Marginalium

Newsfeed vulnerabilities:

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, blocked news from its apps in Canada in 2023 after a new law required the social media giant to pay Canadian news publishers a tax for publishing their content. The ban applies to all news outlets irrespective of origin, including The New York Times.

Amid the news void … dozens of … partisan pages are rising in popularity on Facebook and Instagram before the election … cryptocurrency scams and ads that mimic legitimate news sources have proliferated on the platforms … few voters are aware of this shift, with research showing that only one in five Canadians knows that news has been blocked on Facebook and Instagram feeds.

The result is a “continued spiral” for Canada’s online ecosystem toward disinformation and division … Meta’s decision has left Canadians “more vulnerable to generative A.I., fake news websites and less likely to encounter ideas and facts that challenge their worldviews,”

AI will probably end up being a solution for this, but I’m still very pro-RSS feed.