Police officers in Canada will start posting important news on their personal social media accounts

With the passage of the "Online News Act," Meta Corporation recently announced that within the next few weeks, Canadians will stop seeing news posts in their Instagram and Facebook feeds. "The Online News Act is designed to require the tech giant corporations to pay for Canadian media outlets' news content that they post on their platforms.

And while media groups in Canada like the CBC and News Media Canada are contacting the Competition Bureau to check Meta's actions for competition law violations, many services have run into problems with news blocking and are looking for ways out.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police officials share that Meta's decision will affect the way information is communicated. In the coming weeks, police officers will not be able to count on Canadians to have local news appear in their social media feeds. People are used to using social media to get up-to-date information, and police services are used to disseminating important information through those very social media platforms. The question now became how to disseminate public safety information in a way that would reach the greatest number of people.

Meanwhile, some police officials are already finding unconventional ways out of the situation by using what they have. For example, the Winnipeg Police Department has announced that law enforcement officers will use their personal social media accounts to keep citizens informed about breaking news and missing persons. Perhaps the example of Winnipeg police officers will soon be followed by their counterparts in other cities and provinces, and soon police officers' personal Facebook and Instagram pages will in some ways replace the official accounts of agencies or news outlets.