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Comment by nvy | Hacker News Reader

It's not clear to me how this is "taking an L" in any way.

The only people I know who think getting news from fucking facebook of all places are boomers caught up in the doomscrolling dopamine treadmill who are also caught up in the milquetoast Canadian version of MAGA.

Forcing people to go outside their shitty echo chambers for news seems like an astronomical win.

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It's taking an L in the sense that the government doesn't want Facebook to ban news, they want Facebook to pay for linking news. Forcing people to leave their shitty echo chambers is good, but it's the opposite of what the government wants in this case.

You need to go out and meet more people then. Upwards of 50% of an average news website's referrals come from Google. Add in Meta products (FB, Instagram, Whatsapp) and that can easily cross 70%-80%. All that traffic is about to drop down to 0 in the coming weeks.

They said "facebook" specifically, and that seems about right if boomers also include gen x idiots

Well this bill is not about facebook, but links posted anywhere on the internet. Google is also blocking Canadian news from search, news and other products. Sites like Reddit will follow if they cross $1B in revenue.

My point was that the person was specifically disparaging Facebook users, although the text of the bill is also not remotely as clear as it should be.

The entire entity of Facebook (not meta) could go away tomorrow and the only people who'd care are probably the ones who voted this government in, property boomers and their forgotten gen x offspring.

The rest would just switch their messaging platform if they use messenger, and go back to Craigslist for classifieds.

Edit: To clarify, I'm still being hyperbolic. All kinds of people voted for all kinds of candidates, but in my city most of the extremely wealthy neighborhoods voted for Liberal candidates, so it's a bit fun to poke at. Likewise, the only people I personally know who still use Facebook directly for anything unrelated to selling stuff or direct messaging, are just quite a lot older

Facebook has 4 billion active users across the world. They are not all "boomers" and whatever else you want to call them. There will be much more negative impact on the world if all Facebook properties disappeared tomorrow then all of Canadian news media put together.

You keep roping in other properties into this, if you want to do that, use their parent company name. 4b users on facebook as in Facebook seems a bit of a reach to me at this point. 4b on all properties, ya maybe. Either way, while I could see it having a negative impact, it would mostly be as an advertising platform, and the net positive of that going away might bring it to neutral.

I know it's imused in some places as their primary messaging service or something, but it seems likely they're not doing much unique here.

So what is this harm you speak of?

Didn't the Canadian government beg meta to share news about the wildfires?

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