There’s the door Google/Meta

So Mark Zuckerberg and his band of merry Meta men are taking their marbles and going home when it comes to online news content providing content for their social media venues - namely Facebook and Instagram.

As someone who hasn’t looked at Insta more than a handful of times - and that was only because I had to for DIA dealings a few years ago - and has only gone on Facebook a half-dozen times since bailing on that gong show in January, I could care less about them.

Social media is an albatross around the neck of all society. The problem is, those who have been raised on it and never weaned from it believe it is as important as oxygen.

Cool kids

One-year-old Dawson Martin checks out the splash pad at the Jordan Lions Pool with big sister Everly Martin, 5. McDonald- Photo

Clock ticks on provincial clarifications

It has been many months since the provincial government outlined major changes to planning policies which have major impacts on municipalities.

Key questions jumped out at local officials right off the bat - aspects related to development charges and affordable housing very significant among them. Initially, the provincial government’s reaction was “what, there’s a problem?”

A couple of weeks later that evolved to a blanket, but unspecified as to how “we’ll make municipalities whole” stance regardless of individual circumstances.

That sounds warm and fuzzy and, at the time, brought some level of calm, but that was many months ago and, as Lincoln CAO Mike Kirkopoulos noted at a Monday meeting, no answers have materialized as yet. The clock ticks on. M.W.

All that baggage is a side issue to the ramblings which will follow here.

The issue this week deals with the federal government’s 100-percent-correct initiative to force social media giants to pay for the content which drives millions through their sites via news media links.

The feds approved the Online News Act, which stipulates tech giants are to enter into agreements which compensate Canadian news outlets for content shared via their various platforms.

It’s pretty simple, really, but dealing with the Zuck’s of the world - who are simply too big for society’s good - is tough because they control so much in the digital space it is unnerving.

An example is, Meta officials have said they would include weather warnings as news items, thereby not being permitted to be circulated. Of course a weather warning is newsworthy, but the warning itself is not news until it is reported, but that is the power of the flex Meta and Google hold.

Similar initiatives have been rolled out or are in the planning stages in other countries as well, in particular in Australia where the battle with media has been intense.

There, similar threats were made but the social media giants came back to the bargaining table after first cutting story links in 2021.

Google and Facebook developed more than 30 different agreements with major media outlets which now appears on their platform again.

Metaberg has already run a test of limiting news links for up to five per cent of its users, but says now it will proceed with ending news access entirely over the next few weeks.

In reality, what that means is anyone seeking real news will simply have to go directly to a news source’s site. The problem for some - both media outlets and news consumers - may be paywalls.

Media want to get paid for their newsgathering efforts and consumers, largely, have been used to getting their info free for so long the entitlement has grown exponentially.

When that issue is compounded by people who genuinely believe that they “get their news from social media” when it is really just a bunch of keyboard jockeys punching out something they heard fifth-hand, the false information highway will only get more crowded.

Google made $4.7 billion from news sites in 2018. That was the most recent targeted number I could find, so we’re not talking chump change here.

This should be a fee-forservice scenario and the feds are right to put this legislation in place and boot Meta and Google out the door if needed.

Canada - and all the nation’s media - would be better for it.