Mapping Canadian Social Media: News Sharing on Canadian Mastodon Instances

Thank you for coming to this presentation! I am excited to present "Mapping Canadian Social Media" as part of this panel.

Note that I am presenting on behalf of the lead author, Alex Martin, a PhD student at York University.

Also, a quick disclosure: no generative AI was used in this research or any part of this presentation. I also don't consent to any part of my work being fed into large language models.

Speaking of Alex, he published an article with Open Canada magazine, laying out the fundamental problem we're interested in: how Canadians are wrestling with the fact that they have become reliant on predominantly US-based technology firms.

As he writes, "As Canada faces ongoing challenges, ranging from a growing trade war with the US to fears of becoming the ‘51st state,’ it must also contend with a crucial issue: the information war on social media....

...US-centric social media platforms, particularly Meta and X, wield immense influence over Canadian public discourse, with 30 million Canadians using Facebook and 14 million active users on X alone."

Alex invokes a major political moment in Canada -- the reaction to Donald Trump's repeated (and frankly nauseating) suggestion that Canada should join the United States as the 'cherished 51st state.' This set off a massive wave of nationalism in Canada -- the "elbows up" turn, to use a hockey term. We can have a conversation about the perils of Canadian nationalism -- and there are many -- but at least when it comes to media, Canada has had to struggle with questions of identity in relation to the US for generations. The relationship of Canadians to US social media is no different.

Indeed, the fraught US-Canada media relationship includes a ban on sharing Canadian news imposed by Meta, which was done in reaction to the Canadian government's attempt to regulate Meta.

The Online News Act and Meta's news ban has led to a perverse outcome: the top provider of news to Regina, SK is a garbage company's Facebook page. That's because, well, it's a garbage company, so they can share local news on Facebook, while actual news companies cannot. While dealing with the Online News Act and Meta's recalcitrance is a matter for another paper, what Alex and I are interested in is...

...Canadian social media. I don't mean Canadians' use of US corporate social media. Rather, we're interested in social media run by Canadians, for Canadians, and where Canadians can share news. This project was something Alex, a PhD student in Science and Technology Studies at York, brought to me. And, if you know my research interests, you know that of course, I said

Yes, let's examine how Canadians are running their own social media.

This research is in line with a network I am building, the Network of Alternative Social Media Scholars. (If you're interested in this, please see me!)

The paper Alex and I put together has many concerns: US-Canada media relations, the relationship between social media and news, and the very idea of 'alternative social media' (see my talk tomorrow for mor about this.) But since this is a panel about mapping and media, I will focus today on the question of Canadian alternative social media. This is a major methodological question in our paper.

To narrow things, we focused on Mastodon. There are a variety of alternative social media systems -- again, come to my talk tomorrow for more -- so Alex and I narrowed the focus to Mastodon. Mastodon is free and open source social media software you can install on a server (often called an 'instance'). It is a microblogging system, so the 'verbs' are like Twitter -- followers, posts, likes, reposts. You can invite your friends to join your server...

But that server isn't isolated. It can connect with other servers via ActivityPub, an open protocol for social media. Mastodon is part of a global network of tens of thousands of servers called "the fediverse." Ok, I mentioned a methodological challenge of mapping Canadian Mastodon instances.

At first glance, focusing on Canadian Mastodon instances sounds easy -- let's just look at Mastodon servers with Canadian IP addresses, running somewhere in Canada.... right? Well, it's a bit more complicated than that.

A server installed in Canada might simply be using a Canadian hosting service, but otherwise have no connection to Canada. It could serve any group anywhere there's an internet connection. Conversely, a server physically located outside Canada could be explicitly directed at Canadians. Data centers are found all over the world. So mapping Canadian Mastodon instances is not cut-and-dried.

Alex and I discussed the problem, and then we turned a range of tools that provide metadata about Mastodon instances: Fediverse Observer, To The Fediverse, and the Mastodonserver.ca list. Basically, Alex and I separately looked around. We both examined instances discovered via these tools, compared our lists, and refined, with the question "what is a Canadian Mastodon instance?" in mind.

Through several discussions, Alex and I settled on three major categories of Canadian Mastodon instances: instances intended for Canadians writ large, instances intended for residents of specific regions in Canada, and special-interest servers with an explicit connection to Canada.

Examples of the first include mstdn.ca, Thecandian.social, and Cosocial.ca. These instances do tend to be physically located in Canada. But that is not necessarily required -- they could be physically located on a server farm in, say, Portugal. However, they are all explicitly aimed at building a member base of Canadians -- whether those Canadians live in Canada or abroad.

Regional Candian instances like Niagara.social, Ottawa.place, Nfld.me, or Newwest.social are tied to specific areas (cities, metropolitan areas, or provinces of Canada). The same caveats here -- they may or may not be physically hosted in Canada, but they are all aimed at Canadians (at a regional level).

This category is interesting. Mastodon instances like Sunny.garden, Vmst.io, CanAdapt, or Waff.club are geared towards interests -- gardening, art, technology, activism, and so on. So, what makes these Canadian? One key marker, for us, was explicit mention of a connection to Canada.

For example, Waff.club, which describes itself as a “Furry Mastodon server for art, 3D animations, and general furry stuff,” also includes in the top of its About page “currently hosted in Canada.” Other instances mention that their admins or moderators are based in Canada. Well, so what? The answer, we think, is that announcing the legal jurisdictions of the instance or its admins signals to would-be members. In the case of furries, who are a marginalized group, this might be very important -- privacy regulations, legal protections, protections for free expression, or languages, could be key decisions.

To go back to Waff.club again, their rules include "No posting of illegal content (based on Canadian laws, since the server is hosted in Canada)." So the declaration that a server is based in Canada, or its admins or moderators reside in Canada, invokes a connection to a legal and political regime distinct from, say, the United States or Russia.

There's more to the paper than just the mapping and categorization of Canadian Mastodon instances, but I have limited time. Here, I will say the paper includes interviews with Mastodon admins and members, interviews with Canadian journalists and politicians who are on these instances, and analysis of news sharing practices on Canadian Mastodon. On this last note, let me share a key finding of interest to this panel. Here's a quote from an interviewee.

"I try to promote Maritime-local news, especially community-oriented content. I am motivated by hope for stronger communities, which is what motivated me to start the instance in the first place…. Mastodon’s non-algorithmic feed helps to promote news sharing in local communities." This quote from an interviewee was part of a larger theme we discovered...

A desire for local Canadian news, provided through locally-run social media in Canada. In the wake of Meta's news ban, as well as the long, slow death of local journalism in Canada, some Canadians are hoping that regionally-based, community-run social media might be an antidote to growing news deserts across Canada. This is a sector worth fostering.

With that, I will conclude. Thank you!

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