Ottawa’s crackdown on independent media just got worse
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with Canadian content creator, producer, podcaster, and all-around great guy, Alex Blumberg, to talk all things Canadian content. We talk about what it's like being a Canadian producer in 2019, what's going on with C11, and why it's so important to have a Canadian voice on social media.
Transcript
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Like you get government involved with this of guess what?
00:00:02.680
We're going to have a bunch of bureaucrats in Ottawa and Gatineau decide what is and is not Canadian content.
00:00:10.000
And so now what's happening with your show, and I imagine with a whole bunch of other producers who are on places like YouTube,
00:00:16.100
it's almost like you're hitting the walls of a glass jar, right?
00:00:21.440
I just wanted to point out it isn't just you speaking to camera, which is still good, but you're doing big interviews, right?
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like you're talking to newsmakers and big players in Canada. Yeah. And it's totally silenced. It's
00:00:35.660
and it is. And again, I'm following it in my analytics. And this is something that I've
00:00:40.120
studied a lot that I've had my my spidey senses tingling on ever since it was first introduced.
00:00:45.780
And it is such a disservice. It truly is. And I think the best way that I could summarize it as
00:00:52.680
well, is the forced outcome of discoverability for those approved pieces of content that are
00:01:01.060
somehow promoting Canadian. Again, I don't get it. But the fact that you will have something where
00:01:10.560
every single analytic shows that the audience absolutely loves this, you know, and yet it still
00:01:18.960
gets for lack of better words killed yeah but and nobody's allowed to see it even though if you were
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in any other country that would have been viral um and that's really frustrating to deal with
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though i am doing a social experiment very soon and i will be traveling to the states i live very
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close to the border and i'm going to be publishing my show for a couple of weeks from a nice little
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airbnb i've rented out there just so that i can actually compare the analytical data and have
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much more solid ground on how much c11 is not only blocking me from from reaching canadians
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but it's also blocking me from reaching a global audience as well which used to be easy you used to
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very easily be able to uh to break into the ether and so at the end of the day i think all of this
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stuff truly it is meant to promote canadian content but what it's actually doing is it's
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isolating canadian content so much so like you are actually shutting off the taps for canadian
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voices to make it on a large scale so if you want to if you want to promote canada the best way to
00:02:23.220
do that is probably not to have algorithms manipulated so that your content is only being
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shown in canada and not anywhere else in the world like you are literally isolating your
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entire country and content creators of all stripes it doesn't matter what you do either obviously
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there's some categories that are more protected but you could have a cooking channel and because
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you don't count as being Canadian, well, you're not going to be seen as often.