The Canadian media is still trying to find new ways of spinning the Online News Act to make Facebook look as bad as possible.
With the government Google deal, you might be tempted to think that the propaganda firehouse from the large media companies will finally get switched off. Well, Meta has dropped news links from their platforms back in August. While the government decided to start begging for Meta’s return, that campaign seemingly lasted all of two days as the government abandoned that approach and threatened to sick the CRTC on the company. In the process, the government all but admitted that the CRTC is not an arms length regulator after all and is merely the Prime Minister’s attack dog, ready to act on any order it is given from the government.
So, the major media outlets have started directing their propaganda efforts against Meta, trying to find every sleazy way possible to misinform the public on the debate and run misleading “news” stories. A recent example comes from CityNews Toronto which features a headline that says “Facebook blocks grieving families from sharing obituaries as Online News Act dispute rages on“. The headline is, of course, misleading, because Meta is obviously not blanket blocking obituaries. Here’s the first part of the article:
Hayley Wilson got some heartbreaking news in August. Her beloved grandmother passed away at the age of 81 after living a long and fruitful life. Phyllis Jeannie Lindsay was known as a “social butterfly” who loved sports, family, gardening, and life.
When she passed, Wilson and the rest of her family, wrote up an obituary and sent it into the Hamilton Spectator, which posted it to their obituary section on the newspaper’s website.
Wilson, caught up in her own grief, wanted to let her friends know about the loss but could not call them all so she tried to share the obituary on Facebook. She was met with a message stating, “In response to Canadian government legislation, news content cannot be shared.”
(emphasis mine)
What I highlighted is the real crux of the problem. When Meta has to block news links, simply blocking the domain name is a sure fire way of making that happen. The platform is not going to manually review every link that gets posted onto their platforms and determine whether or not it is a news link. The only really reasonable way of handling a bulk of the news links is to simply block the domain name to the news website.
Another part of the problem here is the fact that you are still posting obituaries in a newspaper… in 2023. This while fully knowing that the newspaper in question isn’t going to offer the reach you are looking for. So, instead, you are posting a link to the obituary onto Facebook after. Honestly, you are probably better off taking that money you spent on that newspaper obituary and paying for a license on a picture from a stock photography website and writing up something thoughtful along with it directly on Facebook (which is clearly where the target audience was in all of this).
Despite the source of the problem being extremely obvious, CityNews went on to pretend that the problem is on Meta and not the act of linking to a news website:
But Wilson asked, “Is an obituary a news story? That doesn’t seem right.”
John Cunningham, president of the Ontario Funerals Services Association agrees. “A lot of families are starting to become aware of this problem and it is a problem.”
Cunningham says people who are grieving shouldn’t be given obstacles when wanting to share stories or obituaries of their loved ones.
“It’s 2023, social media is a very common and official way of getting the word out there that someone has passed,” he said. “It allows their friends to connect with them at what very well maybe the worst time of their lives.”
So, you can tell that the news article is doing a lot of logical gymnastics to try and weave together a convincing story despite knowing better. They are trying to sell the false story that Meta is somehow stopping people from grieving or whatever the heck they are trying to get people to think. The reality is that this is a problem the large media companies brought onto themselves. They lobbied the living daylights out of politicians to get this terrible bill passed, they turned their news websites into soapboxes where the large publishers published misleading or outright fabricated stories just to satisfy personal grudges against the platforms, and they actively targeted anyone daring to offer critical analysis of the situation that didn’t line up perfectly with their false talking points.
Hilariously, the the funeral home in question pointed out the obvious and said that you can simply link to the funeral home page instead, calling it a “workaround”. Despite this, City News added a lair of disinformation right after the point that was made:
Cunningham, who’s also a funeral director in Peterborough, now has to alert families of the issue and has a workaround.
“Many but not all funeral homes post obituaries to their own website,” he said. “Because we are a non-Canadian news source, those obituaries can be shared on sites like Facebook and Instagram.”
Meta did not respond to our request when we asked why obituaries are treated as news content.
Under normal circumstances, I’d sit here and say that what CityNews published is absolutely shameful. Unfortunately, this activity of trying to misinform the public has become all too common practice for the major media outlets to intentionally mislead or outright lie to their audiences when it comes to anything related to the Online News Act. If they can turn the victims of the tragic Yellowknife wildfires from earlier this year into mere political pawns for their Online News Act agenda, nothing is really beneath them at this point. So, trying to turn people’s tragic loss into mere political pawns is not really anything new. Basic human morality is about the last thing on these companies minds at this point. It is sickening, but it is also the reality.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
