TORONTO - An online experiment involving the CBC and Facebook has become dominated by debates over abortion and same-sex marriage, with the public broadcaster defending the informal poll as a successful foray into new media.
The Great Canadian Wish List - in which Canadians are encouraged to visit a Facebook page to post their hope for the future - comes to a close this weekend with a call to ban abortion as the No. 1 entry as of Wednesday.
The outcome has observers pointing to the sophisticated ways that lobby groups are infiltrating and taking advantage of social networking sites, and CBC fans questioning the public broadcaster's judgment.
"I don't know that it's made CBC look like a responsible broadcaster, I don't know that it's made it look like they're on the forefront of incorporating new technology into their media palate," said journalist Elaine Corden, who wrote a column about the wish list for the Tyee.ca.
"In some ways it's kind of embarrassing for them."
"It's made the CBC look like they did something without being able to anticipate how easily a blatantly populist scheme could be perverted or hijacked or whatever you want to call it by special interest groups."
Controversy has dogged the Great Canadian Wish List since it was launched on May 28, with conservative views on abortion, marriage and religion overtaking calls for better health care and education by Day 2. As of Wednesday afternoon, roughly 18,000 Facebook members had submitted their hopes for the future, with the top five wishes being: 1. ban abortion; 2. continue to allow abortion; 3. have "a spiritual revival in our nation"; 4. restore the traditional definition of marriage; 5. lower or eliminate tuition fees.
The winner will be announced on Canada Day on CBC Newsworld, says CBC reporter Mike Wise, who came up with the wish list project with youth group Student Vote.
Wise admits the Facebook page has been beset with problems, noting that for a time a technical glitch allowed users to vote more than once and that there's nothing to stop ardent lobbyists from setting up dummy Facebook accounts to bolster the numbers for their campaign.
And because the site is global, there's no guarantee that those voting for the Great Canadian Wish List are even Canadian. More than two million Canadians are members of Facebook.
Despite its faults, Wise says the project has succeeded in generating great discussion and in giving a forum to issues that otherwise may be overlooked by mainstream media.
"There's inherent risks involved with this and yeah, things come back to cause some concern," says Wise, noting the site has seen a fair bit of "juvenile" and "bullying" behaviour.
"We stepped out into an area where, because it was on Facebook, it was beyond the reach of the CBC journalistic policy so it was edgier stuff that we had no control of. However, I think we should get some marks for trying something different."
Wise says the project was never meant to provide an accurate poll, but rather as an experiment to see how the broadcaster could harness the power of social networking sites to reach its audience.
Journalism professor Alfred Hermida says it was a good idea but poorly executed. He said the CBC should have tried to maintain some control over content by hosting the survey on its own site, but acknowledged that Facebook's immense popularity made it an attractive platform to reach the young and hip and that hosting the project would have required immense time and resources.
At the very least, he says the CBC should have been more upfront about Facebook's unmoderated nature and pointed out rogue tactics on the site as soon as they appeared, rather than relying on a separate CBC blog to explain the controversy.
Still, Hermida said it was a worthy exercise that other news organizations should examine.
"News organizations, the media, are in a war of innovation and so far, news organizations have lost every battle," says Hermida, a new media specialist at the University of British Columbia.
"They've lost the classifieds to Craigslist, photo sharing to Flickr, social networking to MySpace and Facebook. Innovation has to become a core of journalism values. CBC should be praised for trying to do something innovative. It didn't work - well, we just won't do it this way next time. You learn from your mistakes."
Most surprising to Hermida was the ability for certain lobby groups to quickly seize on the relatively new forum to push their message across.
"They've gone beyond the traditional campaigning of having the protests outside Parliament or petitioning the prime minister to actually being aware of what is happening within these social networking sites and then getting organized and having their members organize so that they all can take part in these new forms of expression."
Wise says he will file a radio report Saturday and a Newsworld report Sunday that will explore some of the issues and pitfalls surrounding the project.
