A lot of you might not know this, but meta doesn't allowed Canadians and news organizations to post links to traditional news. That means I can't post a CBC or CNN article that refutes a misinformation account. This action by meta allowed the raise of alt right misinformation to flourish here.
Deirdre Mitchell-MacLean
Holy hell. Was this part of the shitshow too? I'm kind of gobsmacked.
Nov 4, 2026 at 10:02 PM
Sharing without clicking on news in social media
Social media have enabled laypersons to disseminate, at scale, links to news and public affairs information. Many individuals share such links without first reading the linked information. Here we analysed over 35 million public Facebook posts with uniform resource locators shared between 2017 and 2020, and discovered that such ‘shares without clicks’ (SwoCs) constitute around 75% of forwarded links. Extreme and user-aligned political content received more SwoCs, with partisans engaging in it more than politically neutral users. In addition, analyses with 2,969 false uniform resource locators revealed higher shares and, hence, SwoCs by conservatives (76.94%) than liberals (14.25%), probably because, in our dataset, the vast majority (76–82%) of them originated from conservative news domains. Findings suggest that the virality of political content on social media (including misinformation) is driven by superficial processing of headlines and blurbs rather than systematic processing of core content, which has design implications for promoting deliberate discourse in the online public sphere.
PressProgress: Progressive News and Analysis
We're Canada's most shared source for progressive news and information
NMA Condemns Arrogant Meta’s ‘Shameless Landgrab Attempt’ To Plunder News Publisher Websites - News Media Association
Responding to a Nieman Lab report that Meta’s new commercial terms will allow the scraping of news sites if publishers continue to use Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp, News Media Association Chief Executive Theo Bamber said: “This shameless landgrab attempt from Meta to scrape anything and everything from news publisher and business websites to train their […]
Political disinformation concentrates in repeated claims across media
The prevalence and dynamics of disinformation remain contentious, partly because measures have relied on posts containing URLs from untrustworthy sources. We move beyond this by detecting disinformation in text and across posts. Using retrieval-augmented generation, we match six million Facebook, Instagram, and X posts by politicians from the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany, and two million articles from news outlets to fact-checked claims. We show that disinformation is concentrated in a small number of combinations of policy issues and parties and that just over hundred distinct claims account for around half of all disinformation across the three countries. They often appear first on a single platform, later on multiple, and subsequently in news coverage before being fact-checked. These findings suggest that disinformation is concentrated in a narrow segment of political communication, potentially creating repeated exposure that may shape the terms of public debate through both social and news media.
Opinion | A website wanted to restore trust in the media. It’s actually a political operation.
Do you really know where your news comes from?
What does Meta actually do now?
Americans Trust Local News. That Belief Is Being Exploited. (Published 2019)
A growth in impostor local news that promotes ideological agendas.
National Newswatch
National Newswatch: Canada's most comprehensive site for political news and views.
Global News (@globalnews.ca)
Breaking Canadian news with a fresh perspective on local & international headlines 🚨YT: http://bit.ly/2rGQmtG 🚨 TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@globalnews.ca
AI-driven disinformation running rampant on social media before US midterms, experts warn
Social media companies including Meta have pulled back on efforts to protect voters from election-meddling lies
Meta 'financially enabling' Israeli settler violence against Palestinians, report says
Findings published by 7amleh reveal Meta's bias in the moderation of content by Israelis and Palestinians
Financial Post (@financialpost.com)
For more than 100 years, Canada's most trusted source of financial news
Sharing news you didn't read can feel like expertise
Social media sharers believe that they are knowledgeable about the content they share, even if they have not read it or have only glanced at a headline.
News Media Canada | Trusted. Connected. Targeted.
News Media Canada is the national association of the Canadian news media industry, representing hundreds of members in every province and territory.
Who reposts which media sources? And why this matters for understanding populist politics
In social media, while documenting what gets said is important, understanding who posts which sources to raise their visibility is also key. Katharina Tittel, William Allen, and Pedro Ramaciotti use immigration in France to show how far-right users of X cite sources strategically to achieve their goals
And! The reason Meta (and many other sites) do this is because Canada has a "link tax" that forces companies to pay money every time one of their users links to a Canadian news site. Don't allow links to those sites? You don't have to pay the tax.
Krista D Ball is Canada's Potato, Shaken Not Stirred
A lot of you might not know this, but meta doesn't allowed Canadians and news organizations to post links to traditional news. That means I can't post a CBC or CNN article that refutes a misinformation account. This action by meta allowed the raise of alt right misinformation to flourish here.
