{"id":3670,"date":"2008-11-26T15:06:23","date_gmt":"2008-11-26T19:06:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=3670"},"modified":"2008-11-26T15:06:23","modified_gmt":"2008-11-26T19:06:23","slug":"irony-alert-facebook-catch-22","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/11\/26\/irony-alert-facebook-catch-22\/","title":{"rendered":"Irony alert: Facebook Catch-22"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s a small thing, but it made me laugh out loud when I read it: the government of Ontario (the province I live in, for those of you outside Canada) has been confronted by<\/a> a grassroots protest against legislation for young drivers. More than 110,000 people have signed up for a Facebook group<\/a> that was set up in opposition to the proposed law, which would (among other things) restrict drivers who have a G1 or intermediate licence from carrying more than one other passenger under the age of 21. The law emerged at least in part because of a horrible accident<\/a> in which a car full of twenty-somethings heading home from a party wound up going off the road and killing three of the four passengers.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A terrible accident, of course. But here’s the ironic part: near the end of my colleague Murray Campbell’s story about the Ontario government’s response, and how premier Dalton McGuinty (yes, that’s his real name) wants to “engage in a dialogue” with some of the protesters who have joined the Facebook group, Murray mentions that<\/a> this desire is complicated by the fact that Ontario government employees can’t access Facebook at work<\/em>. Why? Because the province has rules that prevent them from doing so, as a result of concerns about privacy, people wasting time checking their friends’ Facebook status every five minutes, and so on.<\/p>\n

Here’s a word of advice for Mr. McGuinty and his government: If you really want to “engage in a dialogue” with those who are critical of you, it would help if you didn’t ban the tools that they are using to lobby you. Just a helpful tip — you can thank me later.<\/p>\n

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It’s a small thing, but it made me laugh out loud when I read it: the government of Ontario (the province I live in, for those of you outside Canada) has been confronted by a grassroots protest against legislation for young drivers. More than 110,000 people have signed up for a Facebook group that was … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Irony alert: Facebook Catch-22”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3670\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}