Wed Jul 5, 2023 – 8:24 pm EDT
OTTAWA (LifeSiteNews) – Canada Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez said the federal government will pull its advertising on Facebook and Instagram in response to the platform’s parent company, Meta, saying it will block Canadians’ access to news on its sites due to a new internet censorship law.
“We have decided to take the necessary step of suspending all Government of Canada advertising to Facebook. We cannot continue paying advertising dollars to Meta while they refuse to pay their fair share to Canadian news organizations,” Rodriguez announced today on Twitter.
Canada’s Senate passed the Online News Act, or Bill C-18, in June and it quickly became law. The House of Commons, led by the Canadian federal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, passed Bill C-18 in December 2022.
This new internet censorship law mandates that online tech companies be forced to pay publishers for news content shared on their sites.
Instead of going along with the law, both Meta and Google, whom it should be noted are responsible for censoring or limiting news content on their platforms, notably during the COVID crisis, have said they would block Canadians’ access to
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