Canada

Way ahead of 'ya

Way ahead of you...

It's the protest/boycott circle jerk. "Congrats everyone, we showed Meta with that two day boycott. They will definitely stop being a shitty company. Let's celebrate by going back on Facebook and Instagram."

Protests & boycotts only work when they are sustained for long periods of time. The requires people to stay committed to an idea or goal even when it inconveniences them.

Lol

It did work well for reddit imvho as it's understood that reddit definitely lost revenue and users as a result - but that might also not apply to FB so well in this case; as the reddit one was global rather than specific to a single country, and reddit was already unprofitable to begin with - whereas this is boycotting what's likely an already unprofitable line for a very profitable company.

Well, you're here. That's gotta be worth some brownie points for the boycott.

Same. Quit FB a few years ago. Never bothered with Instagram, or Twitter or really anything with my real identity.

However I used FB for nearly 15 years. I got a new job so I wanted to clean as much public facing data as I could, including all the "intrest" FB had decided I had. I'm not sure if its the same now but Facebook used to just keep a list of stuff you where "interested" in based on your browsing history (even outside of FB). Often it was inaccurate. I think ads or somthing whould hijack the algorithm to add whatever they wanted, youd have to clear it out every once and awhile.

After doing this my feed started showing me hate groups, alt right nonsense and images of child abuse material. I realized this meant, that in cases where Facebook had no listed intrest for somebody, this is the ads that it whould use, this was the core of what Facebook was. I nuked the account and never looked back. Honestly, great decision and I've never once regretted it.

I agree. The government shouldn't rely on private companies like ROBeLUS to send alert messages to people.

You ever notice during the pandemic there was no email, real mail, phone call or text message sent to you directly from the government about lockdown measures?

We shouldn't but here we are.

What else can we do?

By the way, news companies are also run by maniacs.

I'm impressed that the Reddit boycott left Reddit to be less popular than Instagram and Facebook. Maybe there is hope for this yet.

Give 'em a break, they're just following the capitalist's mantra: Find something that's currently free and charge people for it like it's supposed to be that way.

they show ads next to summaries of articles which, hey, blame the people for only reading the summary instead of clicking through to the source

but they do profit and I would like to see journalism Not become yet another Meta™ product

What you mean is, why are they ALREADY paying Australia for the same thing and suddenly don't want to pay Canada?

The answer will enlighten you.

Seriously, why the hell are people blaming Meta/Google and not their government for trying to push the shittiest deal on them for a product I doubt makes them much money at all?

"You pay our news sites an amount at the end of the year, and if you disagree on the amount we'll be the arbitrator." Only an idiot would make that deal.

Actually, the largest study of our time by a very reputable institution recently showed the opposite.

A bit silly to look at the bleakness and wealth inequality that's increased dramatically over the past two decades and blame social media on increased suicide rates.