the companies need to be regulated by the government. Can’t just let them have free reign because they seized control

Or take responsibility for creating the situation with a nonsensical link tax.

I don't like Facebook, but this idea that Facebook or Google is stealing from a news organization by linking to it is about as asinine as game companies going after Twitch streamers for promoting their game.

I haven't followed this super closely, but I think some Canadian news organizations must have gotten greedy and decided to play chicken and double dip on an already mutually beneficial relationship, not realizing the other party would just say "okay, you don't want to be on our site, fine."