The entire city of #Yellowknife is being evacuated. This is unprecedented and terrifying.
And thousands of citizens aren’t aware because Meta continues to block news in the country.
This is what happens when citizens are convinced to use an American multinational corporation as their community’s primary communications channel — a corporation that couldn’t give two shits about anything except its “fiduciary duty” to shareholders.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/nwt-wildfire-emergency-update-august-16-1.6938756
Regarding the blocking of Canadian news, can we at least place the #blame where it belongs?
#Canadian #Legacy #Media convinced the #government of #Canada to pass a law forcing #Facebook and #Google to pay to show snippets of, and #link to, Canadian news articles.
So Facebook and Google had a choice: they could continue to do this, and pay for the privilege, or they could stop linking to it. There was no third option.
We forced the choice on them; blame our #politicians.
@reneestephen @cazabon @tod The media companies chose to create accounts and publish their stories on social media because it was good for them, not because it benefited social media. Social media drives clicks and views, and therefore money, into these traditional media companies just by allowing them to share their content for free. If anything, the social media companies should be charging the traditional media companies for the advertising space they currently offer for free. The idea that the traditional media companies could charge the social media companies for a service provided by the latter is ludicrous. It's no wonder they chose to simply block the old news instead.
@LouisIngenthron If people didn't read only the headlines then scream at each other in the comments, never to set eyes on the actual article, I might agree with you...
Now there's very little difference between the CBC and the "Detroit Millennial" or whatever on FB -- it is merely fodder for engagement algorithms.
@reneestephen Do you think Facebook is responsible for people only reading headlines?
1. Yes, because they provide a user experience that encourages staying on Facebook and screaming at people in the comments
2. People reading shallowly is why things like lede lines and bullet-point summaries exist. But Facebook pretends not to be a publisher, so 🤷
@reneestephen The user interface literally allows you to click any part of the headline or graphic and be taken directly to the source article. I'd hardly consider that a wall.
If I recall correctly, lede lines and bullet points existed long before the internet. And more importantly, they're written by the very companies looking to extort the social media companies... not the social media companies themselves. Those companies chose to rely on free social media to drive revenue and then they chose to adapt to maximize that revenue stream. They're responsible for their choices.
To me, it just seems like the old media has repeatedly shot themselves in the foot and now they're looking to pass the blame and costs onto the new media.
@reneestephen No, I'm referring to the Canadian law they lobbied for that forces social media companies to pay the old media companies for content they never solicited.
@LouisIngenthron "content they never solicited" is ...a truly fascinating framing.
@reneestephen Given that Facebook chose to turn them away in reaction to the law, it's demonstrably true.
@LouisIngenthron How so? Just because they don't want to pay doesn't mean they didn't want it for free.
@reneestephen The fact that they're so willing and eager to part ways shows where the value proposition truly lies in the relationship.
If social media were really ripping off traditional media, traditional media would have parted ways with social media. But it's simply not true, no matter how much the old media wishes it was.
@LouisIngenthron Again, we'll see. "Old media" is the only one doing the actual reporting, and not just eyeball mining by throwing together scraped remixes. Facebook is a habit -- and, a forum -- and my bet is that it needs content more than content needs it. They are fundamentally different things.
@reneestephen You hit the nail on the head. Social media is a forum, not a newsstand. Does it benefit from some walk-in traffic because of the newsstand out front? Sure, but that's not critical to its business model, and they've clearly done the math and realized that paying the newsstand to stay would be more expensive than losing the customers it draws in.
@LouisIngenthron what costs? So you think Facebook is going to start publishing news on their own now?