The biggest question the news media blackout in Facebook that I can see is …
How did we arrive at a point where we rely on one billion dollar corporately controlled foreign company that does not benefit us have a near monopoly on how we share, intake, gather and read news media?
The problem is not Facebook
The problem is in how we use the internet and social media systems
The technology should be serving us
We shouldn’t be giving so much power to corporate entities to spoon feed us the technology and control the information that makes our democracy possible.
The problem is people are lazy and uneducated about virtually all technology. If you are lucky you get taught how to us MS office in high school but that’s it.
The entirety of human knowledge is out there and anyone can just look up anything they want but that is an active process, Facebook/X/Instagram/Tiktok lets them passively consume an infinite stream of entertainment. So why would 30M user with little to no understanding of digital privacy, digital security, copyright, or even how a browser and webpage works, ever choose not to use the endless stream? As far as they know there is no alternative because they were never taught otherwise.
Teach your kids, teach your family, teach your friends. Be the annoying pedantic prick who points out that FireFox is the better browser an that ‘smart’ devices are actively spying on everything you do. No one will like it but MAYBE they will think about it.
Get. Off. Of. Facebook.
Everyone.
This paragraph here is probably the real meat of the question:
Gizmodo spoke to half a dozen student journalists and station managers who say the ban on news links, intended to hurt big-name publishers, has instead hamstrung their vital ability to fundraise, recruit volunteers, or engage in community outreach. (…) And the Online News Act, intended to boost Canada’s local news, seems instead to have increased the hardships of the nation’s most local outlets.
I can see this going in one of two ways:
1- The numerous small companies push the government into giving in to Meta 2- The small companies are ignored by both sides and, sooner or later, migrate to new platforms to stay in touch with their communities.
My dream is that 2 happens, because that’d lead to zuckerbot having less power in Canada, as less people would rely on meta stuff, but I’m afraid 1 is more likely to happen. A very harsh wakeup call to what a lot of privacy-minded people were preaching for years, to not “depend so much on social media” (which was always easier said than done for smaller companies who needed reach) and something I wish could’ve been avoided
I wish the govt went a step further and deleted its facebook and instagram presences.
I wonder if this is an issue that a different centralized app could solve. Like if there was a government funded platform that just linked out to news sources… I can make an app like that, but who gets the power in this case? My best guess would be the Canadian government, but the im not really in the know in that regard…
Isn’t that just a list of digital news organizations?
Not sure why it needs to be government funded or controlled.
If you’re looking for a list of all articles from each of those websites, you may be alone in that desire (though something could probably be put together with RSS). If you are looking for a curated list of articles from those websites, there’s always going to be some sort of bias in the curation, but that’s pretty much what Lenny and Reddit do in various communities/subreddits (like this one).
It is, but I’m spinning out about moderation and neutrality in allowed articles. I don’t trust anything to do that well, but the closest candidate I think would be a nonprofit gov org most likely. I have no idea though, this is one of those things you’d have to convince someone to spend a lot of money on a leap of faith that has a decent chance of not working out
I do not have twitter or facebook but I still read the news every day. The news is not facebook or twitter. Both these companies could shut down tomorrow and I could still read the news like I always have.
This is a good thing. People will need to find alternative sources for news. I don’t see a problem.
