Canada’s largest newspaper chain, Postmedia, is owned by an American hedge fund headed up by a wealthy donor to Donald Trump.

  • HonoredMule@lemmy.ca
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    6 days ago

    It doesn’t even need to be specifically targeting the U.S. Canada should require all media operating in Canada with a physical presence to have Canadian majority ownership/controlling interest. That is (I believe) enforceable as well as non-discriminatory and fully justifiable as a matter of national security.

  • rumba@lemmy.zip
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    6 days ago

    For the sake of our democracy, American hedge funds should be banned from owning Canadian things. --FTFY

    • xor@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 days ago

      american everything should be banned from owning canadian anything….

      source: American, and i want to flee to canada someday

      • rumba@lemmy.zip
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        5 days ago

        wel, it would be nice to be able to own something while in transition no?

        • xor@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          5 days ago

          well i mean anything bigger than like, buying a house and then moving… if you’re richer than that, buy it when you’re canadian

          • rumba@lemmy.zip
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            5 days ago

            As a Fellow 'murican, I approve with this concept. Let’s ship it for export. Man those tarrif’s though :) /s

  • BeNotAfraid@lemmy.ml
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    7 days ago

    A friendly reminder to everyone. Lemmy is absolutely not representative of the broader mass media dialogue happening around us. We have to be paying attention to how all people, close with us in our day to day lives interact with it instead. My boss is a retired mechanic who thought Trump was gonna run the US “like a business.” I have been speaking very openly about my views on the American News Media bias in Canada. How new and legacy media are both monopolies controlled by the same small group of men. How the Heritage Foundation funded the Trump Campaign. How every far-right group appearing after Covid had the same names and message. America First, Canada First, Britain First, Ireland First, Francais Premier and all, coincidentally, funded by right-wing, American, Christian groups. Something clicked with him today, while he was on his phone and I watched as it all suddenly made sense to him.

    Then I watched as he actually became worried. People know that it’s Big Tech and we have to have these conversations, because that’s how you get people to put their phones down and re-evaluate the idea of trusting 5 companies with all of their personal information and doing all computing in a web browser. That’s how you wake them up to the fact that LLM’s and embedded AI assistants are only their to spy on you and silence dissent.

    Hey Co-pilot, have any of our user’s expressed dissatisfaction with the regime? Here’s a curated list.

    We are so close to class consciousness do not let this echo-chamber be a safe space. Get Offline, get loud, get honest. Fuck Google

    • Isaac@waterloolemmy.ca
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      7 days ago

      This is important information for people to read and unddrrstand. As a denizen of multiple communities for over 25 years I think the seeds of ideas start with these forums. They are almost like a canary in the coal mine to give us an idea what will bubble up to the surface to grandma.

      We’re not the majority on Lemmy, many instances are curated to keep out the filth. But content is recycled and moves throughout the net. I’m reminded of this old meme, eventually content makes it to facebook where my mom and elders consume content.

    • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
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      5 days ago

      My boss is a retired mechanic who thought Trump was gonna run the US “like a business.”

      Running government like a business is a horrible idea.

      The 2 are vastly different types of organizations with very different goals and motivations.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    6 days ago

    American companies shouldn’t be allowed to own or operate anything in Canada, period

    Hedge funds shouldn’t be allowed to own any company, period

    • RowRowRowYourBot@sh.itjust.works
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      5 days ago

      American companies shouldn’t be allowed to own or operate anything in Canada, period

      NAFTA is going to make that downright impossible sadly.

  • eureka@aussie.zone
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    7 days ago

    I highly recommend reading Manufacturing Consent[wiki]. It’s easy to find free online. It explains how mass media is systematically filtered by five major factors, the first being ownership, which is more and more relevant every year as media outlets consolidate under the ownership of billionaires like Murdoch, Bezos, Musk and Bloomberg, who have very different material class interests to the other 99.99999[…]% of the population.

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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      6 days ago

      This, so much this. I literally just went by the bay and it’d just fucking sad. It’s a squeezed out husk

      • HugeNerd@lemmy.ca
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        6 days ago

        I figured things were at the end when Nespresso pulled out their boutique from the flagship downtown Montreal location last year, or two years ago.

        The homeless tents lined up on the West and East sides of the building didn’t help, or the defective escalators.

        They say the retail landscape changed too much and passed them by, but downtown there’s Simon’s that has IMO pretty much the same large store with clothes, sheets, bath supplies. No appliances or perfumes though, maybe The Bay was just too big.

  • phx@lemmy.ca
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    6 days ago

    How about banning them from majority share in any major Canadian business. I’m tired of the buy, drain, dismantle cycle perpetuated but these vultures

  • NihilisticOptimist@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    Wouldn’t it be a shame if everyday people went out and spray painted Trump on every conservative sign. That would be vandalism ppl and plain wrong.

  • CircaV@lemmy.ca
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    7 days ago

    Absolutely. I hope Carney has the cojones to make this happen. Can’t have a foreign country threatening to annex us, masquerading as Canadian media.

    • BeNotAfraid@lemmy.ml
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      6 days ago

      Carney is a former central banker, he will not do anything to upset the flow of money. Realistically, every single career politician in the world is complicit in this. Why can we build no more, houses? Why is everything so expensive? Why is the American party of “progressiveness” running Kamala Harris whose brother is CEO at Uber? It’s an illusion, they are all compromised, they are all bought, that’s just the nature of Capitalism. We have bring back the death penalty, but only for corporate person-hood. If you commit global terroristic acts like Meta, Muskrat and Amazon, we should be able to kill these things. We have to stop putting the 1%'s property rights over the lives of the 99%. It’s our planet, why do we need elected individuals whose sole purpose is to make decisions detrimental to everyone but themselves. We need to make Fight Club a documentary.

        • BeNotAfraid@lemmy.ml
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          5 days ago

          I block everything Meta so I don’t know what that is, but why would you link to centralised social media from the fediverse. We come here to avoid the tracking.

  • anomnom@sh.itjust.works
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    7 days ago

    Don’t let them buy your houses either. In fact don’t let them own anything. Hedgefunds ate parasites that feed the wealthy.

  • KulunkelBoom@lemm.ee
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    5 days ago

    If you want your information to be basically unpolluted - keep the American propaganda machines out of your country.

  • badbytes@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    Did Canada sell them? Maybe the problem is that they are private. But even if private, can’t guarantee it will be pro-democratic.

  • wampus@lemmy.ca
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    7 days ago

    I disagree with this sentiment, to some extent.

    For industries and areas considered critical to national security / functions, they ought to extend and enforce a Canadian content like requirement for the sector ownership structure. That is to say, you’d define news sources / papers as an area of national interest, and require that at least 51% (or some other percent) of that industry’s stakeholders are Canadian citizens / organizations.

    Blocking all foreign ownership of media is not the direction I would want to go, though I would like it to be transparent about its ownership structure, so that readers can make an informed decision about potential ownership biases in the content they read.

    I also wouldn’t be opposed to the Government keeping track of a formal list of licensed News Agencies / Papers, with their ownership structures and official sites. Not only would that make different smaller/local papers easier to find / add to feeds, but it would help in weeding out the “fake” (ie made by unknown/questionable sources) sites. Businesses have to get licenses to operate anyway, so I don’t imagine this would be something too difficult to sort out for the Govt IT folks. Any information they’d require to make it work could be added to the licensing process pretty easily I imagine, and they could theoretically provide options for businesses to update their information in the event of things like site/domain name changes etc (if they expand it beyond just news agencies). They could even tie this in to the ACSS system, or Interac E-Transfers, to flag vendors that have Canadian hosted online payments available, for people wanting to avoid US card networks like Mastercard/Visa. As many business licenses are handled at a municipal level, you’d have in person verification options for all of these items, which could help cut down on potential fraud and abuse. Main hurdle would likely be sorting out how to have the information presented to end users, but if it used a federated approach with clusters for each municipality, province, nation-wide, and international, allowing users to opt in to whichever lists they wanted to reference/search for products, I imagine that sort of an approach could work… ? And honestly, might even give better results for marketing/connecting businesses and customers than something like Google or the existing search engines.

    I admit I haven’t really dug into what’s online related to business licences etc as part of this, though I’m fairly sure we don’t have something like that. If it exists I’d welcome some insight.