It’s like in a club: if the bouncer doesn’t let you in, he or she stays outside. His criteria may seem vague, but they actually serve one goal: the club, formerly known as disco, should benefit. It’s no different with bouncers in the digital world. Meta and others want the store to run. You don’t need to be bored there. And guests that you have to pay for don’t come in at all. The bouncers of the digital world and how things work there, or rather: don’t work, that can currently be observed in Canada.
Huge fires raged there, and for the first time the residents of a provincial capital, Yellowknife, had to be brought to safety. And right now it would of course be helpful if the owner of the digital clubs Facebook and Instagram would put everything important in his feed. Where is the wind blowing from, what is the weather like, which roads are closed. Feed is the sequence of posts that you get when you register with one of these services or start the app on your smartphone.
But Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, among others, refuses. Because the company from California is in a clinch with the authorities in Canada. The government has enacted a law, the Online News Act. It obliges Meta to pay press organs a fee if they publish their content on their platform.
So if a resident of the area wants to share information from a newspaper on Facebook or Instagram, for example, so that relatives, acquaintances and neighbors can also find out what’s going on, Meta blocks it. Because the group doesn’t want to pay anything from Mark Zuckerberg.
Of course, one could object that relatives, acquaintances and neighbors need only visit the websites of the news organizations themselves New York Times above Washington Post until Toronto Star or Globe and Mail. But especially for younger people, the world takes place within platforms such as Meta or Tiktok. At least it feels like they’re getting what really interests them, not the boring grown-up stuff.
The reality looks different. Unlike reputable media, platforms such as Facebook or Instagram do not feel obliged to provide information. The ultimate goal is that the store is booming. It buzzes when as many young people as possible spend as much time as possible on the platforms. So one appeals to rather base instincts such as curiosity, sensation-seeking, vanity, gloating and the like.
Reality is no longer depicted but staged. People who are supposed to encourage the predominantly young audience to consume, call themselves influencers and thus retain a bit of honesty – it’s actually about influencing people. It has always existed, but not under the cloak of camaraderie.
The platforms cannot do otherwise
But the platforms can’t really do anything else. They don’t want to be press organs because they don’t want to fulfill the associated obligations. Unfortunately, many users perceive them as such. The platforms can’t help but be part of a fast-moving competition. They live almost exclusively from advertising. Your offer to advertisers: We know who would spend money on what, here you reach exactly the people who are interested in your product. Hence all the data collection that has been accused of corporations for a long time. With the help of artificial intelligence, they are getting better and better at predicting who to target and how to get advertisers to do business.
The corporations are walking a fine line. They have to design their offers for the users in such a way that they still have the feeling that they are getting something out of it. Actually, it’s about keeping the data milking cows in line. Because only if this raw material flows constantly can the corporations keep their promises to advertisers. So far they have succeeded despite numerous scandals.
With the refusal to share news, another one is now being added in Canada. The Canadian government, for example, called this attitude of Meta “ruthless”. A Yellowknife radio journalist reported that many now post screenshots of news reports because they cannot send links to the articles.
Canadian Minister for Cultural Heritage, Pascale St-Onge, tweeted, they call on Meta to immediately allow the sharing of messages again – in the interest of the safety of Canadians who have to deal with this situation. However, Meta only referred to a function with which you can tell other users that you are safe.
Not everyone thinks Meta’s attitude is bad. Several users on X, formerly Twitter, blamed Canadian law for the misery. Another against commented: Perhaps the thing will teach people not to trust only Facebook and Instagram for news.