Update 05/24/24: my hosted version of sharenews was blocked by FB a couple of weeks ago. See option #1 below, or this post for a little more about it.
Update 10/3/23: both of those Sharenews URLs have been blocked by Facebook, but the developer released his code as open source, so you can now run the service from https://sharenews.pival.me/. Bookmarklet links below have been updated to point to that new location.
If you're in Canada and unable to post news articles to Facebook due to Bill C-18, here are two simple options for you.
- Send the link to the Internet Archive using the Wayback Machine browser extension, then paste the resulting URL into Facebook. Firefox link Chrome link. This method has the advantage of ensuring your newsworthy article is saved for others to view in perpetuity, should it disappear from the original location for any reason.
- Someone has built a page called ShareNews.ca (now ShareMyLink.ca) specifically to work around this. All it does is ask you to past your URL, then prepends the URL https://www.sharemylink.ca/ to the front of the URL of the page that you're trying to share, and, for now at least, Facebook is allowing that URL to be included in a post. If you'd like to streamline the process a bit, I built a bookmarklet that allows you to perform that same process w/o having to visit the ShareNews.ca website first. Hit the bookmarklet while on the page you want to share, and it'll prepend the sharenews.ca URL to it and place the whole thing in your clipboard, ready to share to FB. Here it is - just drag this to your shortcuts bar: ShareNews
(if that bookmarklet link gets stripped, here's the actual code:
javascript: (function () { var currentUrl = location.href; var newUrl = "https://sharenews.pival.me/" + currentUrl; navigator.clipboard.writeText(newUrl); alert("The new URL is in your clipboard and ready to post to FB"); })();
Thanks for the pointer to ShareNews.ca, Heather!
Update 9/18/23: updated link and bookmarklet to point to https://www.sharemylink.ca
New to bookmarklets?
