The nationwide news ban on Facebook and Instagram, which Meta says it will soon implement, went viral on Thursday and Friday.
The tech giant, which has user numbers in the billions across its various platforms, made the announcement on Thursday afternoon, about an hour after the government’s online news law was finally passed. Trudeau in the Senate.
The news was spread by major news outlets around the world, including Reuters and the Associated Press, which helped spread it to all parts of the world.
In the US, the New York Times headline and the Washington Post were among the newspapers picking up the news, with the former headlining: “Canada forces Google and Facebook to pay news outlets for links to articles.”
From the BBC in the UK to Der Spiegel in Germany, via Le Monde in France and Rai in Italy, the battle between the federal government and the American giant has slipped into the categories of international, business or international techno.
The same applies to the largest Spanish-language daily newspaper in the world, “El País”, the “Times of India” or the “Globo” in Brazil.
Meta had been threatening Canada for months and had begun “testing” a select number of Canadian users since early June in protest of Bill C-18.
This is forcing Google and Meta to enter into agreements with Canadian media to share some of the revenue from journalistic content.
“Today we confirm that news content will no longer be available to all users in Canada on Facebook and Instagram,” Meta announced in a post Thursday.
“If the government cannot defend Canadians against the giants of the internet, who will?” responded Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez.
Justin Trudeau recently bemoaned Meta’s “bullying” during parties
However, neither Ottawa nor Quebec intends to forgo the ads bought on the Meta, Facebook and Instagram platforms.
Meanwhile, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, whose party opposed the bill, blamed Justin Trudeau for Meta’s decision.
“And here we go. Step by step, the Trudeau administration is deliberately impeding what people can see and share online,” he wrote on Twitter on Friday.
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