小蓝视频

WESTERN PRODUCER — Rich and powerful men can be silly.

It’s been easy to laugh at the antics of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Elon Musk as they swing handbags at each other, recently challenging each other to a mixed martial arts “cage match.”

But the more significant actions of the tech giants are deadly serious for farmers and the rest of our society, especially considering the stranglehold that dominant platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google have over our access to news and information.

Many people today rely upon these platforms for their “news feed,” even though much of what they carry as news is far away from legitimate news and analysis and is sometimes outright disinformation.

Farmers get enormous benefits from access to these global platforms. That’s indisputable. Farmers today have access to farmers around the world, to crop market analysts across the globe, to almost-live reporting on everything from crop pest outbreaks in their local area to droughts and floods in Argentina and other competing grain powers to market-making news about missiles and drone-boats hitting Black Sea grain ships and port facilities.

But there’s also a lot of junk and deliberate falsehoods on these platforms and across the social media demimonde. You’ve got to have a good internal filter to sort through that junk. Many people aren’t very good at it. Unfortunately, a lot of people think they’re better at it than they actually are. Others fall for the attractions of believing comforting lies rather than accepting the unsettling realities of our messy world, which rarely conforms to our personal hopes and wishes.

Legitimate news media have always played a vital role in filtering out the junk from the vital, in assessing the most critical issues of the day and in producing professional journalism that readers, listeners and viewers can rely upon for a rough approximation of reality.

Oh, I know, mainstream news media have often fallen into their own comfortable biases, have erred and failed many times and have suffered tunnel vision on many issues that editors and news directors have decided are more central to our society than they might really be.

I entered university at the time when undergrads like me were warned about the “gatekeepers” and the “captains of consciousness” of the news media.

There have no doubt been many times when the media has foreshortened our view of the real world. But that hasn’t been a problem since the birth of the worldwide web back in the mid-1990s. We’ve had a plethora of information ever since, of a bewildering variety, and we’re arguably better off because of it.

The news media has been suffering as platforms like Facebook and Google eat up most of the world’s advertising money. The platforms don’t share the money with the media, whose work they are often benefitting from, as people share new stories and analysis.

This has led to the cage match between the federal government and the biggest platforms, including Facebook and Google, over the government’s attempts to require the platforms to make reasonable agreements with media to share the ad revenue. Facebook, particularly, has been aggressive in cutting off users from access to legitimate news media.

That’s bad for users, readers, Canadians. It’s bad for farmers if they suddenly (and without notice) lose access to vital sources of information. Many people take access to news media for granted. That might not be a safe assumption right now.

So, for you who farm and are serious about making your marketing and other decisions based upon access to quality information at least partially supplied by the news media, you might need to work a little harder to get it until the present cage match is over.

Go directly to the webpages of media (like The Western Producer), use news apps, subscribe to newspapers and magazines. Don’t just assume you’re going to get the same news flow you’ve been getting when you go to your Facebook feed or do Google searches. That might not be true now.

Quality information is a vital input. Make sure you’re still getting it delivered.