As a Canadian permanent resident: I wish these politicians would stop it.<p>Meta has proven over and over that it CANNOT be a source of trusted information. I don’t know about the other provinces, but BC has pretty good IT services in my experience, let the information technology people solve information problems. They should be doing everything they can to get people onto official sources of info where rumors and politics don’t compete with critical information. When I’m evacuating I should never be using an app that has parody news accounts.<p>X, Meta et al. Should never have become primary sources of government announcements, and now we are seeing exactly why.
Ludicrous circus.<p>If the Canadian government thinks social media should pay for journalism, they could just raise tax revenue from social media and spend the proceeds on journalism.<p>Instead they create this mechanism which basically lets the social media company walk away very narrowly if they don't like the economics, and then they start crying and pissing their pants when the social media company...walks away. And then the media in this story brags about how they "undermine" Facebook by...continuing to participate and drive engagement on Facebook.<p>Ay ay ay.
No government should rely on Facebook to provide life-saving emergency information to its citizens. Of course, the Canadian government doesn’t really and this is just shitty political theatre.