N.W.T. wildfire evacuees say Facebook's news ban 'dangerous' in emergency situation
Ah, the dangers of getting all your news from facebook. Now with dying in a fire!
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3 replies
Well, tbf Facebook shouldn't be used for emergency communications. There are better and more robust ways such as radio, text alerts etc.
You are not wrong, but I think it is becoming more and more the norm. Last year a town I was in lost all water pressure and they only said anything on facebook, even when I was at the office they had just locked the doors without a sign or anything.
This is the result of the Canadian government giving in to the lobbying from the media conglomerates instead of actually addressing the real problem.
The real problem is the Facebook / Google advertising duopoly. The fix would be to break up that duopoly. Instead, they tried to create a "link tax" so that any time Google / Facebook linked to a news article (for select lucky news corporations) they had to pay for that link. The obvious response from Facebook / Google is "ok, we won't link to Canadian news then".
Now, instead of Google / Facebook getting ~30% of the cut from news-related advertising, they get 0%, but because there's no traffic, the media conglomerates get 0% too. It doesn't really hurt Google / Facebook. If your feed / search would have included breaking news but now includes a cute cat video instead, they get their cut from that cat video and are just as happy.