The pull of the digital on the here and now is at once impossible to downplay, and yet difficult to fully know. Meta and Google, as well as all the others, from OpenAI to NVidia, are masters of evasion. When it comes to the facts of how they operate, they point to the cloud and vanish into mist.

One thing is certain: the internet no longer exists as it was imagined, as a vast public bulletin board. It has been colonized by the global capital it enabled.

Two billion-dollar corporations now divide it up between them. Meta and Google. The “Duopoly,” so called because each exerts a monopoly form of power.

The small businesses who are forced into advertising on these platforms complain of nefarious, unresolvable, never fully disclosed malpractices, of customer service that does not exist.

Google and Meta use powerful algorithms to cut off their own clients at the knees. Work hard over years to build up a loyal base of 30,000 “followers” for your posts? Meta can step in and demand you pay to “boost” your reach to enable your own followers to see them. As few as 10% might, otherwise. 

It’s hard to know exactly.

The power of these inscrutable monopolies is so vast, national governments have difficulty figuring out the scope of the legislation required to reign them in. Tasked with regulating the use of AI in Canada, for example, the parliamentary committee is urging the House to just pass some rules now, any rules, so they can be updated when the nature of the pirating, plagiarism, and privacy invasion to come is more clear.

On the other hand, when legislators actually come up with some legislation, well, watch them try to impose it.

Faced with compensating news organizations in Canada for their contributions to its News Feed — now just a Feed — Meta simply shrugged and pulled all news off its platforms in this country.

Extreme? Not really. Just a more obvious form of the power it has, and the ill purposes for which it uses it. 

It’s Meta policy now to downplay, deprioritize, and demote news from legitimate, well established news organizations such as the Guardian, the BBC, the New York Times and Al Jazeera, on both its platforms, Facebook and Instagram, all around the world.

Google and Meta together earned 80% of the $14 billion in online ad revenues reported in 2022 in Canada. Do you think this happened by accident? Pure coincidence, right?

Both Google and Meta actively employ algorithms to funnel attention away from legitimate news agencies, depriving them of the revenues that readers — I mean, viewers — and link “clicks” they generate.

The object? To destroy their only real competitor in the game of ad revenues. The means? Turn citizens who read into consumers who click.

In Canada, 50% of the population is now on Instagram. For, on average, two hours every day. 

We all know, vaguely, the issues — with privacy, bullying, algorithms, confirmation bias, and everything from misinformation to fake news. And yet there we all are. Even the Gazette is on FB and Insta. It managed to evade the computers set up to detect and silence every single legitimate news organization in this country.

Here we are to tell our tale.

While the patrons of Instagram — “users” — scroll through  the “carousels,” “reels,” and “stories” of its perpetual funfair, behind the scenes, in the anonymity of the algorithm, is where the reality is.

These algorithms are carefully manipulated. Contrary to popular belief, they do not just operate by themselves.

How they work and to what ends can only be deduced, however, from the effects they have.

These are enormous. While users compulsively scroll through endless, increasingly fantastical media sites, real life becomes more and more impoverished. Compare scrolling through reels to reading a newspaper, for example. I don’t care what format, whether print, digital, or braille. Just take the idea of reading, and compare that to what is called “engagement” on these platforms.

I was talking to a marketing friend the other day, concerned about the “Google analytics” metrics on the Gazette’s new website.

“It says we get thousands of “views” every day, but… I am not sure what a view is. It says the ‘average page view’ lasts one minute and 20 seconds.”

“Wow,” she said. “That’s pretty good.”

I know these editorials look like I just breeze them off, but that is not the case. They take hours. I do research. I think things over. I bite my nails. I consider my angle. I make a sandwich. I type a paragraph. I delete it. 

A well written thing can be read quickly, it is true. Like a dinner you slaved over. Gone in a few minutes. But still. You cannot read much in 80 seconds.

The statistics of “views” and “impressions,” whether from Google or Facebook or Instagram, are calculatedly misleading. For example, some Gazette articles — someone falling through the ice, the town hill roundabout, anything to do with Base31 — will, according to Facebook, receive, or make — the terminology is not clear— over 30,000 “impressions.”

That means it floated by on 30,000 feeds. On some level this is impressive — just imagine if Meta had to pay for those 30,000 copies of a single news story. (I know, the mind boggles. And Meta bolted.) It does not mean anything was read, though, on the Gazette’s website, by someone who clicked past the headline.

None of these metrics were set up to evaluate reading. They are hostile to reading. They demote careful reporting, fact-based research, and good writing. They promote 10-second videos.

The end goal is most certainly not a literate, informed population able to debate the finer points of AI regulation. 

It’s time we woke up from the trance. There are all kinds of reasons to get off these targeting and selling platforms. Wanting a world that runs on ethical and informed decision-making rather than anonymous algorithms of ill intent is a good enough one for me. 

Beyond them, there are still all the delights of the internet. They just take a little more effort to find. Books to read, podcasts to listen to, essays on Substack and Blogger, art and film of all kinds, world class news gathering sites. It’s all there waiting for you. 

Finally, thank you for reading this, right to the end.