GUNTER: Trudeau a fool in his WWII overture toward Big Tech
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Farcical, delusional and inconsequential.
That’s what the Trudeau Liberals’ attacks on major social media platforms are – farcical, delusional and inconsequential.
The major platforms are annoyed at the Liberals’ Bill C-18, passed just before the House of Commons rose for the summer. The bill, known as the Online News Act, would make platforms such as Facebook and Instagram pay what is effectively a royalty when a Canadian news story gets linked on social media.
The Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) estimates these royalties would cost social media companies about $100 million a year.
If the platforms were paying for content directly to the newspapers and broadcasters producing it, that would be one thing, but they would pay it to the Liberal government, which would then decide how to divvy it up.
The delusional bit is that Wednesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau likened his government’s efforts to extract fees from Big Tech to the Allies’ Second World War efforts to preserve democracy.
“We want to defend democracy,” Trudeau claimed. “This is what we’re doing across the world, such as supporting Ukraine. This is what we did during the Second World War.”
Honestly!? Does the man think Big Government’s fight with Big Tech is the moral equivalent of defending Ukraine from the Russians and liberating Europe from the Nazis? Grab a little perspective, Justin.
(Of course, when Trudeau wants to make hipster points with young voters he doesn’t hesitate to use social media to tweet pop singer Taylor Swift and plead with her to bring her current world tour to Canada, which he also did this week. That makes him both a hypocrite and a goof.)
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The farcical bit is the government’s belief it can pressure Facebook, Instagram, Google and others into bending to the Liberals’ will. The big social media platforms have begun blocking links to Canadian news sources rather than pay the feds’ fees.
The government’s response on Wednesday was to pull all government ads from social media sites.
On the surface, the Liberals’ belief they can use money to force Big Tech to do their bidding is somewhat understandable. The Liberals use this tactic with the CBC all the time. They give the CBC $1.3 billion a year and our state broadcaster happily functions as a mouthpiece for favoured Liberal causes and beliefs. So, it’s easy to see how Ottawa would mistakenly believe it could play a similar financial game with Big Tech.
The problem, though, is that federal advertising on social media only amounts to $11.4 million a year. That’s just a tiny 0.001% of Meta’s gross income. (Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other platforms.)
Ottawa withholding its ad buy from social media is the equivalent of someone earning $5,000 a month being dinged for $5 for the yogurt they are taking out of the staffroom fridge.
And when you do the math, if the social media giants lose $11 million in government advertising while saving $100 million in royalties for news links, they are still coming ahead by nearly $90 million.
That’s what I mean by the Liberals’ tactics being farcical. And inconsequential.
Trudeau may like to portray himself as Winston Churchill in the fight against Big Tech censorship but, in reality, he and his government are nothing but sanctimonious little gnats annoyingly buzzing around the ears of companies such as Twitter, Facebook and others.
And here’s the hypocritical cherry on top: While the Trudeau government has pulled its ads from social media, the Liberal party has not.
Michael Geist, a University of Ottawa law professor who specializes in Internet and e-commerce law, says it’s obvious with the Liberals that “principled opposition ends when there might be a political cost involved.”
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