Alberta Separatism and Monetized ‘Content’ on Social Media ⇥ cbc.ca

Eric Szeto, Jordan Pearson, and Christian Paas-Lang, CBC News:

You might think, based on the volume of her Facebook posts, that Nieta Aqila is an Albertan who supports separation.

“I signed the Alberta independence petition” because “Canada is not a great country anymore,” an account in her name wrote in a popular Facebook group called Alberta Independence that promotes the movement and has more than 100,000 members.

[…]

But the account owner, according to a CBC visual investigation, was posing as a Canadian and is actually a noodle merchant and content creator from Indonesia, who in some cases was just stealing content from real Albertans.

You might remember the Dutch YouTube channels running a similar playbook: find controversial and newsmaking topics, generate material, and rake in a cut of the ad revenue. In purely financial terms, it is not a bad gig, particularly for this person who lives in a region where minimum wage is about USD $220 per month. An extra USD $14 per month from Facebook, which is what they reported earning in April, can be meaningful. (A screenshot in this article shows a much lower take in previous months.)

The flattening of media into “content” is partly to blame for why this stuff can happen. It appears to get little attention as-is, but it would get none at all without the samey generic framing created by Facebook and YouTube. It is also unlikely a random person in Indonesia or the Netherlands would want to make these kinds of posts without the monetization programs provided by these platforms.