Name: The boomer pause.

Age: A split second.

Appearance: An uncomfortably long break.

Does it refer to an entitled pause between statements to show that you, a boomer, own the room? Not quite: it refers to that awkward moment of silence between hitting “record” and speaking that boomers leave when they film their social media posts.

I’m not sure I understand. It’s like the millennial pause, but longer.

Wait – the millennial pause? A term, coined in 2021, for the telltale split-second pause millennials leave before speaking, because they came of age before TikTok.

And the boomer pause is longer, because boomers are even older? Exactly. Like a long pause before and after speaking.

So it’s a pause indicating age-related technological ineptitude? It’s more than that.

With an added note of self-satisfied indifference about how you come across? That’s part of it, I guess.

And a studied refusal to get to grips with even the most basic and user-friendly editing features? It’s just being a boomer, really.

Would you happen to have a popular example of the phenomenon to hand? Yes: Gary Barlow.

From Take That? That’s the one. On the TikTok account of his wine range, Barlow recently filmed himself grinning in front of a vineyard.

Gary Barlow has a wine range? Keep up. The clip, which has since gone viral, may be transcribed thus: (IMMENSE PAUSE). Barlow: “This is my idea of a very nice day out.” (SECOND IMMENSE PAUSE). End of video.

A boomer pause? “I thought my phone had frozen” was one of the many comments below the post.

Maybe he’s inserting a deliberate pause to … To what?

… to capture your attention. TikTok doesn’t work like that, grandad.

Anyway, I hate to break it to you, but Gary Barlow isn’t a boomer. Are you kidding? He has his own wine range, and homes worth millions in London, Oxfordshire and Santa Monica.

Barlow was born in 1971. The generally acknowledged boomer cutoff is 1964. He is technically Gen X. The boomer pause is down to the length of the gap, not the age of the pauser.

So Kylie Jenner could leave a boomer pause? She could, but she wouldn’t.

Do say: (After counting to five slowly in your head) “Hi, everybody!”

Don’t say: “I am pushing the button! It just keeps flashing this … oops, I think we’re on. Hi, everybody!”

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After a short-lived honeymoon, former President Donald Trump’s media company is experiencing a rough reception on Wall Street. Trump Media & Technology Group — which trades under the ticker DJT, his initials — tumbled 18.4% in Monday trading, a drop that follows last week’s 21% plunge. 

The sharp drop in value comes after Trump Media, whose primary asset is Truth Social, the social media platform, on Monday filed a document with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that opens the door for the future potential sale of millions of shares. The document, called an S-1, relates to warrants held by investors that can be transformed into shares of stock, as well as shares held by company insiders.

The filing also includes all the shares held by the former president. Trump, however, remains under a “lockup” deal that largely restricts him from selling his shares for another roughly five months. His son, Donald Trump Jr., who is a director on the board, and CEO Devin Nunes, are also bound by the lockup.

The stock plunge has erased billions from Trump’s stake — at least on paper. The shares soared when they began trading on March 26, giving Trump’s 57% ownership position a value of $6.25 billion. But after DJT’s recent slump, that stake is worth $2.1 billion, representing a paper loss of $4.15 billion. 

Overall, shareholders have lost $7.2 billion in value since the stock touched a high of $79.38 on March 26. The shares tumbled $5.98, or 18.4%, to $26.61 on Monday.

When companies issue additional shares, they take on the risk of their stock price coming under downward pressure. That’s due, in part, to simple laws of supply and demand — with more stock available, a company’s share price tends to fall unless there’s a commensurate increase in demand. 

So far, the former president’s supporters comprise a significant part of the company’s investor base, with Trump Media CEO Nunes praising their support on Fox Business earlier this month. On Truth Social, some investors said they believed the stock would recover, while others said they were taking advantage of the stock’s plunge to buy more shares. 

“Bought more today just like a lot of you,” one member of a Truth Social group dedicated to DJT shares wrote on Monday. “I believe time is our friend. Half a year until election. I can definitely hold until then at the minimum.”

Other supporters on Truth Social noted that the Monday filing doesn’t necessarily mean Trump plans to sell any of his 57% ownership stake in Trump Media. 

“Trump has NOT signaled intentions to sell his shares,” wrote Chad Nedohin, a pastor and musician, on Truth Social on Monday. “There is no new unexpected issuance of new shares. The increase in total shares in the S-1 is for the warrants.”

S-1 filings are typically filed quickly after a SPAC deal closes, usually within 15 or 30 days, said Kristi Marvin, founder of SPACInsider.com, which specializes in SPAC deals.

Trump Media & Technology Group didn’t immediately return a request for comment. 

200,000 new retail investors

Trump, who relies on Truth Social as his primary social media platform, has about 7 million followers on the app, where he frequently blasts his critics and promotes favorable polls. He’s also turned to Truth Social to rail about his criminal trial, which began Monday, over accusations of falsifying business records related to a “hush money” payment.

About 600,000 retail investors have bought shares in Trump Media & Technology group, with about 200,000 of them buying into the stock within the last few weeks, Nunes told Fox Business earlier this month. He called these small investors “the most amazing part about our company.”

Those investors have had a wild ride since the stock began trading as DJT on March 26. The shares soared on its first two days of trading, but have since shed more than two-thirds of their value. 

Such swings have prompted comparisons with so-called “meme” stocks like GameStop, which typically attract individual investors based on social media buzz, rather than traditional metrics favored by investors, such as revenue and profit growth. 

Last year, Trump Media lost $58 million on revenue of $4.1 million — about half the annual sales booked by a single Chick-fil-A location.

—With reporting by the Associated Press.

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Since Meta blocked links to news in Canada last August to avoid paying fees to media companies, right-wing meme producer Jeff Ballingall says he has seen a surge in clicks for his Canada Proud Facebook page.

“Our numbers are growing and we’re reaching more and more people every day,” said Ballingall, who publishes up to 10 posts a day and has some 540,000 followers.

“Media is just going to get more tribal and more niche,” he added. “This is just igniting it further.”

Canada has become ground zero for Facebook’s battle with governments that have enacted or are considering laws that force internet giants — primarily the social media platform’s owner Meta and Alphabet’s Google — to pay media companies for links to news published on their platforms.

Facebook has blocked news sharing in Canada rather than pay, saying news holds no economic value to its business.

It is seen as likely to take a similar step in Australia should Canberra try to enforce its 2021 content licensing law after Facebook said it would not extend the deals it has with news publishers there. Facebook briefly blocked news in Australia ahead of the law.

The blocking of news links has led to profound and disturbing changes in the way Canadian Facebook users engage with information about politics, two unpublished studies shared with Reuters found.

“The news being talked about in political groups is being replaced by memes,” said Taylor Owen, founding director of McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, who worked on one of the studies.

“The ambient presence of journalism and true information in our feeds, the signals of reliability that were there, that’s gone.”

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The lack of news on the platform and increased user engagement with opinion and non-verified content has the potential to undermine political discourse, particularly in election years, the studies’ researchers say. Both Canada and Australia go to the polls in 2025.

Other jurisdictions, including California and Britain, are also considering legislation to force internet giants to pay for news content. Indonesia introduced a similar law this year.

Blocked

In practice, Meta’s decision means that when someone makes a post with a link to a news article, Canadians will see a box with the message: “In response to Canadian government legislation, news content can’t be shared.”

Where once news posts on Facebook garnered between five million and eight million views from Canadians per day, that has disappeared, according to the Media Ecosystem Observatory, a McGill University and University of Toronto project.

Although engagement with political influencer accounts such as partisan commentators, academics and media professionals was unchanged, reactions to image-based posts in Canadian political Facebook groups tripled to match the previous engagement with news posts, the study also found.

The research analyzed some 40,000 posts and compared user activity before and after the blocking of news links on the pages of some 1,000 news publishers, 185 political influencers and 600 political groups.

A Meta spokesperson said the research confirmed the company’s view that people still come “to Facebook and Instagram even without news on the platform.”

Canadians can still access “authoritative information from a range of sources” on Facebook, and the company’s fact-checking process was “committed to stopping the spread of misinformation on our services,” the spokesperson said.

‘Unreliable’ sources

A separate NewsGuard study conducted for Reuters found that likes, comments and shares of what it categorized as “unreliable” sources climbed to 6.9 per cent in Canada in the 90 days after the ban, compared to 2.2 per cent in the 90 days before.

“This is especially troubling,” said Gordon Crovitz, co-chief executive of New York-based NewsGuard, a fact-checking company which scores websites for accuracy.

Crovitz noted the change has come at a time when “we see a sharp uptick in the number of AI-generated news sites publishing false claims and growing numbers of faked audio, images and videos, including from hostile governments … intended to influence elections.”

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Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge in an emailed statement to Reuters called Meta’s blocking of news an “unfortunate and reckless choice” that had left “disinformation and misinformation to spread on their platform … during need-to-know situations like wildfires, emergencies, local elections and other critical times.”

Asked about the studies, Australian Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones said via email: “Access to trusted, quality content is important for Australians, and it is in Meta’s own interest to support this content on its platforms.”

Jones, who will decide whether to hire an arbitrator to set Facebook’s media licensing arrangements, said the government had made clear its position to Meta that Australian news media businesses should be “fairly remunerated for news content used on digital platforms.”

Meta declined to comment on future business decisions in Australia but said it would continue engaging with the government.

Facebook remains the most popular social media platform for current affairs content, studies show, even though it has been declining as a news source for years amid an exodus of younger users to rivals and Meta’s strategy of de-prioritizing politics in user feeds.

In Canada, where four-fifths of the population is on Facebook, 51 per cent obtained news on the platform in 2023, the Media Ecosystem Observatory said.

Two-thirds of Australians are on Facebook and 32 per cent used the platform for news last year, the University of Canberra said.

Unlike Facebook, Google has not indicated any changes to its deals with news publishers in Australia and reached a deal with the Canadian government to make payments to a fund that will support media outlets.

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