Media censorship as addressed by citizen-funded vs. corporate-backed media outlets

Using the Meta/Facebook example & recommending, once again, the Critical Balance Reporting Indicators as an alternative to media censorship

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DRUTHERS describes itself as “Canada’s Most Loved, Independent, People Powered Newspaper!” It is volunteer-run, and relies on donations from Canadian readers, needing about $20,000/month to run and distribute 200,000 copies across the country. Founded in 2021 by Shawn Jason Laponte, the newspaper initially received a lot of negative press in corporate/government backed media circles, for example, in the Toronto Star.

CANADIAN DIMENSION was founded in 1963 and is transparent about its focus, drawing both its authors and readership from the left side of the political spectrum:

Canadian Dimension is the longest-standing voice of the left in Canada. For more than half-a-century, CD has provided a forum for lively and radical debate where red meets green, socialists take on social democrats, Indigenous voices are heard, activists report from every corner of the country, and the latest books and films are critically reviewed. Our dedicated and longstanding readership is comprised of activists, organizers, academics, economists, workers, trade unionists, feminists, environmentalists, Indigenous peoples, and members of the LGBTQ2 community.

In 1975 a collective took over editorial responsibility. Although its composition has changed many times, and includes members from around the globe, a Winnipeg-based group still functions as the hub of the organization. The dramatic change in the very definition and scope of left politics since the inception of the magazine is reflected in the evolution of Dimension. Topics that were, in the past, often marginalized by mainstream left politics—the environment, the family, the division of labour in the home, food, community development, coalition building, gender and racial inequalities—now feature in a significant portion of our content.

Dimension remains what it has always been—an independent forum for left-wing political thought and discussion—including just about the entire range of what passes for the left in Canada. In 2019 we decided to take CD digital, drawing the curtain on 56 years in print.

The CANADIAN PRESS describes itself as “Canada’s independent national news agency”. Below we highlight in bold the products and services being prepared and marketed by The Canadian Press (CP) in order to fund its operations.

The Canadian Press is Canada's trusted news source and leader in providing real-time, bilingual multimedia stories across print, broadcast and digital platforms. From breaking regional, national and international stories to the biggest events in politics, sports, business, entertainment and lifestyle, The Canadian Press is there when it matters, delivering news about Canadians to Canadians, 24/7/365. We give Canadians an authentic, unbiased source, driven by truth, accuracy and timeliness. We fund and invest in our editorial operations by serving clients that use our content, products and services to engage audiences and grow their business.

We work with more than 600 media companies and organizations of all types and sizes across various industries, including the Globe and Mail, CBC, Bell Media, Rogers, Yahoo, Cineplex, Captivate Elevator Media, Factiva, Pearson Education Canada, Toronto Metropolitan University and many more.

In addition to being the exclusive distributor of AP's world news in Canada, our news articles, photos, graphics, video and audio clips are used in newspapers, magazines, radio and TV newscasts, websites, company blogs, social channels, digital signage screens and more.

Through our own services and those of partners such as Stats Perform, GlobeNewswire and Barchart, we also help media, PR and marketing professionals by providing photography, videography and other custom content services; sports and financial data feeds; media monitoring, press release distribution and stylebooks. www.thecanadianpress.com/about/

How “Independent” are the news platforms?

The term “independent”, while in widespread use among many media outlets, is problematic. It should only be used in cases where there are no financial pressures impacting editorial decision making, for example around which topics and which angles to cover and how. In most cases, there is a symbiotic relationship between the funders/supporters of a particular news outlet and its editorial decision-making. Without content, there would be no financial supporters, and except, perhaps in the case of the standalone, independent media, without financial supporters, there would be no content. Only the latter can claim to be completely editorially independent.

We at Canadian Shareable News are developing the following media nomenclature based on the concepts of financial and editorial dependence/independence:

• corporate/government backed/funded media (formerly known as “mainstream” media or MSM) —> In this case, given the CP’s business model supplying large media corporations with products and services, we are including it in this category.

• citizen-funded media —> DRUTHERS’ reliance on individual Canadian donors to fund the production and dissemination of its news-related products puts it in this category. There appears to be very little reliance on advertising revenue from companies selling products or services.

• alternately funded media —> an outlet that gets its funding from individual citizens but also from other organizations (lobby groups, political organizations, advertising sponsorship, etc.) would fit under this heading. It is not always completely clear which label best describes which outlet. Given the statement by the Canadian Dimension that 75% of their operating budget comes from individual donors, and the fact that they actively solicit advertisers, and carry advertising from, for example, a labour union, we are currently classifying them as “alternately funded”. This is our term for outlets that are backed by a mix of citizen donations, organizational sponsorships and advertising.

• standalone independent media —> an outlet, usually run by single writers or small teams or organizations not reliant on income generated by the outlet itself. Currently CanadianShareableNews fits into this category. Once we change the Substack settings, to receive subscriptions, we move into the “citizen-funded media” category.

For our earlier thoughts related to this nomenclature conversation, please visit our Reference Section to read the two posts starting here: A Review of the Most Common Roles in the All-Media Community.

Here now, we compare how the same story is being addressed by DRUTHERS, The Canadian Dimension and The Canadian Press respectively.

How Mark Zuckerberg is ending Censorship on Facebook

“In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content. This approach has gone too far. As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable. Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in “Facebook jail,” and we are often too slow to respond when they do.

We want to fix that and return to that fundamental commitment to free expression. Today, we’re making some changes to stay true to that ideal.” https://about.fb.com/news/2025/01/meta-more-speech-fewer-mistakes/

According to DRUTHERS

Meta’s founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook, Instagram and other Meta platforms will be ending their fact-checking program. Zuckerberg said the move would “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms.” Zuckerberg said Meta’s “fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”. The tech firm’s content moderation teams will also be moving from California to Texas “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.” https://druthers.ca/wp-content/uploads/druthers-FEBRUARY-2025-resized.pdf Page 2.

On page 10, DRUTHERS contains a full page feature on Controlled Speech in Canada addressing topics like: Digital Overreach via Bills C-10 and C-36; how the lines between journalism and government PR have been blurred; the muzzling of the media; social media surveillance by Canadian intelligence agencies; the vagueness of terms like “extremism” and “disinformation” and more.

According to The CANADIAN DIMENSION

Meta’s move to stop fact checking will make truth more elusive The end of fact checking on Meta’s US platforms is just another step in the digital giant’s efforts to obliterate reality

Republicans in the US have long complained that Meta’s fact checkers were biased against them and have preferred to instead construct their own version of reality based on what they call “alternative facts.”…

The notion that Meta’s fact checkers have been biased against conservatives was rejected by Nina Jankowicz, former head of the short-lived Disinformation Governance Board of the US Department of Homeland Security. She argued on Bluesky that instead the fact checkers “have been perceived as such because of politically motivated efforts to smear them.” The end of fact checking on Meta’s US platforms is just another step in the digital giant’s efforts to obliterate reality, she added. “Facebook has already contributed to the demise of journalism and this will be the final nail in the coffin.” The liberal Guardian called the move “an extinction-level event for truth on social media,” but the conservative Wall Street Journal welcomed Meta’s decision to “abandon its censorship regime.” Fox News legal analyst Jonathan Turley lauded the move as potentially “transformational” for an anti-censorship movement being led by Musk. “For the free speech community, it was like the United States entering World War II to support Great Britain,” argued the Georgetown law professor. “Around the world, free speech is in a free fall. Speech crimes and censorship have become the norm in the West.”

… Some in this country seem to take a “you can’t say that” approach to anything that doesn’t align with their preferred version of reality, … Concerns over censorship in Canada have been heightened by the Trudeau government’s recent efforts to regulate the Internet with the Online Streaming Act and Online News Act, not to mention the as yet unpassed Online Harms Act. After the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission required that podcasters, adult websites and social media register with it under the Online Streaming Act, some Americans scorned the move, with journalist Glenn Greenwald claiming that Canada now has “one of the world’s most repressive online censorship schemes” and Musk tweeting that “Trudeau is trying to crush free speech in Canada.” The illiberal tendency toward censorship on the part of some Liberals was exemplified by a proposal passed at the party’s 2023 policy convention calling for the government to “hold on-line information services accountable for the veracity of material published on their platforms and to limit publication only to material whose sources can be traced.”

The main difference in Canadian and American attitudes toward free speech is codified in our respective constitutions. Freedom of speech, and of the press, is enshrined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which protects even hate speech. Guarantees of free speech in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, on the other hand, extend only so far as they do not infringe on the rights of identifiable groups to not be subjected to hatred or contempt. The American remedy to the problem of hate speech is more speech, not less. This is the classic “marketplace of ideas” view of John Milton in Areopagitica, his argument against licensing and censorship in 17th century England.

… The problem in Canada is that if we start telling each other what we can and cannot say, we might as well start decreeing what we all must think.

https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/metas-move-to-stop-fact-checking-will-make-truth-more-elusive

According to The CANADIAN PRESS

https://www.thecanadianpressnews.ca/search (Zuckerberg ending censorship on Facebook)

Oddly, without adding any dates to the date range tool, NO RESULTS are found. Then, even with dates added, the story addressed above by DRUTHERS and CANADIAN DIMENSIONS does NOT show up.

It appears that the CP did not assign any journalists to cover the topic, and their American news distribution partner (AP) also did not chose to cover it, or their search engine is highly flawed.

Interestingly, only one of the Editorials in the Roundup addresses the topic directly.

A Washington Post editorial, written on January 21, 2025 bemoans the lack of ‘fact checker’ content moderation with the new changes. The fact that sentences like these can be written in 2025 is clear evidence of how successful social media and other types of censorship have been these past 5 years. It is clear that this author has been kept from all the advances in vaccine science — apparently clueless about his own lack of evolving knowledge.

Plenty of evidence shows that social media platforms create echo chambers that reinforce users’ worldviews. Internal studies conducted by Facebook itself and disclosed by whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021, for example, suggest that, despite the company’s efforts to remove anti-vaccine content, misinformation about coronavirus vaccines on the platform proliferated.

Studies such as these illustrate how much insight can be gleaned from the data that online platforms collect. In the right hands, this data could help society identify and cope with the side effects of social media use. Imagine, for example, if public health researchers were able to examine how vaccine-hesitant people consume information and which messages resonate with them. They might be able to develop better strategies to meet vaccine skeptics where they are, and thus combat misinformation more effectively than content moderation does.

There seems to be little attempt made by THE CANADIAN PRESS to ensure that the content provided matches CP’s own pledge: “We give Canadians an authentic, unbiased source, driven by truth, accuracy and timeliness.”

For at least 22 months, former US Genome Sequencer Kevin McKernan has been demonstrating the phenomenon and consequences of DNA contamination in the Pfizer COVID-19 injections. Ontario virologist Dr. David Speicher has been impacting health policy changes in Australia by his work on the same topic.

And the Canadian Press has been silent or working with a flawed search engine?

CANADIAN SHAREABLE NEWS

chose to highlight a different angle also related to Zuckerberg’s company Meta.

In our Issue 46/47 we included this:

META ordered to release Censorship Info

US based Reclaim the Net, a watchdog organization focussed on internet censorship shared the following on February 9, 2025: “Senator Ron Johnson, Chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, has escalated his scrutiny of Meta’s alleged suppression of COVID-19 vaccine injury discussions, demanding that CEO Mark Zuckerberg release internal records detailing Facebook’s content moderation practices. .. Johnson specifically questioned Facebook’s removal of vaccine injury support groups, including A Wee Sprinkle of Hope, which was described in the book Worth a Shot? as the largest such group in the world before it was shut down just five days after Johnson’s June 28, 2021, roundtable with vaccine-injured individuals…. Johnson’s letter followed recent remarks by Zuckerberg on The Joe Rogan Experience, where he acknowledged that the Biden administration exerted intense pressure on Facebook to suppress content about vaccine side effects. According to Zuckerberg, the government "pushed [Facebook] super hard to take down things that were honestly true" and even resorted to “yelling, cursing, and threatening repercussions” if the platform did not comply.”reclaimthenet.org/senator-ron-johnson-meta-censorship-vaccine-injury-investigation Additionally, as per the USASpending.gov site, the Poynter Institute Fact Checking program has received $2.4M of taxpayer funds to silence taxpayers. reclaimthenet.org/us-taxpayer-funds-poynter-institute-fact-checking

DRUTHERS can be excused for not having coverage of angle yet, as their paper is published only once a month. Possibly CANADIAN DIMENSIONS relies on a small number of writers, who will need more time to get to this topic. CANADIAN SHAREABLE NEWS does not write every story, as its role is generally to amplify what has already been written by others, stories that are not getting much airtime in the “mainstream” or corporate/government backed press. Our “coverage” of the Zuckerberg/Meta story, was simply to link to the work of the writers at RECLAIM THE NET. That appears to be another alternately funded outlet in the USA with a heavy focus on internet freedom/censorship. https://reclaimthenet.org

What is stunning is that Canada’s “TRUSTED NEWS LEADER”, the Canadian Press News Agency, is dropping the ball and has NO COVERAGE on this breaking news item of such vital importance.

A message from the CSNews Editor - closing remarks/personal opinion:

Readers of this post are invited to comment if they remember having heard of the removal from Facebook of many of the earliest COVID-19 vaccine injury groups.

Individuals seeking support from others who had experienced the same bewildering effects of the injections, who were using Facebook to build community, to be lifelines for each other, sharing information or a listening ear, HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN what it felt like to have that cut out from underneath them.

Simply by telling their stories, they were guilting of “thought crime”, i.e. of of “providing misinformation”. And for that, they were “punished” by being cut off from their Facebook communities. Their posts, that may have taken excruciating effort to type up, depending on their symptoms, vanished overnight.

Today, thanks to much effort of vaccine injured individuals or their families, communication networks have slowly been rebuilt. Take a look at one such network https://sickandabandoned.com/vaccine-injury-resources/ to try to get a sense of how Zuckerberg’s implementation of World Health Organization driven polices would have impacted some of our most vulnerable fellow citizens… those who FOLLOWED PUBLIC HEALTH ADVICE only to tragically find out the products being pushed were NOT AS ADVERTISED.

Journalists definitely should not bemoan a lack of “content moderation”. Instead, they should cheer on changes that result in more freedom of content.

They should also make amends for having participated in that content moderation in the past, especially if they defended a LACK of balanced coverage. They need to give equal time to the “official” science that was clearly “frozen in time” AND to the continuously evolving discoveries re: the SARS-CoV-2 virus/bioweapon and the associated countermeasure, the mRNA injections.

All of the censorship related harms could have been avoided had tools like the Critical Balance Reporting Test been widely used already 5 years ago. And had journalists all around the country, regardless of political preferences, joined forces to insist on NOT violating Journalistic Codes of Ethics.

One of the indicators is “data evaluation”. To demonstrate this indicator, the author of the Canadian Dimensions piece cited above would have needed to critically examine Nina Jankowicz’s uninformed practice of assuming that key voices being censored were “Republican”. In fact, highly knowledgeable research professors Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Pierre Kory and Dr. Robert Malone all censored under the Biden/Zuckerberg juggernaut were previous Democrat voters. Science is not tied to politics. Journalists who perpetuate these tropes will find much to learn when reviewing journalistic ethics guidelines and being open to the Critical Balance Reporting Indicators.