Canada finds out. Last Friday, Canadian politician Pascale St-Onge lambasted Meta’s ‘decision’ to block news links on Facebook in the middle of a wildfire crisis. This was a “reckless” act, she declared. People could be hurt. Why on earth would Mark Zuckerberg do this? Typical evil tech bro shit, she seemed to argue. It was just the latest in Pascale’s days-long campaign against the company, echoed by Justin Trudeau on behalf of the Canadian Liberal Party, in which Facebook’s failure to platform ‘news about wildfires’ received more attention from these famously beside-the-point politicians than the actual wildfires. Naturally, the pearl-clutching was total bullshit: Canadian Facebook never specifically blocked news links to stories about Canadian wildfires, Canadian Facebook blocked all news links in keeping with recent Canadian legislation — which was championed by the Liberal Party. 

Earlier this year, Trudeau’s government enacted Bill C-18, which requires Google and Meta, specifically targeted, to pay the Toronto Star every time a ‘Canadian intellectual’ changes her gender (reported four times now, in one fascinating case). Or, more generally I guess, they are forcing Google and Meta to pay “news” sites every time Google and Meta link to said “news” sites. Historically, such action has more often been characterized as: sending free traffic to local “news” sites. But we are living in a new world.

While such policy may sound strange to the average person — Why should a “news” company be paid for a link, and nobody else? What makes something a “news company” rather than, say, a personal blog? Is the news company not already benefiting tremendously from the free traffic provided by giants like Google and Facebook? — the law is perfectly in keeping with the modern western government’s view that the “press” is, in some sense, sacred. In this regard, principle tends not to matter; the press, defined as ‘things Trudeau’s government specifically deems the press,’ is deserving of compensation for a vital service (propaganda). His government is less concerned with the question of where the money is coming from, or whether such legislation is ethical, and is certainly not moved by the fanciful American notion of “free speech,” which hasn’t meaningfully existed in the authoritarian state of Canada for many years.