This is not what Canada’s government envisaged when it passed the Online News Act last June. The law promised “fairness in the Canadian digital-news marketplace”. The idea, inspired by a similar law in Australia, was to force Google and Meta, the kings of search and social media, to pay news outlets when their articles appear in search results and social feeds. Publishers and broadcasters have long complained that the tech firms have gobbled up their advertising market. The act was meant to claw some of that money back.
In November, Google agreed to pay C$100m ($74m) a year into a government-run fund for Canadian newsrooms. But Meta declined. News makes up less than 3% of the Facebook feed globally, the firm said, and is of little value to it. Publishers benefit when their stories are shared, it added, which is why most post their own content themselves. Instead of paying, Meta said it would block news links from its apps. Since August, users of Facebook and Instagram in Canada have been unable to view or share links to any news site, from Ku’ku’kwes News to Economist.com.
Nine months later, the number of people using Facebook and Instagram in Canada hasn’t budged. The apps are being downloaded as much as ever, according to Sensor Tower, a market-intelligence firm. Nor does the lack of news seem to be hurting Meta’s pocket, despite an ad boycott led by Canada’s government. The firm does not break out Canadian earnings, but its ad revenue across the United States and Canada has grown 19% in the nine months since the news blackout began, compared with the same period in the previous year.
For news organisations, the impact has been more dramatic. A study published in April by researchers at McGill University and the University of Toronto found that, six months after the blackout, the Facebook pages of Canadian national news outlets had lost 64% of their “engagement” (likes, comments and so on), while those of local outlets had lost 85%. Almost half of local titles had stopped posting on Facebook at all, “gutting the visibility of local news content”, the researchers found.
Large publications, with their own apps and widely known brands, are well placed to weather the ban. But for some digital-only titles, Meta’s blackout has been “absolutely devastating”, says Paul Deegan, head of News Media Canada, which represents publishers. Adam Reaburn, editor of Energetic City, a site covering what he says is otherwise a “news desert” in rural British Columbia, says the news ban initially cut his readership by 30-40%. “I don’t understand why Google, Instagram and Facebook need to pay us when we use their platforms to share our articles,” he wrote in his final Facebook post in August.
Readers are finding ways around the ban. Unable to share links, some are posting screenshots of articles. On “Only in Canada”, a Facebook group with half a million members, jokes and memes are interspersed with photos of headlines from blocked news sites, from the BBC to CTV, a Canadian television network. The sharing of news screenshots on Facebook has more than tripled since the blackout, largely replacing links as a source of engagement on political Facebook pages, the McGill and Toronto researchers found.
News outlets are adapting, too. Energetic City has signed up 5,000 readers to an email newsletter, built a mobile app and put up posters around town with QR codes leading to its website. “We basically have to reteach our readers how to find the news,” Mr Reaburn says. Ku’ku’kwes is courting audiences outside Canada. Indigenous communities in the United States, who can still share news on Facebook, are a growing share of readership; Ms Googoo is planning a reporting trip to Maine.
Some worry that dubious sources of information will fill the gap left by the mainstream sort. “With the ban on news, there has been an explosion of disinformation and misinformation,” says Pascale St-Onge, the minister responsible for the act. NewsGuard, a fact-checking organisation, found that “unreliable” sources accounted for 6.9% of engagement with news on Facebook in Canada in the 90 days after the blackout, compared with 2.2% in the 90 days before. (The McGill and Toronto researchers, by contrast, found no increase in misinformation.) On social media, “the clean drinking water and the sewage are going through the same pipe,” says Mr Deegan. “Without news, the only thing going through is the sewage.” He fears this lowers incentives for politicians to engage with journalists, prompting them to communicate directly through social media instead. “Without that level of scrutiny…that is bad for democracy,” he says. An election is due next year.
Canada’s communications regulator will decide later this year whether the fact that Meta has blocked news links excuses it from making payments. Ms St-Onge says Meta should still have to pay, because news content is still finding its way onto its platforms. If the regulator disagrees, then “we’ll see how it’s possible to amend that piece of legislation, because as long as we’re in government, we’re not going to give up,” she says. Any amendments would have to respect Meta’s freedom of expression and make sure that “we don’t infringe on that [by] obliging certain content to be shown,” she acknowledges. News Media Canada, which supports the new law, is attacking Meta on another front, lodging a complaint with Canada’s competition regulator, arguing that Meta’s link-blocking is an abuse of its dominant position.
Canada’s difficulties may cause countries mulling similar laws to think carefully. When Australia wrung a reported A$200m ($130m) per year out of Google and Meta using its news-media bargaining code, passed in 2021, countries including Britain, Brazil and South Africa pricked up their ears. But Meta appears emboldened by its Canadian experience. In February it said it would not renew the deals it had earlier struck in Australia. “For now, Meta has left the building,” Jesper Doub, who was head of international news partnerships at Meta until last year, told a journalism conference in Italy in April. “If you want to measure the value [of news], take it away and see what happens. And they did in Canada …Nothing happened.” In future, whenever Meta faces demands for payment, “they will just walk away,” Mr Doub said.
That will mean less news on the world’s biggest social network, and fewer readers for small publishers. Ms Googoo hopes Meta’s news blackout will one day lift, and in the meantime has applied for money from the Google fund. For now, however, the main effect of the new law is that fewer people are reading her stories. “The act is supposed to help us,” she says. “But it’s hurting us.”