The CBC has apparently taking a second crack at finding some way to blame social media for human smuggling. It had mixed results.
Is there something in the water where CBC news is located? You can’t help but wonder after what happened yesterday.
Yesterday, I covered some of their antics revolving around their efforts to say human smuggling is entirely the fault of social media. At the time, they brought in (likely inadvertently) an actual expert on human smuggling to discuss the issue. That expert pointed out that there are a number of factors that go into the problems of human smuggling. That includes the laws that are currently in place in both affected countries, the militarization of the border, the economic conditions that allows for this activity to be profitable in the first place, and more. When the CBC news anchor pushed the claims that it was all social media’s fault because they are going so far as to advertise their services, the expert pushed back and very clearly pointed out that this is not the story of what’s going on with this problem.
Now, if you are a real journalist, such an interview should be a pretty clear signal that you are barking up the wrong tree here. Is the existence of those advertisements the problem or is it the symptom of a much larger problem? Is blaming social media really a productive use of your time when the experts are clearly pointing out that it is a waste of time attacking things at this angle? These are among the obvious questions an actual journalism outlet should have been asking. Even better, they have an expert that is physically present to talk to who is happy to advise journalists on where to look.
The problem here is that this is the logical response to take. We’re talking about the CBC here. Sometimes, they don’t always take the logical course of action.
After I wrote the report of their cluster of a situation, the CBC apparently decided to take another crack at this. For them, it seems that the problem wasn’t that they were going about this story the wrong way, but rather, the expert wasn’t saying the things the producers wanted them to say. So, they wiped the slate clean and conducted another interview with a different expert. This expert is a bald man this time. This is where things continue to get weirder and weirder.
You would think that if you are covering a story about human smuggling, you would bring in an expert on human smuggling to discuss the issue. Instead, the expert the CBC brought in the second time was a tech expert. My immediate question to this decision is, “Why?” Bringing in a tech expert to talk about the problems of human smuggling is a bit like bringing in a dance instructor to talk about global climate change. Maybe that person might have knowledge on the subject, but there are probably going to be better, more qualified, people to discuss the situation.
Another thing that was notable is the fact that not only have I never heard of this person before, but I’ve also never heard of the company he apparently worked for. Kind of a sign that they are going pretty far down their internal contact lists to find someone, but I digress.
The CBC’s lead going into the interview was virtually identical which already told me that they learned nothing from the previous expert and they are re-doing everything. What’s also noteworthy is the fact that the CBC made no mention of the first interview in the second interview. Additionally, none of the points raised by the expert in the first interview was brought up in the second interview on top of it all. If this was an actual inquiry to learn something, why scrub an actually informative interview and try a second time? It doesn’t make any sense unless you are seeking someone to make a specific answer. So, already, there was red flag for me on what the CBC was doing.
What is also interesting is the fact that the CBC finally named the social media network they were seeing these advertisements on. They said it was TikTok – something they neglected to mention the first time (which is a pretty big fumble in and of itself if it wasn’t supposed to be secret in the first place).
The interview itself started very similarly to the first interview with the CBC news anchor saying that advertisements for social media is popping up and how much of a problem that is. The expert, for his part, talked about how this might be an issue of holding platforms accountable. The anchor’s eyes immediately lit up and tried drilling down more into that about how social media has become a real problem and asked about what the response should be.
With the point about accountability, the term “accountability” means very different things to very different people. For some, it means that there are certain basic rules that the platform should abide by. For instance, if there is criminal activity going on on the platform, and the platform is aware of it, then it gets reported to police. That… already happens even though it very rarely, if ever, gets noted by the media in general. For technophobes, however, accountability means jailing the person in charge when something bad happens and blocking access to the platform entirely. This is a very extreme overreaction that is also likely unconstitutional. Unfortunately, that point doesn’t really get fully explained in the interview.
To the second experts credit, he at least hit on an actual valid point where this could be an educational thing. Maybe post video’s or advertisements pointing people in the right direction for these things. Explain why it isn’t worth it to use human smugglers in the first place. Educate people on what are the legal channels and what the proper steps are for immigration. As far as I’m concerned, that is a perfectly valid response to what the CBC is clutching their collective pearls over.
For the CBC, however, that is the wrong answer. So, the anchor tried to steer the expert back onto a path where it is possible to get someone to say human smuggling is all social media’s fault. There was mention about how it seems that the situation on social media is out of control and how there seems to be little that can be done about it. This is where the interview goes off the rails a little.
The expert in question mentioned that he recognizes how much harder it is to get the word out with what happened with the Online News Act and social media platforms. Hilariously, the anchor jumped on that (likely because of personal biases) and said how he raised an excellent point about how the platforms are blocking news, making it more difficult for the media to get their news to an audience.
Now, if you are confused as to why this is bring brought up in this context, you should be. This is because it is Meta that dropped news links in the first place. This affects Instagram and Facebook. The platform that is being discussed here is Tiktok which is… a very different company from Meta. TikTok hasn’t blocked news links nor are they subject to the Online News Act. So, the question is, why bring this up? It’s likely it was because the expert was inadvertently conflating two completely separate issues. The anchor, for her part, never clued in and was so focused on trash talking social media that she thought she found another angle on attacking social media when, in fact, she was exposing the fact that she knows so little about the tech world in the first place and that ignorance was getting displayed.
In all likelihood, someone in the room caught on to this and informed her that she was conflating the two issues. This is because she looked puzzled for a second, then said that, oh, I guess the Online News Act and news blocking was a Meta thing. Um, yeah, a very astute observation, there. The expert, obviously, doesn’t have that luxury and realized that was a very good point before dropping that angle. Yeah, I was laughing at the interview at that point.
The anchor then tried to get things back on track by going back to how this seems to be a problem on social media. She pointed out that it seems like there’s whole networks of human smugglers on social media. The expert, for his part, made another point that actually has a lot of validity. That is that social media is a place where a lot of people communicate with each other. It’s become a central hub for social activity, so there is a lot of things that are going on social media, making this matter complicated.
So, again, to the credit of the expert, he actually brushed up against a very big issue with all of these attacks on social media. Like he said, for people, especially generations who are younger than the boomer generation, use social media for a huge variety of things. Whether that is for social status purposes, communicating with friends and family, starting and maintaining a business, and a whole host of other reason, people use social media for a variety of very legitimate reasons.
The reason why that is a critical point is because the efforts today by government is to either restrict access to social media (i.e. through age verification laws) or to ban it altogether (such as the nefarious plots to get TikTok banned altogether from a whole country). It is difficult to overestimate the damaging implications of such a move on society. For one, people will immediately find themselves losing many of their social connections. For another, the business models that have been set up have basically been ripped apart. Whole communities get severed and picking up the pieces on a different platform takes time – and many of those users are never made whole as a result. That is the modern reality that so frequently gets ignored.
It’s likely for those reasons that the point was simply tossed aside by the CBC anchor. Sometime afterwards, the interview ended.
I think for the CBC, the second interview was a bit better, but I’m not sure that the CBC got what they wanted out of it entirely. What they were likely after is an expert to sit in front of a camera and voluntarily say something like, “Human smuggling is out of control and it is all the fault of social media. We need government to step in and crack down on these platforms because if they do, then the problem of human smuggling goes away.” No expert worth their salt is going to say that. If the CBC did find someone to say that, then they would be widely discredited on a number of fronts as a result.
What I saw with the pair of interviews is an absolute train wreck for the accountability of the CBC. At so many steps along the way, there were opportunities to re-evaluate the situation and take a different approach. If a second interview was absolutely necessary, then I would have expected, at bare minimum, that the questions and the nature of the interview be dramatically different. For instance, the anchor asking what do experts think contributes to the problem of human smuggling. Are there was in which the government can respond to such a problem? How bad is human smuggling? What approaches can be taken to reduce this problem? Questions like that would have been infinitely better than the credibility train wreck I saw on display yesterday.
Instead, the CBC is seemingly on a quest to try and pin the blame of human smuggling onto social media and take things to their natural next step on calling on the government to further crack down on social media after. Nothing about what I saw with those two interviews spelled out to me that the journalists were after a better understanding of the problem of human smuggling. It was bias run amok. If I was a CBC executive right now, I would be extremely embarrassed at what aired yesterday, then sit down the news staff and say, “WTF was that? You are better than that.”
An important thing I’ll note about all of this is something I noted for the CBC’s first attempt. At no point in that second story did the CBC mention that the advertisements got reported to TikTok. Further, at no point, did the CBC mention that the advertisements or accounts got reported to authorities. What’s more, they didn’t talk about the reaction TikTok had in response to those reports that were probably never made. That, alone, causes the story to fall apart in my books. OK, you found something illegal happening on social media. What meaningful action did you take? For the CBC, as far as I’m concerned, they took no action at all. Instead, just used it as an opportunity to spread propaganda and conspiracy theories which… does nothing to solve the problem in the first place.
Personally, I can deduce a few things that happened. For one, they were basically answer phishing. They were trying to frame questions and lead people around, attempting to get the answers they wanted experts to say (which is antithetical to basic journalistic practices). In addition to that, when they didn’t get the answers they were after, they did a little bit of expert shopping. Think of it as a variation of the legal term of “forum shopping”. Forum shopping is the act of litigants looking for a court that would most likely give them a favourable outcome and filing their case in that court. In this case, expert shopping is the act of going through different experts and trying to find one that would provide the most favourable view most closely aligned with what the news producers are seeking. Again, this is antithetical to basic journalistic principles.
This is why people have increasingly built so little trust to larger media outlets. The activities these corporations have, at least as far as perception is concerned, is that the larger media companies are less interested in informing the public of the world around them, and more about telling people what to think and how to think – going so far as to bend over backwards to support whatever political party they happen to be supporting at the time. It’s one of many reasons why I get so frustrated with the mainstream media outlets. I’m not mad at them in a vacuum. I’m mad at them for the actions they are taking. This is the latest action that mainstream media has taken that is annoying me. I think others should be annoyed at activities like this as well.
I’ll bet you could find the anchor on social media.