• SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    The issue is that Google and Meta have positioned themselves as gatekeepers. They can decide which news sites they direct people to and which ones they don’t. This gives them a lot of power over news media.

    The result has been that despite having more information available to people than ever, people are more ignorant of the news than ever before.

    The social media companies have made themselves de facto stewards of the the internet. If they were Canadian corporations, the government would have the power to break up their oligopoly over information. But since they aren’t Canadian corporations, the only recourse is to tax them.

    • terath@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      1 year ago

      Yes agreed, but the problem is far wider than just Canadian news sources. The solution is not to try to tax them, because they will just disengage and make the problem worse. I don’t have a good solution right now but if we were to pass regulation it should be something about automated recommendation systems (ai) not trying to make people pay to link to things.

      • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        AI recommendation systems are even worse. They learn from the behaviour of people. Not everyone on the internet is trustworthy, so these AI algorithms are learning bad habits. It probably only takes around a 1000 person troll farm to manipulate a machine learning algorithm.

        Who can devote 1000+ people to manipulating the machine learning algorithms that recommend content? Countries interested in disinformation campaigns to destabilize their adversaries. Hence C-11… need to have Canadians involved in those systems otherwise it’s just going to be Russia, China, or whoever else is dedicated enough to poisoning the data that the machine learning algorithms are learning from.