Canadian Facebook News Legislation Taboos You Should Try Today

SEP 11, 2023 2:00 AM What’s New With WIRED

Facebook Is Giving Up on News—Again

https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-is-giving-up-on-news-again/

Are you a Canadian like me? If you are, you probably know that there is a Facebook news link ban. Do any of these three news stories ring a bell?

Prince Harry and Meghan to “Step Back” from Royal Duties

Harry and Meghan Markle declared their progress out of their jobs as senior individuals from the Family. “We now plan to balance our time between the United Kingdom and North America, continuing to honour our duty to The Queen, the Commonwealth, and our patronages,” their statement read. Buckingham Palace responded with a statement explaining that “Discussions with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are at an early stage,” and that “these are complicated issues that will take time to work through.”

Canada Wins First Medal at 2020 Tokyo Olympics

Swimmers Maggie Mac Neil, Kayla Sanchez, Rebecca Smit, and Penny Oleksiak posted a time of 3:32.78 to win silver in the women’s 4×100 m freestyle relay. The most memorable decoration of the Tokyo Games was this one. Mac Neil went on to win Canada’s first gold of the Games in the women’s 100 m butterfly.

Decathlete Damian Warner Wins Lou Marsh Trophy

Damian Warner received the Lou Marsh Trophy as Canada’s athlete of the year, in recognition of his gold medal victory in decathlon at the 2020 Olympic Summer Games in Tokyo. Warner set an Olympic record with 9,018 total points and became one of only four decathletes to reach 9,000 points in international competition. He additionally got the 2021 Lionel Conacher as Canada’s Male of the Year.

All of these news stories were widely discussed on Facebook. Certainly, they were in mainstream media around the world, but Facebook calls its wall a “news feed.” Facebook users discuss stuff like this.

This does not mean it is any less of a juggernaut of Big Tech. Except for TikTok and YouTube, Facebook has little competition. Even with Mark Zuckerberg being a wanker, changing the company’s name from Facebook to Meta, or losing billions of dollars in value by obsessing over the idea of a future in which we live in a “metaverse,” Facebook remains important.

In Canada, the Liberal government and Zuckerberg have clashed over the perception that news journalism on services like Facebook should be paid for. I know journalism is a tough, competitive business. However, it doesn’t mean journalists should get such a free ride that Facebook pay for their ice cream.

Many journalists employed by big media outlets sell lies, at least occasionally.

Moreover, news on Facebook is notoriously uninformed. The Internet battle between the political spheres of the Left and the Right, particularly in the US and in the UK, where much power is seated, is hard not to notice.

A platform that had an excellent reputation as a place to go for news, and now is not so hot and trustworthy, is X (formerly Twitter). It is declining in popularity and will probably keep going that way, but it’s still a giant platform.

I don’t see radical hate running willy-nilly. The biggest problem is that what’s trending is sometimes pretty goofy now, whereas before it was cooler. Anyway, it doesn’t mean you can’t still get news on X, and while it’s easy to argue that unless he manages to make it visibly profitable, it could be in for trouble, he might find a way to do that and X will seem cool again.

You might just get ahead of a surge in popularity for X if Elon has his way. He wants to see a lot of change in X.

He sometimes makes announcements that don’t come true, a habit about which he needs to be more careful in the future.

Twitter Indeed Verified or whatever it’s called is no longer useful. That’s the thing where you spend your monthly $8, or maybe $12 if you’re in Canada (I don’t actually know the prices) and then you get priority service when you tweet and some other advantages. I personally am not checkmarked blue.

I respect Elon, he certainly provides a lot of fun, but I just don’t think messing around with the checkmark for clout is in my interest.

Most X users don’t tweet themselves. They lurk, which is fine because it makes sense that people just want to read cool tweets or whatever.

So, you could try lurking on X, and maybe tweeting an opinion, or putting in the extra mile and getting yourself a blue badge.

If you’re already on X, you got this!

Anyway, if you’ve left Twitter because Elon bought it, you could consider returning (to X). This is even more true if you’re a Canadian who formerly relied on Facebook for news.

Even with X‘s decline in popularity, returning to X, the fact that it’s now a notorious platform, is one thing you could do for news.

I hope that the legislation around Canadian Internet content won’t negatively impact our Facebook use, our X use, our streaming video services, and our YouTube usage. I am not sure we have that luxury.

You’re welcome to “like” this post, to comment, and to follow the blog. Good luck getting your Internet news. The story is ongoing.