Tories cosy up to biased Facebook

Throughout much of the world, there seems to be a general consensus, especially among conservatives, that Facebook has much to answer for, for suppressing right-wing voices and obliterating the business model that reputable news outlets once relied upon to fund quality journalism.

Republicans in the United States get this, which is why Congress spent two days grilling its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, over his company's alleged anti-conservative bias and its improper use of personal information for political advertising purposes in 2018. Conservatives in Australia get this, which is why the centre-right Liberal government passed a groundbreaking law last year that forces Big Tech companies to negotiate fair deals with the country's news publishers for the right to repurpose their content.

It is only Canadian Conservatives who seem to be under the false impression that Meta, which owns the social networking site, needs to be defended, as we saw on Friday during the heritage committee's hearings into Bill C-18, which proposes a made-in-Canada version of Australia's News Media Bargaining Code.

Friday's hearings gave MPs the chance to question two Meta executives. Instead of using this as an opportunity to inquire about the company's past behaviour or find constructive ways to improve the bill, however, the Tories lobbed a series of softball questions at them and tried to prevent others from asking tough questions.

Alberta MP Rachael Thomas began making a circus out of the committee by asking a series of leading questions, such as, “How does this legislation harm the internet?” Needless to say, it wasn't too hard for Kevin Chan, Meta's head of public policy, to hit that one out of the park. Later in the proceedings, Thomas called successive points of order and began badgering the chair to hamper a witness from being interviewed.

Next up from the Opposition benches was Marilyn Gladu, who warned about “unintended negative consequences like 22 million Canadians having their content blocked by Meta.” She was referring to Facebook's unseemly decision to temporarily block all news content from its network in Australia in February 2021 to protest the new law.

This wasn't an “unintended consequence,” but a petty decision on the part of the company to try to punish Australian social media users — and it was one that itself had numerous unintended consequences, including preventing people from accessing information from government health departments and the National Weather Service.

Gladu suggested that the legislation “might ultimately result in Canadians having to pay to have news links shared” on Facebook. Despite the fact that this hasn't happened in Australia and Chan saying, “I honestly don't know” if that would be a possibility, Gladu asked the next witness whether “charging people for a link would sort of destroy the whole openness of the internet?”

MP Kevin Waugh tried to argue that most of the news outlets that have been forced out of business have been owned by large publishers — who he accused of wanting “to be at the trough of C-18” — and said the heritage minister had ignored all the new publications that have set up shop in recent years.

What he failed to say is that the vast majority of the “independent organizations” he alluded to are not offering the local news coverage that was once provided by local papers. Instead, many of them provide national opinion content that relies heavily on the original reporting conducted by large media companies, and few of them live up to the journalistic standards Canadians have come to expect.

The Tories on the committee also completely ignored the intellectual property rights of Canadian publishers and the fact that Big Tech companies have been profiting off their IP for years. This is a stark reversal for a party that, under the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, spent a lot of time and energy passing the Copyright Modernization Act, which made great strides in modernizing this country's antiquated intellectual property protections.

While we understand that Opposition parties have a reflexive instinct to oppose any measures put forward by the governing party, the Conservative members of the committee did a disservice to their constituents, and Canadian democracy as a whole, by giving far too much deference to a company using fear tactics to try to escape its obligations to the media companies it has spent years siphoning revenues from.

It certainly makes strange bedfellows to have the Tories cosy up to a company that has a history of censoring conservative thought leaders, and even news stories that would be troubling for liberal politicians.

Facebook has banned or censored a long list of conservatives, but in his 2020 testimony before the U.S. Congress, Zuckerberg couldn't name a single liberal who had been targeted. Earlier this year, he admitted on Joe Rogan's podcast that Facebook suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story, which turned out to be completely legitimate.

If these are the types of friends the Conservatives are trying to make, who needs enemies?

COMPANY USING FEAR TACTICS TO TRY TO ESCAPE ITS OBLIGATIONS.