Today on NOW and NEXT:


Today on NOW and NEXT

I had one of those weird "work" dreams last night. I was in a newsroom I didn't recognized and told we had no one to cover shifts. After a few anxious moments and efforts to solve the problem, I realized - it's NOT my problem. In fact, I DON'T EVEN WORK HERE! And I walked out.

That's when I woke up:)

I was clearly triggered by the Meta story! (I am a Recovering News Director after all.)

The Meta decision to block news links from Facebook and Instagram is being positioned as a big tech versus big government story. There has been some misguided notion among legacy media commentators that the Canadian government would simply wait out Zuckerberg and Facebook would come back to the table.

That's not what's going on...entirely.

Zuckerberg isn't just taking on the feds. He's setting the stage, here and elsewhere, to take on Elon Musk on his own turf.

Remember, Threads, (Zuckerberg's "Twitter killer"), is still publishing news links. Threads isn't covered by C-18. And Threads is not in the legislative crosshairs, yet, of law makers in the US or other jurisdictions considering their own C-18-like bill.

It's worth remembering, journos and news geeks generate most of the traffic on Twitter. Zuckerberg doesn't need to keep all 100 million people who've downloaded the Threads app in order to beat Elon. He just needs to win the news link war over Twitter...er X.