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At first glance—with its sky-blue trim, scrolling feed, and quirky community group pages—Spaces, a new Canadian social media platform, feels like a throwback to the early days of Facebook. But Jeff Elgie, who opened the site to the public last fall, says he isn’t looking to simply re-create the popular social network: he’s trying to revive social media as a home for local journalism.
Elgie, the CEO of the local news and marketing company Village Media, is working against the tide of declining online local journalism in Canada. In 2023, the Canadian government required social media sites to share profits from news stories with the media outlets that produce them; Meta, Facebook’s parent company, responded by blocking access to news for Canadian users, eviscerating a major forum for sharing information locally. Elgie, who had opposed the law out of concern it would result in exactly this outcome, saw an opening. “My goal is to materially impact Facebook’s audience in my community and others by making Spaces a better place for community discussion to happen,” he said.
Elgie envisions the network, which he once described as “Facebook groups meet Reddit meets NextDoor,” as a way to drive traffic to news—starting with the more than two dozen local sites he already owns. Village Media operates thirty-one digital news outlets across Ontario, as well as one in neighboring Michigan; the outlets are well-regarded and popular, and often serve communities without many other options for news. Spaces has been rolling out slowly, and only where Village Media already has a presence. ”If we didn’t own these news publications, we would never try to do this,” Elgie said. “We actually see this long term as a massive audience engagement tool for the community that can then benefit the news publication.”
To enter Spaces is to enter a digital town hall, with signage resembling the welcome sign seen in every real Ontario city. There is no centralized hub—instead, each locality operates as its own self-contained network, with forums for hobbies and interests relevant to the community, like “Gardening” and “What’s for Dinner.” The sidebar contains a running list of the latest stories from the local Village Media news site: “Crews ready as wildland fire season officially starts next week,” “Art by Wawa students celebrated at Ontario Legislature,” and “Man banned from Timmies again after smoking drugs in the restaurant.”
Interactions on the site are tightly controlled, said Eric Moss, the site’s user interface designer, with the aim of keeping conversations friendly and safe. Interest groups can only be set up by Village Media staffers and designated volunteer hosts. (“We didn’t make a ‘pothole’ group for a reason,” he said.) In 2020, some articles at SooToday, the company’s flagship news site, became so overrun with racist and hostile comments that it ended up shutting down comments. On Spaces, pages are open to the public to read, but only verified residents of the community can post, and there are no profile pages for users, nor any option for direct messaging. “We went back and forth on that,” Moss said. “But it’s not about the people. It’s about the topics.”
A friendly place for users also happens to be a friendly place for brands, something Elgie freely embraces. “I think the bulk of the industry has completely lost their way with how local advertising products should be built,” he said. “Just selling display ads beside original journalism will never work. But a robust community news and information model—with lots of service-based journalism like weather, transportation, events, classifieds, and obituaries—are really big for us.” The site’s microcommunities naturally lend themselves to microtargeted ads; members of the Sault Ste. Marie cycling group are likely to see ads for the local bike shop, and members of the Burlington real estate and housing page are likely to see ads for moving companies.
Dax D’Orazio, a political scientist at the University of Guelph who specializes in free speech issues and has been following the rollout of Spaces, says the intimacy of the site’s communities, and its reliance on local advertisers, could undermine the independence of the journalism it’s meant to empower. “They’re not necessarily buying insulation from critical reporting,” D’Orazio said, of the decisions local businesses might make about whether to advertise, “but it definitely creates an environment in which critical reporting and investigative reporting does not jibe with the bottom line.” D’Orazio also noted that the stringent moderation of discussion groups—while “laudable” in its goal of “reanimating the lost art of civil discussion”—could severely restrict the free exchange of ideas. “Is this just a space where communities share high fives? Or can they grapple with real community issues and have a space for productive conflict?”
Elgie prefers to characterize his moderation choices as springing from self-sacrifice. “There is no question that avoiding ‘inflammatory’ topics and discussions means that it’ll be a slower build for us,” he said in an email. “We accept that. We’d prefer a healthy, constructive environment for the community versus a viral inflammatory approach to it all.” Political discussions will have a place on the site, he added, “so long as they follow the rules (norms) of the Space.” As for the advertisers, he acknowledged that moderators would “discourage attacks on local businesses”—just like they would personal attacks on individuals. And if he loses some advertisers for the news business, it wouldn’t be the first time, he said. “These things happen in a small community all the time, but our team just finds someone to take the place of that advertiser and away we go.”
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