Journalists and news consumers can exhale. Canadian news will not be blocked on Google, at least not any time soon. But another digital giant, Mark Zuckerberg’s $840-billion Meta, remains defiant in stripping Canadian news from its Facebook and Instagram.
That’s where we are on this, the day the contentious Online News Act comes into effect. How did we get here and what lies ahead?
Social media is more akin to the Editorials, Opinion Pages, or Letters to the Editor sections. Certainly there is real journalism being disseminated via Social Media, even the National Enquirer occasionally got things right, but that is not its primary function. AI generated stories and pictures will slowly erode even that poor record until we are left with just Weekly World News.
I agree, it might not be exactly like a modern newspaper … but it is a platform that carries most or all the news content that everyone consumes. What does that say about our culture and society when we allow one or two major private corporations to control all or most of the information that everyone reads and has access to. What are the implications of giving all that control of information to two or three private corporations that have little to no government regulation?
It means that we have given them the keys to our democracy and the future of our society.
Sadly and old phenomonen with no end in sight.
Generally speaking no one should take Social Media as a legit news source, but here we are. Even some corporate news sources should not be take seriously as news sources.