Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau complained that Meta is continuing news link blocking. This as he can’t stop shovelling advertising dollars towards them.
In response to the wildfires across Canada, the Canadian government and the media decided that now is the time to start playing political games and politicize the situation to score cheap political points against Meta. While some of the most outrageous conspiracy theories are easily debunked, the government is continuing to turn victims of the worst fire season in Canadian history as political pawns to try and launch political attacks against Meta. Make no mistake, we have now left the realm of even the most basic levels of human decency at this point where people’s lives means so little to the Canadian government at this point.
Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, is continuing to double down as he continued with his conspiracy theory that Meta is the one at fault for the news link blocking even though it was his own law that caused this situation in the first place. The comments were made at a Liberal Cabinet retreat (warning, right channel audio only):
Indeed, Trudeau did complain about how a highly profitable company could do something like this, supposedly making money off of Canadians, it seems that Trudeau himself is making a concious decision to continue shovelling money towards Meta for advertising. This according to Facebook’s transparency report which shows that the Prime Minister is continuing to shovel money towards Facebook for advertising on the platform. In fact, he and his team launched a whole new wave of new ads just this month alone.
What is striking in all of this is how much Trudeau admonishes how much money Meta is making, yet as he publicly criticizes the platform for making money ‘off of Canadians’, he has no problem voluntarily shovelling more dollars towards the company in the first place. Compounding the issue is the fact that this is the same government that tried to lead a boycott of Meta by suspending their $10 million advertising program because they were standing up to the platforms on principle and hoping other companies followed suit. The boycott was dead on arrival thanks, in part, to the hypocritical position the Liberals found themselves in.
If Trudeau was serious about his criticism towards, you would think that he would take all those advertising dollars he otherwise would spend on Facebook and put it towards advertising campaigns for the very news sources he so regularly claims to defend. Yet, here he is, continuing to shovel all those advertising dollars towards the very company he so publicly despises in the first place.
As a result, why should Meta care about what Trudeau says in his political grandstanding? After all, it is just that: political grandstanding. They’ll just continue accepting all those advertising dollars as any company would and just let him beak off in front of the public, making a fool of himself in the process. After all, as been shown many times over, the Canadian public really isn’t on board with this whole link tax campaign in the first place.
(Hat tip @MGeist)
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
