One of the big bosses of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, decided to falter at a federal parliamentary committee on Monday, offended by the title of the meeting, which suggested that the company is using “tactics of intimidation and subversion” in its threat to block all news from its platforms.
“We were notified that the title of the meeting had been changed to a more confrontational one,” said Kevin Chan, Meta’s Canada-based global policy director.
He carried the message of one of his superiors, Nick Clegg, who was absent from the committee on Monday, but who meant that Meta would remove all news from its platforms if the Canadian Parliament passed Bill C-18, which provides compel it to financially compensate the news media.
“We have made the difficult decision that if the flawed legislation is passed, we are going to have to end the availability of news content on Facebook and Instagram in Canada,” Mr. Chan read, echoing Mr. Clegg’s words, a former British politician turned leader of Meta.
Kevin Chan was one of two company officials who came Monday morning to answer questions from elected members of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. That committee had instead subpoenaed Meta’s chairman, Mark Zuckerberg, and its president of global affairs, Nick Clegg.
The latter had initially confirmed his presence, before canceling at the last minute, last Friday. In a post on the company’s blog, Mr. Clegg writes that he accepted only because his invitation was to be about “the reaction of companies in the information technology sector to Bill C-18. »
Noticed absence
The presence of other Meta officials than those invited by the committee created quite a stir within the parliamentary committee on Monday.
“Is there reason to believe that we were rolled in flour? asked New Democratic Party MP Peter Julian, who said he was very surprised to see Mr. Clegg’s last-minute absence.
“Meta wants to tell us what questions to ask, what we call our meetings! “, was also indignant the Liberal MP Anthony Housefather.
In a highly unusual exchange, parliamentary committee chair Hedy Fry called the clerk to account for the absence. Visibly uncomfortable, clerk of Parliament Michael MacPherson initially declined to respond, before implying that he had been told that the “new setting” of the meeting seemed “unacceptable” in the eyes of this official of Meta.
Since Mr. Clegg and his boss Mr. Zuckerberg are based in the United States, subpoenas from Canadian parliamentary committees cannot compel them to appear.
Intimidation and subversion
On March 20, a motion by Mr. Housefather was adopted which stated that “recent actions of the two companies in Canada […] can be seen as attempts to intimidate the Canadian Parliament, which follow a cycle of subversive and systematic tactics used by web giants around the world to avoid accountability. »
This followed the threat voiced a few times since December that Facebook intends to block news sites in protest to Bill C-18. Google, for its part, has carried out tests aimed at blocking news sites from its search engine for some Canadian Internet users.
The Liberal, Bloc Québécois and NDP MPs supported it, while the Conservatives abstained. No one opposed it.
“I didn’t think the March 20 motion was related to our invitation […] Me, I received an e-mail, which said that we were invited to speak about C-18. We are always transparent, ”explained Kevin Chan, of Meta, in a tense exchange with Bloc Québécois MP Martin Champoux.
The latter pointed out to the representatives of Meta that it is now too late for the elected officials to modify C-18. There An Act respecting online communication platforms making news content available to persons in Canada passed third reading in December and has been considered by the Senate ever since.
News was briefly blocked on Facebook in Australia in 2021 when that country passed a similar law. The “compromise” reached with the Australian government allowed the Internet giants to avoid sanctions if they concluded enough agreements with the media, which Canadian law already provides.
Meta’s head of public policy for Canada, Rachel Curran, said on Monday that Canadian law would not give her company enough time to comply, unlike the Australian model.