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Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

nationalpost.com

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Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#111

Post by rightbyte »

throw0101c wrote: post #17
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is living under a rock and not getting bombarded with political BS every second on FB but seeing FB ads from PBS? I'm just not sure that's a good forum for governments to try to get out a message.

If social media platforms can identify certain demographics, like those who smoke cigarettes, then why wouldn't the government use that to (e.g.) target ' Would you like help to quit smoking? ' program availability ads to them? * https://www.ontario.ca/page/support-quit-smoking * https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/smoking-toba...

The government can put ads on the packages of cigarettes them self for free. Without the moral defeat of benefiting from spyware.

Why would you want to waste tax money on Zuckerberg's mansions.

Etc.

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#112

Post by EatingWithForks »

wvenable wrote: post #106
EatingWithForks wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually don't think the Internet has been a good substitute for a local distribution of information. It's too global and too big. There's people who aren't from a neighborhood talking about it and skewing information about that neighborhood. Portland's supposed to be literally a BLM-flagged wasteland or something, y'know? I'd really love for there to be a local newspaper that tells me a new bakery opened in town,…

My go to solution for that was reddit.com/r/somecommunity which was local enough to have posts about lost cats and dogs. More than once local media near me has literally just published a story that was first posted as text to Reddit.

I've tried this strategy but often r/somecommunity is either never used by people who live there/is too small to be useful, but the bigger neighborhood/city is absolutely astroturfed by people who don't live there.

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#114

Post by fireflash38 »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #97
wvenable wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issue with this, is this a problem that needs to be solved? Do we need to guarantee monetization of every human interaction? If my friend and I go a cafe, see a newspaper headline, and have a discussion about that headline without ever opening that newspaper should the cafe have to pay for that discussion? Why should any media adjacent interaction anywhere happen without payment? If the cafe is playing music, they…

This is a perfect example of how people confuse causality and responsibility. They are not the same. Trying to monetize and compensate for every externality is absurd. If I make coffee at home that causes a coffee shop to lose out on Revenue. Surely I'm not responsible for paying the coffee shop for the Lost Revenue. If I do go to the coffee shop, should the coffee shop have to share their revenue with the car compan…

Your analogy is flawed. It's like someone consuming coffee but not wanting the persons who grew the coffee beans/roasted/brewed it to be compensated.

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#116

Post by telotortium »

fireflash38 wrote: post #114
s1artibartfast wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a perfect example of how people confuse causality and responsibility. They are not the same. Trying to monetize and compensate for every externality is absurd. If I make coffee at home that causes a coffee shop to lose out on Revenue. Surely I'm not responsible for paying the coffee shop for the Lost Revenue. If I do go to the coffee shop, should the coffee shop have to share their revenue with the car compan…

Your analogy is flawed. It's like someone consuming coffee but not wanting the persons who grew the coffee beans/roasted/brewed it to be compensated.

If the persons who grew the coffee beans/roasted/brewed gave the beans away without asking for compensation because they hoped to obtain ad revenue, most people wouldn't go out of their way to pay the bean producers.

Canadian news media (unlike the vast majority of US news media besides NPR and PBS) is very significantly government subsidized, so this bill is really a stealth tax on Meta and Google.

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#117

Post by JohnFen »

wvenable wrote: post #95
grf27 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but if you're a government seeing your media industry shrinking because they can't make a profit to sustain themselves, meanwhile others are profiting off their work, then you want to try something, and I guess this is their attempt. One of the other solutions proposed was taxes on media aggregators. This is similar to the taxes on entertainment aggregators currently in place that pay into a fund that supports do…

The real threat to local news is Craigslist and Facebook marketplace. Local newspapers were mostly funded by their classifieds section. The news is merely to bring eyeballs to those ads. When the market for classifieds disappeared, there was no longer any financial support for local news. You could even argue that newspapers were only viable businesses because they had a monopoly over the local distribution of inform…

> Local newspapers were mostly funded by their classifieds section.

Local newspapers (at least in my US state) were mostly funded by their commercial ad placements, not by the classified section. Classified ad revenue and the purchase price of the paper were minority fractions of their revenue.

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#118

Post by JohnFen »

EatingWithForks wrote: post #102
wvenable wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real threat to local news is Craigslist and Facebook marketplace. Local newspapers were mostly funded by their classifieds section. The news is merely to bring eyeballs to those ads. When the market for classifieds disappeared, there was no longer any financial support for local news. You could even argue that newspapers were only viable businesses because they had a monopoly over the local distribution of inform…

I actually don't think the Internet has been a good substitute for a local distribution of information. It's too global and too big. There's people who aren't from a neighborhood talking about it and skewing information about that neighborhood. Portland's supposed to be literally a BLM-flagged wasteland or something, y'know? I'd really love for there to be a local newspaper that tells me a new bakery opened in town,…

> I actually don't think the Internet has been a good substitute for a local distribution of information.

It started off looking very promising for that sort of thing -- but when people fled for the likes of large social media properties, that killed things dead. Facebook, Reddit, etc., are very bad at encouraging local community.

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#119

Post by version_five »

Animats wrote: post #46

Why was the government of Canada advertising on Facebook and Instagram anyway?

Canadian political parties, when in power (and it's not a partisan thing, they both do it) see fit to "advertise" their party under a thin veil of pretending to advertise government programs. The example that immediately comes to mind (despite my distain for the current government) is the former government who circa 2008 had advertising everywhere for their "economic action plan" and how it was helping us. It was partisan garbage paid for by taxpayers. They all do it.

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#120

Post by gloryjulio »

adjav wrote: post #9

Note: This article is by the National Post, which is owned by PostMedia, who were one of the main backers of bill C18. Just something to keep in mind.

Upvote this post for the context. In the oligarchy society of Canada, it's important to know who the big players are
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