Opinion – Web Giants and Democracy

Web giants don’t like people meddling in their business. The owner of Twitter is not shy about negatively labeling media whose content he disapproves of, such as the New York Times last April. Next, Meta threatens to block Canadian media content on Facebook and terminate agreements with several newspapers following the Online News Act (C-18) aimed at funding a the advent of the Internet. Google, meanwhile, has just announced that it will follow Meta’s lead if the law is sanctioned.

The Australian experience with a comparable law, from which Ottawa drew inspiration, seems to have been crowned with success despite some
attacks from social networks, which now fear that the Canadian law will snowball by inciting Europe and the United States to adopt similar laws.

However, the giants of the Web should be the first to go to the front to defend the free flow of information in a democratic regime, because their success has always depended on it. […]

Elon Musk may well admit to admiring the Chinese economic model (with its authoritarian leadership), as he declared during a recent visit to Chinese territory. However, Twitter, Google and Facebook could never have blossomed in a repressive environment like contemporary China. […]

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