BY BILL PHILLIPS
Media mogul that I am, I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Facebook and, to a lesser extent, Twitter, X, Twix, or whatever the kids are calling it these days.
The hate part is pretty obvious: I toiled in the newspaper industry and saw, firsthand, advertising dollars move from print to Facebook, Google, et al. On top of that, community groups and organizations no longer needed newspapers to get the word out about local events … and they could do it for free. We, in the newspaper industry, argued that posting a community event on Facebook wouldn’t result in the same numbers attending. We were, at best, wrong; at worst, deluding ourselves.
The love part is a little different: Firstly, Facebook provided journalists with an incredible amount of source material. Looking for a photo of someone for a story? Check their Facebook profile. Looking for more information on someone, something? Check their Facebook profile. It’s public domain and free for journalists, and other more nefarious folks, to use (just in case you didn’t know, so be aware of what you post).
The other love part of Facebook, and once again to a lesser extent Twitter, was that when I launched the online-only Prince George Daily News, Facebook became my legion of paperboys. Social media, primarily Facebook, is one of the PG Daily News’ main delivery mechanisms. So far this year, 31.2 per cent of traffic to the website comes through social media … a link shows up on someone’s social media feed and they click the link. At the PG Daily News, 84 per cent of that is through Facebook and 5.5 per cent through Twitter.
Thirty-four per cent of the overall traffic comes from organic searches. In other words, someone searches ‘Mayor Nic Milligan’ and a news story shows up.
The rest of the traffic is direct i.e. someone has the PG Daily News bookmarked and goes directly to the site; and by an email that is sent out to subscribers.
This is all an intro into the ongoing battle between tech giants Facebook and Google and the federal government, who like to espouse they are taking on the big tech boys while fighting valiantly to protect the corporate media behemoths in this country.
The argument that social media should be compensating media in this country for distributing links to stories is, frankly, absurd. Whether it’s a small local media outlet or the Globe and Mail, getting people to click the links to your stories is what it’s all about.
This is just a clumsy, goofy attempt by Ottawa, pushed by big media companies, to penalize social media for beating them to advertising dollars in the open market. Losing advertising dollars to social media is the real threat to legacy media, not distributing links to stories. And, in an eye-rolling twist, Ottawa only decided to pull its Facebook advertising after Facebook decided to get tough. If the federal government really wanted to help Canadian media, maybe it shouldn’t have been sending Canadian tax dollars to foreign social media giants in the first place.
Ottawa should find a way to back out of this stupidity because all that is really happening is Canadians are being denied access to local news. Find another way.
But let’s not let the social media giants off the hook either. It wasn’t too long ago they were dithering over removing hate speech etc., giving us the tired old line that it’s too difficult to police and they don’t control content. And yet, with the flick of an algorithm they can block Canadian news content.
There are no winners here, only losers. Those losers are ordinary Canadians who the federal government should be looking out for.
Bill Phillips is an award-winning columnist with 35 years of experience in community journalism.