Justin Pot

The dumbest trade war in world history is underway and Canadians are responding to the idiocy by changing their spending habits. American liquors have been pulled from store shelves and Canadians are trying to replace American products with Canadian equivalents at the grocery store. This is a great example of patriotic unity during a time of crisis—one that I can’t imagine happening in the divided United States. The boycotts in Canada will likely change consumer habits for decades to come, regardless of how long this stupidity lasts. 

Speaking as a Canadian who lives in the U.S. and has been covering technology for almost two decades, I would like to make one more suggestion: consider also boycotting American social media companies. I know: this is hard. But it’s also important. 

Your attention is one of the most valuable things you have. The things you spend time reading, watching, and discussing literally shape your thought and as such, who you are. Every minute you spend on one of these social networks is enriching people who are enabling the Trump administration and leaving yourself vulnerable to manipulation. 

Because American social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, and X are not neutral. These companies have a long history of influencing culture to serve their own ends: decades of optimizing for engagement above all other pursuits have led our collective global culture to the moment we’re in now. 

Even beyond that, the social media companies have made it clear where they stand. Mark Zuckerberg, who owns Facebook and Instagram, donated $1 million to the presidential inauguration and has otherwise gone out of his way to suck up to the current regime by doing things like dropping fact checking. This is a company that literally enabled a genocide through a combination of malice, ineptitude, and inaction. Can you trust them to behave responsibly given the current political context? 

And I don’t need to tell you that the zombified remains of Twitter, currently called X, cannot be trusted. That website exists so one man can manipulate global opinion to his whims. It was weaponized during the U.S. election, it was weaponized during the recent German elections, and you can count on it being weaponized during Canadian elections later this year. 

I could go on. The point is that these social networks are American products, owned by American oligarchs, all with connections to the current American regime. They are not neutral tools. 

I realize I’m being Quixotic here. Social media products are woven into the fabric of people’s digital lives, and they have their benefits. You might be questioning my premise here—isn’t social media driving the Buy Canadian moment right now? And you’re right. These are powerful tools. But they are not tools you are in control of. Every minute you spend on American-owned social media, you’re trusting these services to remain neutral on the question of Canadian sovereignty while there is every reason to believe that they won’t. 

So what should you do instead? The simplest thing is to just commit to spending less time on social media. Start a group text with your friends and post there instead. Stop getting your news from social media. Maybe watch the game at a bar, drinking Canadian beer, instead of watching at home while posting about it on X. Use this as a chance to unplug from the net and reconnect with your community. 

I personally think Canadians should consider building their own alternatives. There’s no quick answers here but there are tools available. There’s Mastodon, an open source alternative to Twitter. This was built by a worldwide network of collaborators and owned by no one. It’s also decentralized, meaning you can set up a social network for your family, friends, neighborhood, or city and still connect to the broader world. 

It turns out there’s a Montreal-based company that makes it easy for Canadians (or anyone) to quickly set up their own social network using that technology: Fedihost. This could be a shortcut toward Canada building its own alternative to the American social media giants while remaining connected to the rest of the world. Canadian media organizations and political leaders, at the very least, should consider using such tools so they can own the channels their messages are distributed on. 

That’s just one idea. And I don’t expect most people to set such services up themselves. It’s going to take a network of Canadian technologists and enthusiasts building such networks using the tools that exist while ordinary Canadians make the choice to shift their time to them. It won’t be easy, granted, but nothing about the times we live in are easy. It’s a question of what needs to be done to ensure Canadian sovereignty in the long term. 

I could go deeper into the weeds about different alternatives here, and I will if people are interested. For now, though, I just want you to stop thinking of the big American social networks as neutral tools. They aren’t—they’ve chosen a side. So should you.