Last January’s panic over Meta overlord Mark Zuckerberg’s firing of Facebook fact checkers once again revealed a sense of entitlement among many Canadian users who sanctimoniously posted that they were jumping ship.


That sense first arose in 2023, when Ottawa demanded that Meta compensate our media for profiteering from their content. Refusing to pay, Zuckerberg banned news links posted north of the 49th. That sparked outrage—misdirected outrage—against Justin Trudeau. How dare he kill our news source?

To a disturbing number of Facebookers, it seemed that news should be free, journalists should work for nothing, and paywalls were censorship because news should be free, and journalists should work for nothing.

But, just days after Zuckerberg announced that misinformation would go unchecked, Canadians finally clued into what he really was after: a place on Donald Trump’s billionaire tech bros team. He was bowing down to the U.S. president, who accused Facebook of a left-wing bias.

Rather than confront the actual problem—our collapsing corporate media after decades of concentration, consolidation and convergence—Facebook users were gonna stick it to the Meta Man by flouncing. There was little talk of standing up for Canadian news providers. So, again, many blamed the Canadian government for preventing freebie access to journalism.

A news junkie long before I joined the Toronto Star in 1989 as media columnist, I have long been monitoring North America’s broadcasting and publishing industries, watching them shrink in number, grow narrower in perspective and scope, offer more infotainment and less investigation, while presenting the illusion of choice with the proliferation of cable news channels.

Alarmed by rapidly sinking audiences and ad revenues, they also grew even more heavy handed in their gatekeeping. Discuss climate change? That would anger the automotive and travel industries, which pay the rent with truck and vacation package advertising. Worker issues? Can’t upset business and government with money for commercials. So labour activists became “union bosses”—as if “CEOs” were democratically selected and workplace organizers were mobsters.

But there’s more, much more, out there than the Globe and Mail, owned by Canada’s richest family, whose interests are antithetical to most Canadians, or Postmedia, controlled by a Republican-aligned U.S. hedge fund, or news channels taken over by distribution monopolies that serve shareholders ahead of the public interest.

That’s why Canadians must fight for CBC and TVO, subscribe to liberal papers, such as the Star, UK’s Guardian and Israel’s Haaretz, under fire by the Netanyahu regime. We should prop up our indie media: Tyee, Rabble.ca, The Maple, The Breach, Canadian Dimension, National Observer, Narwhal, Ricochet. We must follow progressive, fact-based podcasters and Substackers, many of them journalists whose jobs were eliminated.

They now provide much of the information needed to fact check the X-bots. They also counter the BroCasters who amplify racism, misogyny, and homophobia.

Being free is costly. It takes millions to do what a daily or newscast can do. Indie media boldly go where business advertisers and political groups don’t want their ad dollars to go. That’s why we must bet on them, on the future, on democracy.

Note that fascists first come for the journalists. Juntas take over the media along with the government. Trump attacks those who don’t back down, like Jim Acosta, late of CNN. The apple-munching Pierre Poilievre casually bullies reporters. Israel slaughters Palestinian journalists.

But emojis aren’t enlightening. Liking isn’t thinking. Retweeting isn’t engaging.

Facebook gives us space to expose lies and corruption, to organize, even to resist. It connects us. It’s community.

But to be effective, we must support the truth tellers with our own dollars, promote and point to them. There are workarounds for Meta’s news link ban.

Don’t abandon ship. Turn it around.