It may seem pretty strange, but I’m beginning to think Facebook did us all a favour by blocking news content in Canada. Mostly because anything that looks like a news story we see on the site, we should pretty much think of as fake right from the start. Most real news isn’t allowed on there anymore.
I’m not exactly in favour of the reasoning behind the decision. Their refusal to share revenue with the people who actually created some of the content that allowed them to earn that revenue in the first place just seems wrong to me. But the result might not be all bad.
You might think I would feel otherwise. Since I work for what is considered a news outlet, I can no longer post a direct link to this blog for example. And this blog is pretty far from news. It’s mostly just a bunch of random thoughts. Hardly anything earth shattering. But news might sneak in there, and we can’t have that. The ban on news might not be such a bad thing, though.
Just for example, we have probably all seen the stories that pop up on Facebook saying “You won’t believe what this person said,” or “This other persons career is over because of this”. Mary Berg seems to be a big target lately. I don’t know Mary, but she seems like a nice person. I feel sorry that she is being used like this.
I usually ignore such things, but I got curious as to what the actual story might be, so I clicked. There is no actual story. Mostly, they take you to an ad for cryptocurrency. That seems legit to me. I clicked on what looked like a news story. I’d better break out the credit card and give these people some money for crypto. But there must be people who fall for it. Unfortunately.
This morning, as I was scrolling through, I noticed a post from a friend. It looked very much like a real news story. I won’t go into details, but it was a typical dog whistle type thing, meant to rile people up. It took me all of about ten seconds to find real news on the subject, from legitimate sources, proving the entire thing wrong. But the first, and biggest, clue? There was a news story on Facebook. That no longer happens in Canada, so I should have known right away it wasn’t true.
I know there are still ways for real news to sneak onto the platform. I’ve seen people copy and paste entire stories. Or share links from outside the country, although that seems to happen with less frequency. In fact, even though I follow several news sources from outside Canada, far fewer of their posts seem to be getting through lately.
So maybe, in some strange way, this is a good thing. If you see something that looks like a news story, it probably isn’t. Before the band, you couldn’t be sure.
There are still lots of things Facebook could get rid of. Like the people begging for friend requests while telling you how nice you are and how great your comments are. Do people really fall for that?