Meta’s decision to ban news links in Canada after the country’s parliament enacted a law to bail out left-leaning legacy media companies by imposing a “link tax” on tech platforms like Facebook has not damaged the company’s user numbers.
The platform’s usage numbers were analyzed by Reuters, which conceded that the findings “appear to support Meta’s contention that news holds little value for the company.”
Mark Zuckerberg surrounded by guards ( Chip Somodevilla /Getty)
Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister (David Kawai/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
In other words, Facebook doesn’t need the mainstream legacy media to survive. The company can ban news links in an entire country and lose virtually no users. The analysis of minutes per day spent by Android users on Facebook found that the minutes have “stayed roughly unchanged.”
The Canadian bill, known as C-18, was passed earlier this year. As Breitbart News has reported before, it bears a striking similarity to the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), a bill pushed by media industry lobbyists in the U.S. to funnel cash from tech giants to media giants.
Via Breitbart News:
The bill is the Canadian equivalent of the derided Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) in the U.S., a bill which media lobbyists have gone to extraordinary lengths to pass, including a last-ditch effort to attach it to the annual defense spending bill last year.
Much like the JCPA, the goal of C-18 is to force tech companies to prop up the overwhelmingly left-leaning legacy media.
Just like the JCPA, C-18 allows media companies in Canada to enter into negotiations with tech companies to pay them for “carrying” their content, i.e., linking to the content and providing the media companies with traffic.
Also similarly to the JCPA, the Canadian bill contains a massive loophole allowing for the exclusion of independent and conservative media.
Both Meta and Google have blocked news links in Canada in response to the passing of C-18. Facebook employed the same tactic in Australia in response to a similar bill passed in that country. In that instance, Facebook eventually backed down. This time, it looks like the tech giants are sticking to their guns.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election. Follow him on Twitter @AllumBokhari.