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Now, government officials and news outlets caught in the crossfire are now learning a lesson in the hardest way possible: Meta does not bend to governments, even when lives are at stake.
Sitting three miles from the US state of Maine, on the edge of the Bay of Fundy, St. Andrews is the kind of place where everybody knows each other. The last census counted 2,048 residents, and the tight-knit community has become even tighter since the pandemic.
The surrounding Charlotte County covers 1,323 square miles of territory—about twice the area of Greater London, and four times the size of New York City—with a population of just 26,015. Its location means it’s faster to row a boat to the US than drive almost anywhere else in Canada. It’s far from an anomaly. Nearly 7 million Canadians live in rural or remote areas—about one-sixth of the country’s population.
“Facebook has never been a numbers grab for us, because we live in such a small part of the world,” CHCO-TV news director Hogarth says. Instead, she sees her outlet’s Facebook page—currently followed by 28,000 people—as a way to keep locals connected on events and issues that matter to them.
St. Andrews is a postage stamp of a town in a quintessentially rural area. Without the local cable television station and its Facebook page, St. Andrews would also be a news desert—a place parched of reliable, factual daily information about the community. It’s within voids like this that Facebook has become a powerful resource, says Markus Giesler, a consumer sociologist and a professor of marketing at York University in Toronto, who studies technology. “You need to look at how Facebook came out of this idea of capturing people’s social relationship data and then, as that became more and more of a saturated business model, the question arose as to how they could remain sustainable,” Giesler says. “From then on, they began to sort of hijack community.”
Now it’s become almost unfathomable for people to think of creating communities around anything—social issues, childcare, pets—without Facebook or Instagram. “They’ve taken a sociological asset, something that’s very important to how we relate to each other as human beings, and they have made themselves indispensable,” Giesler says.
Meta’s ubiquitous influence made it an easy target for news CEOs and lobbyists.
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