Overall social media engagement for local Canadian news has fallen by more than half, with social media engagement for all Canadian news falling by nearly half, one year after Meta’s Canadian news ban, which was a result of Canada’s Online News Act.
With the passage of the Online News Act (Bill C-18) in June 2023, the federal government required U.S. online media giants Meta and Google to give up a larger share of their profits from linking to Canadian journalists.
“Thanks to the Online News Act, newsrooms across the country can now negotiate fair compensation when their work appears on the largest digital platforms. It levels the playing field by keeping the power of big tech companies in check and ensuring that even our smallest news organizations can benefit from this system and be fairly compensated for their work,” said Pablo Rodriguez, Minister of Canadian Heritage, after the law was given royal assent.
A month later, Meta responded by banning all news posts on its websites (Facebook, Instagram and Threads) for Canadian users.
“The fact that these internet giants would rather deny Canadians access to local news than pay their fair share is a real problem, and now they are resorting to intimidation tactics to get their way. That will not work,” Prime Minister Trudeau said at the time.
After Google considered a similar news ban, the two governments have now agreed to a deal. The company will pay $100 million annually, distributed by the Canadian Journalism Collective, to continue offering Canadian journalism on its search engine.
While some praised the government for its fight against the American technology giants, others criticized its actions and viewed it as a huge gamble in which journalists had to bear the losses.
“By banning links to news sites, the millions of readers that Facebook had sent to the industry for free every day disappeared. The government had calculated that Facebook was bluffing. That was not the case.” Globe and Mail wrote columnist Andrew Coyne recently.
One year after Meta’s news ban, interactions with local Canadian news outlets across social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube dropped by over five million (58 percent), according to a study released last week. Engagement with national Canadian news dropped by 24 percent.
The Canadian news ban had almost no impact on Meta’s Canadian user traffic or time spent on the app, according to ReutersThe company had previously stated that links to Canadian news made up less than three percent of the content of its feeds and had no economic value.
According to the report by the Media Ecosystem Observatory (MEO), a think tank at McGill University and the University of Toronto that studies the health of Canada’s news industry, overall engagement among Canadian news users on the social media site has declined by 42 percent.
The loss of engagement meant about 11 million fewer views per day for all Canadian news outlets. The decline was driven by Facebook and Instagram, where engagement for Canadian news fell by over six million (82 percent) and two million (90 percent), respectively.
Meanwhile, social media giant TikTok, which is based in China and subject to its laws, increased Canadian news interactions by more than a million and is now the largest social media provider of Canadian news.
The overall decline in engagement is not good for Canada’s struggling local journalism, which relied heavily on Facebook for its online circulation and brand advertising in general.
One year after Meta’s news ban, the number of Canadian news outlets active on social media dropped to 555, of which 501 were local and 54 national. The vast majority of Canadian news outlets that went offline were local news outlets: 212 outlets, representing 98 percent of those no longer active on social media. The number of national Canadian news outlets active on social media, meanwhile, dropped by three.
In 2023 alone, at least 36 local news outlets were shut down across Canada. Some even cited the Meta News ban as the main reason for their demise. Since 2008, a total of 516 local Canadian radio, print, television and online news outlets have been shut down.
“The ban has hit local news organizations in Canada the hardest. Many lack the resources to build audiences from scratch on other platforms or are already struggling to survive. So the overall visibility of local news in Canada has declined and will likely continue to decline. The worst part is that the majority of Canadians haven’t even noticed this happening,” said MEO analyst Sara Parker. The Hub.
Discussions about Canadian news in Facebook groups – at least about political topics in the main discussion forums – were nevertheless essentially unaffected by Meta’s ban, the MEO report said.
In Facebook’s 40 most active Canadian political discussion groups, users have found a workaround by posting unverifiable screenshots instead of links.
Just over half of Canadians who use Facebook and Instagram to get their news (51 percent) said they were unaware of Meta’s ban on news content. A majority (about 70 percent) still use the sites as their primary source of news, according to the MEO report.
Meta has no intention of lifting its Canadian news ban. Ottawa has no plans to amend the Online News Act and recently suggested that Meta may still fall under its regulation because Canadian journalism appears as screenshots on the company’s platforms.
