You may have heard that Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has blocked posting of links to Canadian news sites after the government passed Bill C-18, which mandates that platforms like Facebook pay Canadian news sites for the privilege of linking to them.
As this article from Wired points out, it's causing lots of problems for people, especially those who need to get news out to people in danger from wildfires and other disasters.
Cabin Radio has been struggling with two major barriers that have gone up between it and its audience. Earlier in the year, Canada’s broadcast regulator denied the outlet a place on the FM dial because it decided there wasn’t enough demand in Yellowknife. Then, Meta’s news ban meant that the station couldn’t reach locals with up-to-the-minute fire and evacuation developments.
The Cabin Radio live blog quickly became a reverse-chronological lifeline for people from the Northwest Territories, and for the hundreds of journalists covering the fires from abroad. And, now that more than half of the population of Northwest Territories is under evacuation orders, Cabin Radio is a reliable tether to home for displaced evacuees. “People can refresh that thing every half-hour or hour and know that they're not going to miss a trick in terms of our efforts to understand what's happening on their behalf,” Williams says.
He is also broadcasting the station’s live morning show through public posts on his personal Facebook account. “If I can undercut the ban and stay on Facebook and give all this information to our audience, I will. Meta can make all the stupid and wrong decisions it likes, but we shouldn't,” he says.
I've noticed the sudden absence of posts about local news in my feed. Personally, I think the government is way off base with this one and in typical Liberal fashion, has fallen victim to a lobbying campaign from big business.
I'm going to try something here and post this article to Facebook and see what happens.
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