Last issue, I told you about the new Online News Act the Canadian Government was in the process of passing, and how, in response, Meta—Facebook’s parent company—had decided to block news links because of the law. I mentioned that the Canadian Government was trying to help, but failing.
And I didn’t really point fingers at Facebook. I mean, Facebook is a horrible, horrible place, and the only reason Mark Zuckerberg isn’t the world’s least favourite billionaire is because Elon Musk took a look at Zuck and said “hold my beer.”
But in this, Facebook and parent company are perfectly within their rights, right?
The Canadian Government has been giving them grief, because they decided to stop allowing links right as the wildfires were rolling into West Kelowna and in the Northwest Territories.
But it was the Canadian Government’s bed that they made, right? And now they were being forced to lie in it.
That’s true. Except….
Except the law that Facebook is snubbing by not allowing news links? Isn’t actually law yet.
They’ve gone proactive. They’re banning links before they need to. When the Canadian government said “can you turn the feed back on so that people can get the news,” they could have said “the Canadian Government is being a big rubber dingdong about this, but people of Canada, we’ve heard your plea. Behold! News!”
But instead, they just pointed at the as-yet-to-be-signed-into-law law and shrugged their shoulders.
That’s not a good look.
According to the Local News Research Project, 474 local news outlets have gone under since 2008. That’s the year that Facebook implemented it’s news feed. Newsfeed. Sounds kinda…newsy, doesn’t it.
And 80 percent of digital advertising dollars in Canada go to Facebook or Google, leaving scraps for the remaining news sources.
In fact, in a moment of near pure irony, the Canadian Government spent $11.4 million of its $64 million digital ad budget on Facebook and Instagram ads alone.
$11.4 million would be enough to keep the Tumbler RidgeLines going at its current budget for … 1850 years according to my calculations.
So yeah, it’s hard not to look at the 68-billion pound gorilla (that’s $116.6 billion in US dollars) in the room and wonder maybe, just maybe, there are ways to tame the beast?
I mean, I’m not saying we don’t allow digital media, that we all go back to reading dead trees (to those of you reading this on dead tree, thank you), just … well, when your company is making more than the annual budget of 200 of the 228 countries that are being tracked (and about the bottom twenty countries total), well, maybe we should at least look at our priorities as a society.
Cory “I totally don’t have a writer’s crush on him” Doctorow talks about a process he calls the enshitification of platforms.
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
“It is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.”
When Facebook started, it needed users. So it made itself valuable to users. Remember the good old days when Facebook was just the college version of Hot or Not?
Facebook became really attractive for students looking to connect with friends and that hot guy in English Lit 121, then opened up, and quickly grew to encompass most of the known world. It sucked all the air out of the room, and other social networking sites (Myspace, anyone) whithered away.
Once it had gathered those customers, Facebook began focusing on business customers (read: advertisers). In 2010, Facebook was making a paltry $1.97 billion. By the next year, revenue had nearly doubled, then doubled again. Ten years ago, Facebook was making $7.87 billion. Last year, it made $116.6 billion. Why? Because it took all those early adopters and began selling them to advertisers.
And over the last few years, Facebook has begun to turn again. Rather than be a place for businesses to go to find customers, they are merely finding ways to optimize revenue for themselves.
Doctorow would say the next step is for them to die, but, well, I don’t know about that. Is there a next step after Facebook? Right now, the path ahead does not seem to suggest it.
And so they continue to suck all the air (and money) out of the room (and world), leaving behind dead competitors in their wake.
Yes, Facebook is a private business, and they can choose to allow users to share things or not. (They’ve had a no nudity policy for years, for instance.) And by blocking news links they underscore the weakness in the online news model, rather than their own. We news sites chose to build our businesses on the back of their success, can we blame them for our failure?
To be fair, they are only exploiting the system that already exists. Hate the game, not the player, as it were. And Facebook is under no obligation to allow news organizations to piggy back of their site.
But there’s something wrong when they are sucking away billions of ad dollars from actual news organizations, then refusing to provide any news and actively disallowing news to be posted on their site.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
