One year after Meta’s news ban: What’s the outcome?  

14th August 2024
There has been a serious decline in public engagement with news media since Meta’s news ban in Canada, according to new research, as concerns rise over the way people source their news in Canada.
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Woman holds smart phone with facebook application on the screen. facebook is a photo-sharing app for smartphones. Credit: Jirapong Manustrong / Shutterstock.com

IN BRIEF : 

  • The Media Ecosystem Observatory published new research, painting a grim picture of the impact of Meta’s news ban on Canadian journalism.
  • The news ban drove media outlets to change their strategy and innovate to attract their audience on their websites and platforms. 
  • However, no progress is in sight for a deal between Meta and the Canadian government.

IN FULL:

– By Charlotte Pion

One year after Meta’s decision to ban the access of news to Canadians following the adoption of the Online News Act, new research has found there has been a significant decline in peoples’ access to online journalism. The bill was meant to address the issue of news outlets’ funding decline, due to the shift of advertising to tech platforms, by forcing the biggest tech companies (Google and Meta) to enter into negotiations with media organisations to compensate them for their content published on their platforms.  

However, instead of entering into these negotiations, Meta blocked Canadians from viewing, accessing, and sharing news article links on its platforms, including viewing news content from international news outlets.  

Read more: Meta pulls news from Canada

Since the ban, news outlets have struggled to draw the audience directly to their own websites.   

“What happened when Meta banned news for Canadians users?”  

To mark one year after Meta’s decision to block news access on its platforms in Canada, the Media Ecosystem Observatory published a study on the impact the ban has had on Canadian news media. The report depicted a bleak picture of the online news industry in Canada, which was already struggling before the ban:  

“Almost half of the public engagement has disappeared”: Overall, media organisations lost 43% of their public engagement as they were not able to compensate for the loss in engagement through Meta’s platforms. The majority of Canadians relied on social media platforms to be informed. “I was surprised — maybe shocked is a better word — by how profoundly the ban affected local news outlets. […] Obviously their engagement rates have decreased significantly, but many outlets have stopped posting [to Facebook and Instagram] entirely,” said Sara Parker, one of the authors of the report.  

“As a society that cares about the truth and cares about having a population that’s informed to ensure better democratic outcomes and to hold politicians to account, this is extremely bad news,”– Aengus Bridgman, Director of the Media Ecosystem Observatory

“Less news is being consumed by Canadians”: The report showed that despite some people seeking to be informed through Canadian broadcasters’ native mediums – such as their website, radio or television channels – “active news seekers are a minority”. The danger highlighted by the Media Ecosystem Observatory was the increasing risk of Canadians being informed on politics and current affairs through a “more biased and less factual lens than before”.  

“Almost one third of local news outlets are now inactive”:  Meta’s news ban had a significant impact on local and smaller news outlet, who depended a lot from their content being shared on Facebook and Instagram.  

“Three quarters of the Canadian public is unaware of the ban”: Only 22 percent of people are aware of the news block on Meta’s platforms. Despite Meta’s blockage of news for Canada users, a majority of people claimed they were still getting informed through social media platforms.

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“As a society that cares about the truth and cares about having a population that’s informed to ensure better democratic outcomes and to hold politicians to account, this is extremely bad news,” said Aengus Bridgman, director of the Media Ecosystem Observatory and contributor to the report.  

However, while there has been a noticeable drop in public engagement on social media, not everyone has been alarmed by the situation. According to Radio-Canada, local media were able to anticipate the blockage and adjust their strategy to reach their audience.  Even if they saw a serious drop of interaction on social media, they also noticed that their audience changed their behaviour and remained interested in local news. “Many people have set our site as their default homepage. They have downloaded the mobile application and activated notifications,” said Johanne Fournier, President of the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec.  

Facebook looping around the bill.  

Although Meta implemented a news ban to comply with the Online News Act, the tech giant also found a way to get around its own ban. A Radio-Canada report showed that when testing the new Meta AI chatbot, the tool was using Canadian news media websites, when questioned about current affairs. The tech giant also used search engines such as Bing, Google and Google News to answer questions about the news, sometimes copying passages from articles word for word. 

Additionally, ways of circumventing the news ban have also emerged, with people posting screenshots of Canadian news on Facebook, for example.   

No deal in sight but new ban abroad plausible 

After one year of trying to find an agreement with Meta, no deal seems to be near. While Meta has not budged on its position, Google signed an agreement with the government to pay Canadian media $100 million per year, indexed annually, in order to continue featuring news sites on its search engine. 

Canada was not the only one who pushed big tech companies to pay for the news media content they share on their platforms. The state of California has recently advanced a bill that would require big tech platforms to pay publishers to use and share their content. Australia crafted a similar legislation three years ago, the News Media Bargaining Code, forcing Meta and other big tech companies to enter in commercial deals with Australian news media organisations. However, Meta announced earlier in March it would put an end to this deal and block access to news on its platforms in Australia. Concerns over a “rising tide of misinformation and disinformation” were raised in a recent thinktank, calling on the Australian authorities to keep requiring big tech companies to pay for news content and put ‘deterioration of the information environment’ as a foreign policy priority.