Bill C-18 was never meant to be about getting big tech companies to pay journalists. It was about getting them to stop censoring Canadian news. And now, with the wildfires raging across Canada, the Liberals are demanding that the government restore all Canadian news on their platforms.
00:00:00.000The Liberals made their Bill C-18 bad, and I think that they can lie in it. The Online News Act, since it was passed about a month and a half ago, was obviously never going to achieve the Liberals' stated goal of getting journalists paid. It was obviously always going to lead to big tech companies like Google and Meta to shut down Canadian news on their platforms. Not because those companies are somehow being unfair, but because the Liberals were being unfair with them.
00:00:24.360I don't want to have to defend big tech companies who have done their own censorship in the past, but the Liberal government effectively trying to extort big tech companies to pay journalists for merely posting stuff on their platforms that these big tech companies never asked to be created, nor post on their platforms in the first place, is utterly ridiculous.
00:00:42.380Now you have Pablo Rodriguez demanding that the Meta reinstate all Canadian news because of the wildfires going on across Canada.
00:00:51.800And while that's horrible that Canadians cannot access news about the wildfires on Facebook at the moment, you cannot blame this on anyone but the Liberals for having incentivized the content's takedown in the first place.
00:01:03.800Obviously, if Facebook puts back up the news, all Canadian news on their platform, then the Liberals are going to hammer them for not paying the journalists who wrote the content while it was live.
00:01:15.780It's absolutely, utterly ridiculous, and I think that this proves why Bill C-18 absolutely needs to be repealed.
00:01:22.160It's benefiting no journalist, and I think it would have been immoral if I was getting paid by Facebook in the first place for posting my own content that I already found value in posting on Facebook to reach my audience, because somehow I think I deserve 50 bucks from Facebook for having written stuff that they didn't need and they didn't ask for.
00:01:38.580I know that they get money for ads on their own site, but it's their own website.
00:01:42.320Why do they owe me money for operating their own website?
00:01:45.260Anyways, but isn't this absolutely despicable that now that Canadians are in danger, the Liberals aren't thinking of repealing this bill and then giving the big tech companies the green light to put Canadian news back on their platforms under the promise that they're going to get rid of this ridiculous legislation.
00:02:01.720They're going to use this tragedy where Canadians are being deprived of information to try and spin this into an anti-big tech narrative.
00:02:10.560Again, you don't have to love big tech to know that extortion is wrong.
00:02:15.700I happen to think that extortion is wrong, although I think that many on the left these days don't really care as long as it serves a particular goal.
00:02:23.840So I want to make the case that this is not big tech's fault for people not being able to get information about the wildfires right now.
00:02:33.560Even though it's Pablo Rodriguez and other Liberal ministers making the whiny point that the news should be restored, this is obviously all being done under Justin Trudeau's direction.
00:02:43.860So it's Justin Trudeau who's depriving Canadians of news while they're trying to flee wildfires, not big tech.
00:02:49.520Justin Trudeau is the one who wanted to get independent media shut down on Facebook and Google, so that's why he basically passed this stupid extortion bill.
00:02:59.220This was never meant to get journalists paid.
00:03:00.660It was to make such a ridiculous ask that big tech would have been forced to shut down the news in general.
00:03:06.540And now, even though he knows exactly what his bill was meant to do and that it was meant to be unreasonable, he is now going to try and blame Google and Facebook when it's his fault.
00:03:16.120And I think that this needs to be clearly stated over and over again, which is why I'll admit I've kind of repeated it a couple times here, but I just want to make it absolutely clear what's going on.
00:03:26.320Anyways, well, that's the end of that rant, and I hope that this whole situation is resolved fairly quickly.
00:03:33.700I hope that Canadians are able to get the information they need to avoid these wildfires and be able to get to safety.
00:03:39.140At the same time, I don't see them getting that information unless the Liberals actually allow big tech to post the stuff without trying to fine them for massive amounts of money for not paying journalists.
00:03:49.480Anyways, that's it for me today. I have my legal fundraiser in the comments below for my lawsuit, Defense Against Chinese Billionaire.
00:03:58.620I am currently winning that, but of course, any amount of money helps me. I've had to pay over $15,000 into that.
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00:04:25.680And other than that, have a great day.