Posting news to the Take Action Against COVID Facebook group

This page concerns recommendations and rules about posting news to the Take Action Against COVID Facebook group.

As we are sure you aware of, Meta (Facebook’s and Instagram’s parent company) have retaliated against the Canadian government raising their taxes by blocking all news sharing on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads for Canadian residents. Scroll to the bottom to read about how to use workarounds to share news on Facebook.

When posting COVID and related news, please follow these guidelines to increase meaningful engagement.

1) Stay on topic. Posted news articles should relate to the pandemic situation in or affecting the province of Saskatchewan.

2) Don’t ‘spam’ the group with a lot of posts that are just news articles, about COVID or anything else. A lot of repetitive cold posting of bad news is not productive.

3) When posting a news article, introduce it: with your view, a comment, concern, description, encapsulating quote from the article, or a question. Articles should generate discussion, share our perspective, deepen our understanding and hopefully lead to suggestions of solutions and actions.

4) Never post links to sketchy anti-vax or misinformation sites (even to show why they’re wrong or absurd) as that can get our group flagged by Facebook. Facebook can’t read your intent.

5) Do not post rumours or misinformation. Be able to stand behind and credibly back up what you post.

6) Make sure you’re up-to-date on recent/previous posts, so you’re not posting a repeat. A repeat from the same or different media outlet isn’t helpful unless there is a significant point of difference. In this case, post the second article in the comments of the first.

7) Admins may remove other news posts at their discretion; e.g. if the posting violates other group discussion rules.

While Facebook/Meta is enforcing their “capital strike” against journalism for Canadians, in retaliation for taxation measures, news cannot be directly shared. Please use the following methods to work around the blocking of directly sharing news articles.

In general, these methods involve some copy-pasting which may be easier to do on a computer rather than a phone or tablet. We will keep these methods updated as new methods emerge or change.

1) Screenshot the article
2) Create a photo post in this group (like a regular post, just choose the green “add to your post” option)
3) Copy-paste as much of the article that you want into your Facebook post and click “Post”

1) Copy the URL of the article
2) Go to archive.org, click “Web” in the upper left corner of the menu
3) In the Save Page Now field, paste the URL, then click Save
4) Choose to “Save screen shot” if you are given an option (check the box)
5) Wait for Wayback Machine to generate a permanent link (takes a minute).
6) Copy the link, paste into a new post or comment under a post in this group. It should look something like:

https://web.archive.org/…/Long-COVID-Never-Been-Taken…

Tip: if you create and use a login account at Wayback machine, saving the article has more features.

1) create a Google Doc
2) paste the article into the new Google doc, format it or just remove the cruft (advertising)
3) use the sharing controls to make the document public and view only
4) paste the link here, which should look something like:

https://docs.google.com/…/13PSZyfAsZSOg3JINhItf…/edit…

We will keep working on solutions for the Take Action Against COVID group so that we can share blocked stories with less effort.

We offer these other ways of viewing informative links that have been shared in our group.

We now have a raindrop.io account where we collect links that have been shared in the group and via our Twitter. We presently don’t have a way for people to contribute to the collection directly, but we do try to add shared links as soon as possible.

If you want to view news stories collected in the group, sorted newest to oldest, visit:

https://www.actagainstcovid.ca/news

If you want to see all the bookmarks we’ve collected:

https://www.actagainstcovid.ca/bookmarks

To visit the most resource-rich reading and mass-distribution-worthy links in our reading:

https://www.actagainstcovid.ca/featured