Marketing has evolved. During my childhood — back when the McBarge served McChickens instead of tetanus, and the iconic Pizza Hut roofs actually contained pizza huts — advertising was comparatively primitive. Marketing companies focused on trends and demographics to line up their ads with their target audience. If you were watching Saturday morning cartoons, you’d get the promos aimed at kids, while the denture commercials aired that night during Matlock. Now, all you have to do is walk into a store with a smartphone to get ads an hour later for the product you just talked yourself out of buying. It’s no wonder you regard your Alexa with suspicion.
Narc.
Ads have evolved, and Meta and Google absolutely dominate digital advertising in Canada. With a combined 80 per cent market share, they collected the bulk of Canada’s $8.8 billion digital ad revenue in 2019. By 2022, Canada’s digital advertising market surpassed $14 billion, making it one of the most lucrative in the world. You know what they say… “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” Canadian news outlets, however, took in a measly four per cent of the 2019 market share, in part, because most people don’t actually visit or remain on the news publisher’s site anymore.
While on average, Canadians spend two hours a day on social media sites, time spent on news websites (or any other websites) are typically measured in seconds. Advertisers understand the value in that sort of disparity, and invest their dollars accordingly. Journalistic organizations post their stories where they’ll be seen: social media. This increases their reach and engagement, but it also forfeits much needed ad revenue, and Canadian media has collectively haemorrhaged billions of dollars over the past decade. This dynamic — a market that has rapidly shifted to the digital sphere, where platforms offer an endless array of content and products while mining your data — has left journalism an impoverished shell of its former self.
According to a government report, “At least one third of Canadian journalism jobs have disappeared since 2010,” with nearly 450 news outlets closing up shop between 2008 and 2021. Local journalism has been the hardest hit, resulting in “local news deserts” and fractured communities prone to increasing polarization and institutional distrust. Public service media like the CBC have come under increased pressure.
In June, the Reuters Institute and the University of Oxford released their 2023 Digital News Report based on a survey of over 93,000 online news consumers. They found that only 41 per cent of Canadian respondents found public service media to be of personal importance. The perceived importance was even lower for young people, who “have grown up preferring digital and social media, and have little or no experience of using these services.” That discrepancy is stark. For someone like me, who was raised on CBC children’s television in the 1980s, the service is indispensable. So too are public institutions outside of Canada, such as the BBC, and PBS. The erosion of confidence in institutions is a global phenomenon, and correlates with trust of traditional news media dropping to a historic low last year.
A lack of community reporting makes institutional distrust self-reinforcing. When local news is so profoundly eroded, it loses the human-capital, cash flow, and journalistic clout required to take on the powerful. Governments and corporate interests become more opaque, shutting out inquiry into their operations and decisions. Without a journalistic check on their power, cronyism and corruption begins to burrow into the system like a tick, and once entrenched, becomes hard to dislodge. However, that doesn’t mean it goes unnoticed. Whispered rumours replace investigative rigour, and conspiracies circulate online to be woven into pre-existing theories about globalist deep-state agendas. Stories of a mysterious and all-powerful elite are more interesting than simple human greed, bribery, and graft.
In August 2023, The Atlantic published “The Local-News Crisis Is Weirdly Easy to Solve.” The article’s author, Steven Waldman, argues that directly funding local journalism in the U.S. through tax revenues “wouldn’t just be cheap — it would pay for itself.” Waldman, who is the president of Rebuild Local News and a co-founder of Report for America, has long worried about the decline of America’s newsrooms. According to Pew Research, while digital-native newsroom employees in the U.S. have risen from “7,400 workers in 2008 to about 18,000 in 2020,” newspaper newsroom employment plummeted over the same period, “from roughly 71,000 jobs to about 31,000.” That precipitous decline has seen “1,800 communities that had a local news outlet in 2004 without any at the beginning of 2020,” according to the Hussman School of Journalism and Media. Those that remain are often staffed by skeleton crews and prone to predation by private-equity firms.
The reduction in local journalism presents a prime opportunity for the amoral and duplicitous to exploit. Waldman cites numerous cases of fraud, extortion, and shady backroom deals uncovered by local reporters in which large sums of money were ultimately returned to the taxpayers — reporters are a great investment. Propped-up by public funding, local news has the power to expose the corruptive practices that drain the lifeblood from communities, rob people of opportunities, and degrade our societies and natural environments.
A 2018 study found that local news coverage reduced the emissions of nearby polluters by 29 per cent. Civic-minded reporting is being swiftly replaced by digital-native journalism that focuses on issues of broad and sweeping appeal. The brighter the spotlight, the darker the shadows outside its beam’s periphery appear. I doubt anyone in an online newsroom in Toronto is investigating what coal stripmining will do to Lethbridge’s water supply — but the Lethbridge Herald is.
The shift to digital media from a consumer-perspective makes sense. On average, Canadians spend over six hours of “screen time” every day, with nearly half of that time spent on mobile devices. News outlets around the globe face a dilemma not so different from retailers and manufactures who market their products on Amazon, only for Amazon to undercut them with their house brand — you’ve got to go where the people are, even if it’s ultimately a losing proposition. For news media, that means uploading your stories to social networks because that’s where the eyeballs are. It’s this new paradigm that’s been dubbed “the attention economy.”
This economic model sees human attention as a scarce and finite resource — a commodity that can be extracted like petroleum. Humans only have 24 hours of attention to spend each day, and much of that is taken up by routines like work, sleep, and socialization. The insidious brilliance of tech is that they continually develop new methods of extracting increased amounts of attention, like watching YouTube on TV while scrolling TikToks on your phone. Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, thinks that increasing the size of the attention economy through this multitasking shortcut has serious, harmful implications. “The problem,” said Harris in an interview with NPR, “is we’re fracking people’s brains to split their attention into less and less valuable chunks to get more attention out of them.” The incentives imposed by the attention economy has led to increasingly addictive practices being employed on our devices to stripmine every last ounce of human consciousness. It’s all about keeping our gaze where they want it.
The captive audience created by companies like Google and Meta has made much of the internet irrelevant. These platforms know us so well that they serve us the next thing we want before we know we want it. Predictive algorithms have been known to discern their user’s sexual identity before the users are aware of it themselves, and identify our interests — and vulnerabilities — in mere hours. This leads us to more niche content in a rabbit hole effect that exerts enormous influence. I see you like videos about organic food. Would you like to see this anti-vax clip? These companies know what we want — and what we don’t. “We know the people using our platforms don’t come to us for news,” said Rachel Curran, Meta’s head of public policy in Canada. Recent reporting backs up her claim.
In November 2021, Canada’s federal government began its work crafting a bill that would attempt to level the playing field. Tech bristled. On June 22, 2023, Bill C-18 received royal assent — the final step in its journey from a bill to a law. The now infamous legislation, commonly known as the Online News Act, would require big tech companies to compensate news outlets for articles hosted on their platforms. Faced with the fed’s attempt to claw back some of news’ lost ad revenue, Facebook opted to take their ball and go home.
On Aug. 1, Meta released a statement of its intent: “In order to comply with the Online News Act, we have begun the process of ending news availability in Canada. These changes start today, and will be implemented for all people accessing Facebook and Instagram in Canada over the course of the next few weeks.” Shortly thereafter, Facebook and Instagram users began seeing the various new organizations they follow, blocked. A statement from Google a month earlier indicated that they may soon follow suit. The decision has impacted The Cascade as well, and though we are not tied to the same advertising model as many news outlets, social media — primarily Instagram — was a primary tool we employed to disseminate articles to our followers.
Meta denies the claims that they are contributing to the impoverishment of Canadian news outlets, stating that they are “proud of the role they have played to support a healthy and diverse news ecosystem,” and that their platforms have in fact generated “$230 million in estimated value in a twelve month period.” They conclude with a call for the Canadian government to amend their policy in a way that “upholds the principles of a free and open internet.”
Let’s consider their statement carefully by picturing the “ecosystem” of a “free and open internet” as a river. The river is chock-full of fish, and supports a vast population of fishers. Some toss nets from the bank or wade into the shallows to cast their line, while some trawl from large boats sailing up and down the length of the estuary. The large operations catch the vast majority, but there are always fish in the river. Then, someone gets an idea. If they can simply divert part of the river, they can claim all the fish in their tributary. They dig the requisite channels, and soon, the water is flowing and the stream is populated with fish; but what if they could have more fish? What if they studied the fish and learned just what attracted them? They could add that to the water, and more fish would come. So they studied, collected, and analyzed their data, and applied their tactics. It worked so well, they soon had 80 per cent of the river’s fish crammed within their private stream. Fear not, other fishers. We have learned exactly what each fish in the stream wants, and we’ll sell that information to you.
The business model of companies like Meta and Google is to provide so much value to the user that they look past the real world harm they do — and it works. In 2018, Facebook was used to incite a genocide in Myanmar against its Muslim Royhinga population. According to a PBS report, “The timing coincided with the rising popularity of Facebook in Myanmar, where for many people it served as their only connection to the online world. That effectively made Facebook the internet for a vast number of Myanmar’s population.” Google’s Gmail was so good at filtering out spam that we let them loot our emails for data, just as they do with Search, YouTube, Maps, and Android’s operating system.
Given Facebook’s problematic history, Sam Harris, on his Making Sense podcast, asked Scott Galloway, Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, about the ethical concerns of marketing his meditation app on the platform. The response from Galloway was on-brand for the boisterous best-selling author.
“I believe that Facebook’s underlying business model is fueled by rage. And I also think, sitting on top of that unbelievable rage machine — that creates rage and dissent among a population greater than the southern hemisphere plus India — is controlled by a single voter/shareholder class owned by one individual who got his start building a website evaluating women on their physical appearance; screwed over his friends in college; totally fucked over his best friend out of school; demonstrates all the characteristics of a sociopath; is the most dangerous person on the planet [who] can’t be removed from office, potentially for another 60 or 70 years… [who] delays and obfuscates necessary regulation and scrutiny we provided to other organizations; such that this platform can be weaponized by advertisers, paying in rubles, to suppress the turnout in key swing districts, electing an illegitimate president that puts people on the Supreme Court that every day are chipping away at a woman’s rights for sovereign domain over her own person and body. I think Facebook is the most dangerous organization in the world. If I were you, I would 100 per cent advertise on Facebook.”
The professor’s words ring true in a world increasingly dominated by a few massive tech companies. While in reality, you can browse the internet without Google and connect with friends outside of Facebook, the reason they have consolidated so much wealth and influence is the very real value they provide to billions of people. While many online video sharing platforms exist, YouTube dominates its competitors. As of 2020, 62 per cent of Americans use YouTube daily — a figure that climbs to 92 per cent for weekly use, and 98 per cent monthly. The almost total cultural saturation of YouTube is a credit to the friendliness of its interface, and the recommendation algorithm that operates behind-the-scenes.
The power of the algorithms and refined targeting of the ads is based on a dragon horde of information scoured from users — and like a dragon, tech companies covet the data they have claimed as their own. With it, they have become almost unimaginably powerful, gobbling up whatever they like, and growing fat and lazy in the process. Even tech reporters are noting that Google Search — the company’s first and most iconic product — isn’t what it used to be.
This article won’t show up on Meta’s platforms in Canada. We’ll adapt. So will the market. The decline in local journalism isn’t a Canadian problem — it’s a human one — and it will take humans to solve it. Perhaps some young, innovative student will develop a news-based social media app for Canadians; an aggregator that will learn from our actions and feed us important, relevant, legitimate news while sharing its ad revenue with the publishers. Maybe other legislators will stand up to the tech companies that say the crumbs that fall from their ravenous mouths is ample compensation. Or we could decide, as a nation, that robust local journalism is worth funding from our own pockets, and invest the few hundredths of a percentage of the budget required to rebuild our communities and our democracy.
Those should be our goals, assuming we can agree, collectively, to not back down. Meta’s co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerburg once said, “The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.” The Online News Act is risky, but it’s better than doing nothing. Alternatively, to surrender and reverse course now would be catastrophic, and would show the states and countries drafting their own laws, and waiting to see who breaks first, that the tech giants truly are sovereign.
In the meantime, there’s another “Zuck” quote that my American friends should consider: “We have a saying. ‘Move fast and break things.’” Well it’s time for the U.S. government to pick up its antitrust hammer.
Break ‘em up. Do it fast.
Long ago, when DeLoreans roamed the earth, Brad was born. In accordance with the times, he was raised in the wild every afternoon and weekend until dusk, never becoming so feral that he neglected to rewind his VHS rentals. His historical focus has assured him that civilization peaked with The Simpsons in the mid 90s. When not disappointing his parents, Brad spends his time with his dogs, regretting he didn’t learn typing in high school.
