Byron Kay
(Reuters) – Since Meta blocked news links in Canada last August to avoid paying fees to media companies, right-wing meme producer Geoff Ballingall says he’s seen a spike in clicks on his Canada Proud (NASDAQ:) Facebook page.
“Our numbers are growing and we’re reaching more and more people every day,” said Ballingall, who posts up to 10 times a day and has about 540,000 followers.
“The media will just become more tribal and niche,” he added. “This only inflames the situation further.”
Canada has become the epicenter of Facebook’s battle with governments that have passed or are considering laws that would force internet giants – most notably social media platform owner Meta and Google Alphabet (NASDAQ:) – to pay media companies for links to news published on their sites. platforms.
Instead of paying, Facebook blocked news sharing in Canada, saying the news had no economic value to its business.
Australia is likely to make a similar move if Canberra tries to enforce its 2021 content licensing law after Facebook said it would not renew agreements with local news publishers. Facebook briefly blocked news in Australia without waiting for the law to pass.
Blocking news links has led to profound and troubling changes in the way Canadian Facebook users interact with information about politics, two unpublished studies obtained by Reuters have found.
“The news that is talked about 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 presence of journalism and truthful information in our feeds, the signals of reliability that were there, have disappeared.”
The lack of news on the platform and increasing user engagement with opinion and unverified content could undermine political discourse, especially during election years, the study’s researchers say. Both Canada and Australia will participate in elections in 2025.
Other jurisdictions, including California and the UK, are also considering legislation to force internet giants to pay for news content. Indonesia passed a similar law this year.
BLOCKED
In practice, Meta’s solution means that when someone posts a message with a link to a news article, Canadians will see a box that says, “Under Canadian law, news content cannot be published.”
According to the Media Ecosystem Observatory, a project of McGill University and the University of Toronto, while news posts on Facebook once attracted between 5 and 8 million views from Canadians per day, that has disappeared.
The study also found that while engagement with the accounts of political influencers such as party commentators, academics and media professionals remained unchanged, reactions to image posts in Canadian political Facebook groups tripled, consistent with previous engagement with news posts, the study found.
The study analyzed nearly 40,000 posts and compared user activity before and after blocking news links on the pages of about 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 go “to Facebook and Instagram even when there is no news on the platform.”
Canadians can still access “authoritative information from a variety of sources” on Facebook, and the company’s fact-checking process is “committed to stopping the spread of misinformation about our services,” the spokesperson said.
A separate NewsGuard study conducted for Reuters found that the number of likes, comments and shares from what it classifies as “unreliable” sources rose to 6.9% in Canada in the 90 days after the ban, up from 2.2% after the ban. 90 days before.
“This is particularly troubling,” said Gordon Crovitz, co-chief executive of NewsGuard, a New York-based fact-checking company that rates the accuracy of websites.
Crovitz noted that the changes come at a time when “we are seeing a surge in the number of AI-powered news sites publishing false claims, and a growing number of fake audio, images and videos, including from hostile governments… aimed at influencing for the elections.” ”
Canadian Heritage Minister Pascal St. Onge, in a statement emailed to Reuters, called Meta’s blocking of news an “unfortunate and reckless choice” that has led to the spread of “disinformation and misinformation on their platform… during sensitive situations such as wildfires, emergencies, local elections and other critical moments.”
Asked about the research, Australian Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones said via email: “Access to trusted, quality content is important to Australians and it is in Meta’s own interests to support this content on its platforms.”
Jones, who will decide whether to hire an arbitrator to negotiate Facebook’s media licensing agreements, said the government had made its position clear to Meta that Australian news media companies 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 to work with the government.
Facebook remains the most popular social media platform for current affairs content, research shows, even as it has been losing status as a news source for years due to an exodus of young users to competitors and Meta’s strategy to de-emphasize politics in user feeds .
In Canada, where four-fifths of the population uses Facebook, 51% got news on the platform in 2023, according to the Media Ecosystem Observatory.
Two-thirds of Australians use Facebook last year, and 32% used the platform to get news, according to the University of Canberra.
Unlike Facebook, Google has not announced any changes to its deals with news publishers in Australia and has reached an agreement with the Canadian government to pay into a fund that will support media outlets.