Saving Canada's Information Space

It's time to make peace with social media and salvage what's left of our information environment.

Justin Trudeau sought to be a transformative Prime Minister for families, for wealth redistribution, for Crown-Indigenous relations, for infrastructure, for climate change, for the future of the media, and for so many other things. Not all of it was successful or even well-received, and much of it was subject to the Law of Unintended Consequences. Most critically, in an era of foreign bot farms seeding doubt and false information into our daily dose of news, he picked an unwinnable fight with social media giants over funding traditional media outlets. The result has been nothing short of catastrophic.

The disappearance of news from facebook has been subtle. The average user’s timeline is still full of links, videos, ads, and what appear to be news stories. If your friends are engaged and sharing information without linking to recognised news sources, you can also still get a fair bit of news from your facebook feed in the form of hearsay, or links to things like the Daily Show which discuss news without being news. What is not visible is not obvious. Out of sight, out of mind.

If you want to share news from Canada, though, facebook presents this error and refuses:

The government legislation in question is Bill C-18, the Online News Act:

4. The purpose of this Act is to regulate digital news intermediaries with a view to enhancing fairness in the Canadian digital news marketplace and contributing to its sustainability, including the sustainability of news businesses in Canada, in both the non-profit and for-profits sectors, including independent local ones.

Objectively, the Act has been an abject failure in achieving the purposes set out in section 4. While Google created a $100 million per year fund for Canadian media to comply with the act, Meta, facebook’s parent company, dug in and outright refused to share news on facebook and Instagram. Nearly two years after the law was adopted, there is no sign that this is about to change.

The election that just finished was an excellent example of why this matters. Facebook has become one of the most important means of sharing information in politics, and not only in Canada. While nearly everyone directly involved in Canadian politics on all sides lives and dies by obsessively refreshing National Newswatch, the public largely turns to facebook and other social media platforms for their news and information.

On the function of Social media

Canadians looking for information about the candidates in this election had access to abundant sources on facebook. The trouble was much of it was fake. A quote attributed to Mark Carney, reading in part “This is not a promise to make the lives of ordinary people better, but temporarily worse” circulated widely through the election, but it was patently false. With no legitimate news available on facebook, it spread like wildfire with little accurate information to counter it. This was just one of numerous examples of false information spreading in this manner through the writ.

With legitimate news banished from facebook, fake news and groups with an agenda are free to fill the void. Sites that trade in false information are not, by definition, sharing news, and so are not subject to the ban.

Scammers, too, are taking advantage of the information void. Throughout the election, articles that appeared to be from CBC news were widespread on facebook and X. They looked legitimate but the content was off. The only big clue that they were fake is that the linked address was not CBC.ca; if you followed the links you’d find yourself being dragged into a crypto scam.

Facebook has little interest in resolving this issue themselves. And while I question the ethics of the company, they are largely right on how they reacted to bill C-18. Websites depend on traffic, and facebook drives significant traffic to websites. Under C-18, the Trudeau government sought to fund news media organisations by making social media pay for the content they were linking to. The bill had a “we’re going to build a wall on the border and they’re going to pay for it!” vibe to it, and it flew in the face of the very structure of both the world wide web’s premise of the free exchange of links, and the fundamental precept of net neutrality.

Net Neutrality and the War On News

Google trades in the collection of and access to limitless information. That’s their whole purpose. The very name comes from ‘googolplex’, the term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes, representing the vastness of the data and information they wanted to gather. They did not have the option to ignore the Act as limiting information defeats their purpose, and so they came up with a system to comply with this law.

Facebook, on the other hand, does not trade in information. They trade in networking and the capitalisation of emotions and buying habits. Whether a CBC or National Observer article can be shared on their platform is really irrelevant to them, and so they have no incentive to pay for the privilege so long as people continue using the platform anyway. There are, as we have seen, plenty of organisations willing to fill the void with information that does not qualify as news — and is therefore not blocked, and there is little feeling of being deprived of information you are not aware is not available to you.

For Canada to resolve the issue, the whole problem needs to be seen from a completely different angle. First of all, C-18 needs to be scrapped. It’s a destructive policy failure that tries to apply 19th century thinking to 21st century problems. In Parliament, as I learned in my time there, understanding of high technology is not only rare, but openly mocked. The political level see software as business and not as infrastructure, which results in catastrophic internal failures like the Phoenix pay system disaster and the canada.ca fiasco. It also influences how social media companies are seen and (not) understood.

Social media companies aren’t simple businesses. They are victims of their own success in that they are now essential parts of our social and economic infrastructure, and of our information environment. Allowing their users to share and view news and information cannot be left to the good will and algorithmic generosity of these companies. They have essentially achieved common carrier status and need to be treated as such.

Repealing C-18 does not mean giving up on its objectives. Quite the opposite. The replacement needs to specify that it is illegal to suppress news and verifiable information from social media feeds by providing some form of tangible and effective quality control. Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence, and fact checking has to be mandated.

Fake news has limitless funding because a misinformed society serves the interests of the oligarchy. In spite of the vast wealth of the social media oligopoly, it is not a simple question of forcibly transferring money from social to traditional media companies; they can never hope to compete on a financial basis with billionaires working to become trillionaires.

The algorithms themselves need guardrails; they cannot be permitted to undermine our very society for profit. At the same time, if social media drives traffic to news sites, it is up to those news sites, not the government nor the social media companies, to monetise that traffic.

The social media news environment must not be surrendered to foreign bot farms and false information. The solution is not to force arbitrary payments, but to demand access to genuine information through the common carriers we call social media.