Achi news desk-
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’s 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 around 540,000 followers.
“The media is going to become more tribal and more niche,” he added. “This ignites it further.”
Canada has become ground zero for Facebook’s battle with governments that have enacted or are considering laws forcing internet giants – mainly the owner of social media platform Meta and Alphabet’s Google – to pay media companies for links to news and published on their platforms.
Facebook has blocked news sharing in Canada rather than pay, saying news has no economic value to its business.
It is seen as likely to take a similar step in Australia if Canberra tries 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 before the law.
Blocking 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led to profound and disturbing changes in the way Canadian Facebook users engage with information about politics, two unpublished studies shared with Reuters found.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 that is discussed in political groups is being replaced by memes,” said Taylor Owen, founding director of McGill University’s Center for Media, Technology and Democracy, who worked on one of the studies.
“The ambient presence of journalism and true information in our streams, the signals of reliability that were there, are gone.”
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The lack of news on the platform and increased user engagement with unverified opinions and content has the potential to undermine political discourse, especially during election years, the studies’ researchers said. 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 cannot be shared.”
Where once news messages on Facebook gathered between five million and eight million views from Canadians a day, that has disappeared, according to the Media Ecosystem Observatory, a project by McGill University and the University of Toronto.
While engagement with the accounts of political influencers such as partisan commentators, academics and media professionals has been flat, responses to image-based posts in political Facebook groups in Canada tripled to match previous engagement with posts news, the study also found.
The research analyzed around 40,000 posts and compared user activity before and after blocking news links on the pages of around 1,000 news publishers, 185 political influencers and 600 political groups.
A Meta spokesperson said the research confirms 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 preventing 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 deemed “unreliable” sources climbed to 6.9 per cent in Canada in the 90 days after the ban, compared to 2.2 per hundred in the previous 90 days.
“This is particularly concerning,” said Gordon Crovitz, co-chief executive of New York-based NewsGuard, a fact-checking firm that scores websites for accuracy.
Crovitz noted that the change comes at a time when “we are seeing a sharp increase in the number of AI-generated news sites publishing false claims and increasing numbers of fake audio, images and videos, including from hostile governments… intended to influence elections.”
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In an emailed statement to Reuters, Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge called Meta’s news blocking an “unfortunate and reckless choice” that had allowed “disinformation and misinformation to spread on their platform… during situations of need- to-know such as wildfires, emergencies, local elections and other critical times.”
When asked about the studies, Australian Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones said by email: “Access to reliable, quality content is important to 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 its position clear to Meta that Australian news media businesses “should be paid fairly for news content used on digital platforms .”
Meta declined to comment on future business decisions in Australia but said it would continue to engage with the government.
Facebook remains the most popular social media platform for current affairs content, according to studies, although it has been declining as a news source for years amid an exodus of younger users to competitors and Meta’s strategy of de-prioritizing politics in consumer feeds.
In Canada, where four-fifths of the population is on Facebook, 51 percent got 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 has reached an agreement with the Canadian government to make payments to a fund that will support media outlets.
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