Genuine question, not trying to be a snob about it…
Who actually uses Facebook and Instagram and stuff for news? It’s such a foreign idea to me that I’m interested in how many people actually get their news from these sites (as opposed to coming across it and interacting with it just because it’s there).
Are there actually people who will consume less news because of this? Is it specific demographics?
At one point I was following a few local news accounts on instagram because I’d scroll past some content while I was already looking through the feed. It wasn’t my only way of getting news, but just another form of it.
Facebook dropping news probably won’t affect me much, but I can see Google being more impactful. I know some people use the news feed as their primary way of finding news, and I also click on news articles when they come up on the search. Depending on the extent of the removal, it might replace a lot of reputable news with content that isn’t “news” but still fills that niche.
Is one really on the internet if they’re trapped inside a tech bro walled garden. The situation seems quite terrible now that people have to be told how to go to a URL as simple as cbc.ca. It’s not like the internet was recently invented. This is a developed nation and one of the earlier to widely adopt internet usage. Here we are teaching people how to browse to a website. What a mess that big tech has made.
At some level I can’t really blame the tech companies for making it convenient to browse through their sites, but rather how they have used it to track and influence people. At some point everyone using the internet should have learned how to find websites they find it worthwhile to visit and use their critical thinking to identify whether a site is trash. That skill hasn’t changed in decades.
Every media organization and news outlet also has a website that people can directly connect to
With a bit of setting up, you can also use a feed aggregator in a variety of ways or services to just collect headlines to news stories and read all their headlines as they appear every day to read the news.
This is the way. Been using RSS feeds since 2005. Haven't had a piece of news delivered to me via Reddit, Facebook, Twitter or any other social media without it being in my feeds within 5 minutes. Never need to go anywhere else.
This is a good reminder of just how much CBC puts out there. I am a little surprised not to see a mention of using alternative search engines like DDG or Bing, as to my knowledge those aren’t blocking Canadian news corps. (Please correct me if you know differently!) I guess if the goal is to raise awareness of the content you can get without an intermediary, it makes sense.
I’m very interested to see which parties cave first in this standoff. If nothing else, I’m impressed the Canadian government had the balls to mandate this of American companies.
The Canadian government seems to be following Australia’s lead. Australia was able to make deals with Google and Meta, so Canada is probably looking for the same thing.
Yes, key word here is “make deals,” which is what Australia ended up doing. They didn’t just dictate terms like Canada seems to want to. The entire point of these companies banning news is to remind our government that no, you can’t just dictate your terms, you actually have to negotiate. Maybe they will, we’ll have to wait and see.
Not against foreign owned companies they cannot. As much as they would love to force these companies to both carry and pay for news, those companies can choose not to carry the news and thus not pay for it. Canada can not force them to do so.
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