A year of Meta's news ban in Canada | Hacker News Reader

A year of Meta's news ban in Canada

mediaecosystemobservatory.com

119 pointsikesau134 comments

This whole fiasco was such an obvious own-goal cooked up by an unholy coalition of newspaper industry lobbyists and progressive politicians who are explicitly hostile to understanding the simplest economic principles.

To illustrate the absurdity, imagine if a newspaper had a community section containing blurbs about upcoming local events. Some well-meaning politician comes in and says that the newspaper should pay $10 to every event they feature, because they're benefitting from selling ads on the next page.

The obvious outcome would be for the newspaper to decide that it's just not worth the trouble and remove the community events page. Now everyone is crying and blaming the rich evil newspaper because the events are struggling with less attendance than before.

It turns out that having free links to their stories all over social media really was beneficial to the media, and they were the ones who would be harmed the most by punishing social media companies for allowing it.

I've even seen news organizations' official accounts posting obfuscated links to their stories to get around the ban. Why would they do that, if the core premise that uncompensated links are "stealing" were even remotely close to being true?

One flaw with the comparison is that event organizers submit their upcoming events to the newspaper and may even agree to an interview if the newspaper thought it worthy enough to write their own blurb. In some cases the event organizers will be paying to appear in the events list. Notice how the event organizers are making most of the decisions. The incentives are also completely different. Those events lists are promotional tools in the eyes of event organizers. They benefit from being in them.

With respect to news organizations and social media, they (or at least a subset of them) felt that social media companies were receiving a disproportionate benefit from their product. What resulted was a battle of the titans, where pretty much everyone loses out. It's important to remember that bit about titans. Both the news organizations and social media companies are taking their stance to benefit themselves, not consumers.

News organisations would routinely post links to their latest stories using their official social media accounts.

Don't you think they would have stopped if they felt they were being harmed by it?

That's why I made the comment about disproportionate benefit. It is clear that news organizations want, or at least feel compelled, to use social media as a promotional tool under some circumstances. Yet they don't like the terms that social media sites offer them.

In some respects, I don't blame them. If most people just skim the headlines and never click through to read the article, newspapers would be better served by their readership going to their own landing page. The other option is to recognize that the title and summary have intrinsic value, in which case the news organizations should have the right to request compensation.

I realize that there are other factors to consider here. For example: end users sharing links, either as information or to solicit discussion, should be considered a form of expression. Unfortunately, the business interests of social media sites muddies the waters.

It was an attempt to replicate similar legislation in Australia. The difference is Rupert Murdoch is almighty in Australian politics and any retorsion of the kind Meta deployed in Canada would have been met with stern reprisals from the supine government. No media group has that kind of power in Canada.

Meta gave notice at the start of 2024 that it wouldn't renew it's agreements in Australia when they expire.

It looks like the agreements have expired in the last few weeks and things are working their way through a process.

Good, the Canadian example gives them the ability to tell Murdoch to buzz off.

Very well put. The whole legislation is completely backwards to how the web has always worked.

I run a website. I can pay Google, MS, Meta, etc money to make my site show up higher in search results. Or gain an audience through SEO and organic growth, including on social media. I'm happy when someone shares a link to it, because that means more eyeballs on what I'm putting out. Then I can choose if and how to monetize it. By suggesting that this harms the publisher makes no sense. Why would anyone ever pay for Google sponsored search results if it's harmful to their business?

The lobbyists and politicians have framed it as "using" or "stealing" the content, which is an outright lie: reproducing content without permission is already covered by copyright law. Many of these news sites even have abstracts and social cards specifically for preview when shared.

The other analogy I like is "journalists drink coffee when writing. Starbucks has lots of money. Let's force Starbucks to give journalists free coffee, and a dollar out of their till whenever a journalist walks in."

It's backwards! Offensively so!

If these publishers didn't want their content on Facebook or Google, they can use paywalls, robots.txt, or referral blocks to stop it showing up. But none did - they just wanted to bite the hand that feeds for a few bucks, and we see how well that worked out for them.

Yes! The only argument I could ever get out of supporters of this law was "but they're billion-dollar corporations, they should pay their fair share!"

Well fine, then adjust the corporate tax rate however you like -- but don't be surprised when the corporations you just described as self-interested and greedy react in the obvious way to a brand new, explicitly created economic disincentive.

>"but they're billion-dollar corporations, they should pay their fair share!"

I don't think this is an invalid argument. This is arguable how YouTube works. One thing that is very interesting about Meta is that they have side-stepped the need to actually invest in content. There's nothing wrong with saying "my content drove eyeballs to your platform, so give me a cut of the ad revenue".

I think the bigger issue is, we have decided the marginal cost of journalism is nearly 0

YouTube pays because they're displaying copyrighted works. I don't think even the worst case— displaying opengraph tags that sites have to opt into, meets the bar for reproduction of a copyrighted work. I mean we're talking about linking here.

It's not that the marginal cost of journalism is a pittance, but that the marginal value to a social network of links to a few news sites is actually zero. I would take a bet that if social networks just up and banned all external links period it would be at worst revenue neutral.

>YouTube pays because they're displaying copyrighted works.

I think this is a distinction without a difference. YouTube paid for content long before they got serious about IP. Similarly, TikTok had to adopt the same mindset with the Creator fund.

More seriously, the reason why Google pays for content is not because they are billion dollar content, it's because the marginal cost for video is greater than 0, and if they didn't pay for it, the content simply wouldn't exist. However, news article pretty much spawn out of thin air. It exists despite the tech giants not paying for it.

Pro photos cost a lot of money to use and FB just gets them for free. Why?

Also, big news corps have lots of correspondents and offices around the globe, which are expensive too.

> Pro photos cost a lot of money to use and FB just gets them for free. Why?

a) Because the photographer uploaded it, granting a license to display it under the TOS

b) Because someone else uploaded it without permission and Facebook is protected by DMCA safe harbor provisions so long as they remove it upon request

> Also, big news corps have lots of correspondents and offices around the globe, which are expensive too.

Lots of things are expensive without creating some obligation for an unrelated third party to pay you for it.

FB should still not get all these things for free.

So Facebook should be obliged to pay you every time you upload a photo? Anyone with a camera will be a millionaire by tomorrow morning.

And the government did choose to require Facebook to pay for the news. Facebook decided the price wasn't worth it, so now they no longer allow news on their platform. They aren't getting anything for free. Fair and square.

Responding to 'it seems fair to ask for treatment that other media authors get' with 'lets forget all nuance and adopt the most extreme position one could take' by comparing people who sell their work for a living with people who post pictures of themselves for attention is not helpful and does not make your point stronger.

Facebook doesn't get these things for free. Facebook is no more able to commit copyright infringement than you are.

There's no difference between amateur and professional photographers under the law. In both cases it's a photo uploaded to Facebook by someone who owns the copyright on it. When you upload a photo to Facebook you grant them a license to display it when people see your post. They're not Getty, you're not selling your photo to them.

Like I'm not sure where the disconnect it, do you wish Facebook had a monetization scheme like YouTube? Because that's entirely voluntary. For "pirated" content monetization is a voluntary offering that serves as an alternative to issuing a takedown request.

I don't wish anything. I am telling you that resorting to comparisons which destroy the nuance of life and human actions is detrimental to conversations and that you should stop doing that because it doesn't make you right, it makes you an agitator.

Where are they wrong?

They didn't make any factual statements in the comment I initially replied to.

Yeah, he's just twisting the facts to make a point.

Still no comment on why news corps have to pay for pics and content when FB gets it all for free.

> I run a website. I can pay Google, MS, Meta, etc money to make my site show up higher in search results. ... The lobbyists and politicians have framed it as "using" or "stealing" the content

Cough, reddit.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/08/01/1129247/reddit-ceo-...

Same mistake? Note that "AI training" has now made an appearance. Ignore that Reddit has no ownership of the user-written content in the first place.

> Ignore that Reddit has no ownership of the user-written content in the first place.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Reddit might not retain sole ownership, but they certainly seem to own a copy: https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement

  Except and solely to the extent such a restriction is impermissible under applicable law, you may not, without our written agreement:

  license, sell, transfer, assign, distribute, host, or otherwise commercially exploit the Services or Content;

  [...]

  By submitting Your Content to the Services, you represent and warrant that you have all rights, power, and authority necessary to grant the rights to Your Content contained within these Terms.

  When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world.

"Own a copy" doesn't mean anything here. They have a non-exclusive sublicensable license to use Your Content. They have no ownership at all of Your Content, and have no standing to do anything if someone commercially exploits it (except for content posted by Reddit itself). The individual comments/posts are copyrighted by the individual posters. To the extent that Reddit does not give you a sublicense to exploit the content, the individual posters would be the ones who could make a claim for copyright infringement.

If you don't have an account, then you haven't agreed to the ToS. Indeed, you can visit e.g. https://old.reddit.com/new/.json to fetch the latest posts without ever even seeing a link to any terms of service, much less agreeing to any. If someone distributes that scraped data via torrent (they do), then (again, except for posts by Reddit staff) Reddit has nothing to say. They have no claim to that data.

Agreed, except that those people who haven't agreed to the ToS also have no legitimate right to the work outside of a separate agreement with the publisher.

Just putting it on Reddit doesn't make it fair game for everyone.

Similarly, posting a news article to Facebook grants FB the same rights, more or less, but it doesn't grant Joe Random the right to re-publish the same article unless he makes an outside deal with the original author.

Now imagine that the newspaper not only has a page on community events but starts selling tickets for those events. Some well-meaning politician comes in and says that the newspaper should pay a portion of the ticket sale to the organisers. So the newspaper stops advertising the event in their pages, and the event starts struggling with less attendance than before.

Analogies are nice, but one should always be cautious that they don't oversimplify the issue.

> progressive politicians

I would characterize the current gov't as staunchly neolib.

The Trudeau gov't has listened with great attention to all corpo lobbyists from oil & gas to big media groups, so I don't think "hostile to economic principles" particularly applies eotber.

What you don’t consider is that FB is heavily profiting from professionally created content that takes a lot of money to create, with many users just skimming the headlines without ever clicking through.

In short, just another billionaire profiting off of other people’s work without ever paying for it.

Those new AI companies, which are also conducting large-scale theft, are no different and should either seize operation or also start paying their fair share.

Well then this is great no? The billionaires and Facebook don't get to profit from the media. Since the law was passed on the premise that Facebook was basically stealing money from local media corporations, surely our national media industry is doing better now by not getting exploited like that.

Yet I keep seeing sob stories after sob stories from the exact same media organizations that were vehemently pushing for this. Something about leopards and faces getting eaten comes to mind

(Also, media corporations here are -in typical Canadian fashion- a handful of giants controlling basically most outlets. A part from the state sponsored/funded CBC. So there's basically no little guys in this fight, and Canadian corporations always try to pull this type of stuff to protect their little corporatist fiefdoms through the federal government)

But why should FB get this content for free (including the images used)?

Because the news organizations are giving it to FB, with the intent of FB using it in a way that gets users to click on the link, and all of this is disproportionately to the benefit of the news organizations.

Also, how do you know this is "disproportionately to the benefit of the news organizations"? FB also quite heavily profits from the massive engagement this kind of content generates. Content that is often very expensive to produce.

There is a very obvious value we can assign to the outbound traffic from FB to the news sites (based on their typical advertising CPM), so we know the news sites are profiting.

We can also infer that the effect is significant based on how much the news organizations are complaining about losing this free source of traffic.

On the other hand, FB is willing to block news links, which suggests they don't actually profit from them meaningfully. Nor does blocking them, or winding down the dedicated FB News product, appear to be causing any hit on their user or revenue numbers.

Now, you turn. How do you know that "FB heavily profits" from this?

FB should give back more than just clicks. See YouTube.

That's fine. Now it doesn't use their content. So there's nothing for them to give. Yet we have seen articles after articles of media corporations complaining about how this is still unfair to them.

Clearly then Facebook did provide more value for them than it took, otherwise why wouldn't they just be happy by the current situation now that their links are protected from the big man?

Also YouTube isn't just a link aggregator. News media usually have their own platforms with their own ads and monetization. And they still have them! So they are completely free to monetize their assets/content. Canadian media isn't entitled to getting services from Facebook and also demanding payment while doing so.

They don't any more! This whole article is about how they go out of their way to prevent users from even posting links to it!

Yes, it would not make sense for the GP to consider that statement, since it was just made up for political purposes.

There is no evidence of it being true, and some circumstantial evidence of it not being true: namely, that FB was willing to block news from their site, and there was no obvious impact to e.g. their financials.

I’m not following. What’s been made up for political purposes?

That "FB is heavily profiting from professionally created content that takes a lot of money to create". Sorry, I thought this was obvious from context, since it is what you accused the GP of not considering.

But they are profiting quite heavily from it. Look at all the engagement it drives, especially political content.

Yes, you keep asserting that with no evidence. Just saying it more often doesn't make it any more true.

Where's your evidence?

First, you're the one making an affirmative statement about what FB should be doing. The burden of proof is on you.

Second, I've posted the (admittedly circumstantial) evidence in direct reply to you multiple times. You've not engaged with it in any way, but just repeated your talking point.

You don't appear to be acting in good faith in this discussion. Your need to put some effort into this, and actually reply to what people write.

The burden of proof should be on FB, they're the ones hiding the data on this.

>> FB is willing to block news links, which suggests they don't actually profit from them meaningfully.

This is just an assumption and not evidence.

FB just isn't willing to pay for it.

So just to be clear, you do indeed not have any kind of evidence at all for the claim about FB profiting from news links?

> In short, just another billionaire profiting off of other people’s work without ever paying for it.

Why are the news orgs unhappy after Facebook stopped doing it?

How do you know they’re unhappy?

Because they're constantly posting articles whining that "Meta's news ban" is killing the media.

Yeah, but Meta wasn’t willing to pay for it.

Why should power-hungry Zuck get everything for free when YouTube, for example, is giving everyone a cut?

Well, maybe he shouldn’t but it seems he’d rather not deal with this problem at all and now we have the status quo. That has to be a situation you’re willing to accept, unless you’re saying Facebook should be forced to allow news, and be forced to pay for it.

> Yeah, but Meta wasn’t willing to pay for it.

Sorry, I don't see how this contradicts the idea that the media don't like the current situation.

This is not really a dry cut. There are people that pay to be on a talkshow or in a newspaper or to perform in an event. Then there are people who get paid to do the same. It all has to do with the economics of the situation.

In this case, those big newspapers were betting that they drive a large portion of Facebook engagement in Canada, so they wanted a cut. Facebook didn't think so. It's trying to find the answer to the question "How many people use Facebook because that's where they get their news?" vs "How many people get the news because they happen to be on Facebook?"

I think it’s more apparent that this shows “for how many people Facebook is the internet to them”.

> Less news is being consumed by Canadians

I don't think this is a bad thing tbh. I've also started reducing my news consumption years ago. First there was the pandemic where there was only bad news not worth watching. And now we have an extreme-right government in Holland so I'm simply disillusioned and I don't care what they do anymore.

At the same time most news sites (like the mainstream nu.nl) require either payment or logging in with an account which I refuse so I'm just skimming the news headlines on the national state broadcaster (NOS) once a day or so.

I still follow the local city news a bit because those things actually matter in my life. But not on social media, I've blocked all news outlets there (on the few i still check because I've greatly disconnected from socials since even before the pandemic). I simply don't care anymore.

And guess what? I'm a lot happier for it. A lot less things to get angry about. I just spend my time talking to friends and people I do actually care about.

I think it's because both socials and the regular news love promoting controversial topics because they get more engagement. People get all wound up and that makes them stay on the platform to argue and thus see more ads. I'm kinda done with that.

And most news is really not that important anyway. My life is not noticeably changed by not knowing all but the most important news facts. I'm fine without it, most of it was just FOMO.

Ps I really appreciate HN for not doing this. I still learn a lot of nice and interesting things here.

> I don't think this is a bad thing tbh.

I am quite sure this does not mean that Canadians consume less digital content. Just that is is not news (from Canadian news outlets).

For a sovereign country this is catastrophic.

It probably means that Canadians consume even more reddit style media, YouTube shorts or outright propaganda from foreign nations.

Canadians can watch most major news broadcasts on YouTube. Also we have our own state sponsored media and propaganda, is foreign propaganda guaranteed to be worse?

>First there was the pandemic where there was only bad news not worth watching.

scaremongering people’s amygdalas 24 hours a day for more than six consecutive months must have left a mental scar on people’s minds and the newborn children

After doom-scrolling Covid all through 2020, I stopped reading all news at the start of 2021. I haven’t deliberately visited the home page of a news organisation since.

It’s not a hard ban. I’ll click a link someone sends me, not that people do that. I’ll walk past my partner’s iPad and look over her shoulder. Occasionally I’ll pick up a print edition of the Economist.

But, by and large, I don’t ’read the news’. I can only recommend it. ‘The news’ as published on the majority of sites is mostly crap you don’t care about. Even the reputable sites. And then when it’s some big event that you are supposed to care about, that just makes you sad/angry/whatever.

People say that I’m absolving myself of my responsibility to society. Nah. I vote (I have to, I’m Australian). My vote hasn’t changed in 20 years, nothing I read is going to do that now. And I wasn’t politically active before, so that hasn’t changed.

Just stop reading the news.

I don't think disconnecting entirely is the answer. You also vote with your money and attention. I think following and funding credible, solution oriented outlets and investigative journalists that can deep dive into topics is important for holding power accountable, and transforming the social landscape.

Australians need to care more about improving society - not just the media landscape but in so many facets. Its not going to fail-forwards for much longer, and the cracks are showing

> And now we have a fascist government in Holland so I'm simply disillusioned and I don't care what they do anymore.

If that's indeed the case, it should be an alarm call for all citizens to start caring and getting politically involved even more than before. It's not like the world owes us not to go up in flames, and if it does, we shouldn't just sit down shaking our head in disappointment.

> If that's indeed the case

It's not. The Netherlands remains a parliamentary representative democracy.

It is but with a quarter of people voting for extreme-right I'm very disenfranchised and I just don't care about society anymore.

The good thing is that the current coalition is so unstable it will likely collapse soon. Even during their inaugural debates they couldn't stop slinging mud.

> It is but with a quarter of people voting for extreme-right I'm very disenfranchised and I just don't care about society anymore.

Unfortunately this is how the far right is able to gain power.

Yeah it's really sad when our own minister of immigration was promoting the "displacement theory" :'(

And I'm already politically active, I always was. But I the these people thrive on dissent just like social media does. Anger is a very strong emotion.

Ps I have since edited the term fascist to extreme-right as it's a more appropriate description. Though both apply IMO. For example the party in question doesn't even permit members. It's all about the one guy who decides everything.

>> Less news is being consumed by Canadians

> I don't think this is a bad thing tbh.

Less real news, but not necessarily less political content. And now you can't reply to misinformation with a link to a real news story.

My neighbourhood Facebook groups have gotten much more tolerable, if I’ll be honest. People stopped polluting them with provincial/federal news, and just talk about hyper local stuff, which I really like.

For what it's worth I see a similar trend in the US. I'm in a few neighborhood/city Facebook groups in different places and over the past year or so there does seem to be a new, reasonable consensus of opinion against divisive topics or offensive/rude behavior. Posts have taken a turn toward being people-oriented (e.g., this person needs your help) and utilitarian (recommendations for tradespeople.) Angry, overly political, or confrontational posts are quickly called out or deprived of engagement. It's refreshing!

Yeah it is great, isn’t it? Someone told me there was an announcement from Meta how they’re deranking all political posts (maybe only on Threads?) and there was a lot of curfuffle that said stuff like “censorship”, but I genuinely believe it’s a very good idea. It sucks for big name political commentators, I guess, but I really don’t want to see anything election related when I’m trying to find the opening hours for my farmer’s market.

This is one of the reasons politics is (loosely) a banned topic on HN: right or wrong, it has a tendency to just suck all the air out of the room if it's allowed to run rampant in every forum.

This is only a short summary. There is a couple of full reports on the main page of their website.

Unfortunately, is is not very interesting because the study seems to rely almost completely on Facebook data. The effects on that platform were pretty predictible.

There are obvious questions left unanswered:

- What was the effect on direct traffic ?

- What was the effect on paid subscriptions ?

- Are people effectively less informed ?

As a Canadian active on social media, I’ll also add that the quality of news I consume and am exposed to has dramatically increased.

This is positive. Media in Canada is concentrated by a few large orgs (Postmedia, Quebecor, Bell media, Rogers). Most independent newspaper, radio stations are being bought and speaking with the same voice. Deplatforming themselves is turning out to be a good thing for everyone else.

This is super interesting, but I think the question everyone wants an answer to is how are the news orgs doing? Are they going out of business or does the ban just not matter to them? Looking at revenue or other metrics would have been the study I'd want to see.

They’re going out of business/further consolidating/mass layoff for a lot of reasons but this doesn’t help.

A lot of newsrooms have already done mass layoffs over the years and there isn’t much more to cut other than shutting down.

https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-wire-news-releases-pm...

https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/corus-entertainment-says-ong...

Can sort by date here and see a pile of newspaper closures in 2023: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_newspapers_o...

Metromedia filed for bankruptcy and shut down all papers in August 2023: https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/an-atomic-bomb-for-local-news-me...

This is especially having a huge negative impact on some of the smaller newspapers. One example from a recent article - https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/one-year-after-news-ban-can...

Yeah. This study is almost entirely about vanity metrics. Like, who cares about the number of social media engagements for news companies? Nobody. They're not worth anything to anyone.

Or how is the proportion of people who don't know that news content is blocked interesting?

Basically, this appears to be a study of data that was easy to get, not of data that could produce any kind of actionable insights for anyone.

In addition to the kind of data you asked for, data on whether use of FB/Instagram went down when the block was put in place would be fascinating.

CBC is publicly funded so they aren't going to go out of business. The smaller outlets maybe, but remains to be seen.

One of the oldest (though smaller) dailies, the Whitehorse Star, folded this past May:

<https://thewalrus.ca/whitehorse-daily-star/>

I mean, they'll probably shut down if Pierre Poilievre assumes power, though.

Not sure why I got downvoted— for context to non-Canadians, a core policy of the Conservatives is to defund the CBC.

There is no such thing as "Meta's News Ban". This is the federal government's ban on non-fee-paying websites sharing links to news stories.

> ban on non-fee-paying websites sharing links to news stories

There's a couple important caveats there that you're eliding.

> made available by dominant digital news intermediaries and generates economic gain

https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-charte/c18_...

"Three quarters of the Canadian public are unaware of the ban"

In other words most people don't care about the news and weren't paying attention anyway. Doesn't seem like much has been lost.

I'd assume there are knock on effects. The people that did get news via FB no longer share it because they aren't getting it. So, even people that don't use FB become less informed. Like if one member of a family used to read news via FB and share some of it with the rest of the family.

Note: I'm not saying whether that result is good or bad I'm only saying that not being aware of the ban doesn't mean nothing has been lost.

I strongly suspect that such people have simply moved to other sources, and more importantly, the statistics on who was reading news was _strongly_ biased by the ease with which that information could be tracked.

If 1% of the population was responsible for seeking out interesting news and sharing them, and 4% was reading what was being directly provided to them, and then the ability to see what that 4% is reading disappeared, it would look like an 80+% reduction in people reading the news, even though all that happened was that the sharing is now occurring in an illegible fashion.

Interesting point:

> Despite the ban, news organization content is still available on Meta platforms through work-around strategies like screengrabs, with 36% of Canadian users reporting encountering news or links to news on Facebook or Instagram. This arguably should make Meta subject to the requirements of the Online News Act.

I wonder if this will be a new argument from the news media lobbyists. It will loom as a new type of threat similar to removal of safe harbour protections : if web sites have to take full liability for what their users post and no amount of active measures to prevent infringing content are sufficient to relieve that, we arrive back at the end-game where user generated content is just not viable except for the giant monopolists that can pay off rights holders or defend against the liability.

> Almost one third of local news outlets are now inactive - The ban has reshaped the media landscape in Canada, with 212 or approximately 30% of local news outlets in Canada previously active on social media now inactive.

Is this because these sites were already failing and failed regardless of the ban? Or did they see enough of a drop in engagement to matter? Or did this ban just help entrench the big players at the expense of the smaller ones and forced consolidation?

In other words, it’s hard to draw conclusions of a larger story just from raw data points.

This statement is too ambiguous. They could mean inactive from social media or inactive as an organization.

Local news in Canada is in dire straights. Consolidation has made it incredibly fragile or non existent in places, and the government's solution is to always turn on a faucet of $$$ to the entrenched media companies, only for them to back out or disappear after the money runs dry.

The "outcome" of the bill and the deal with Google was essentially a slush fund for entrenched media companies in Canada. Instead of fostering competition, the government just funnels more money into old guard monopolies, as is tradition in Canada where monopolistic behaviour usually gets explicit government endorsement.

Commentators and lawyers like Micheal Geist have argued for years at this point that the ban and deal are blatantly counterproductive to ensuring a functioning and competitive news and media ecosystem.

I think it’s easy to assume that because “old guard” is an easy villain (not sure where monopolies comes from though - media remains more competitive than something like tech for example). Similarly easy to blame government intervention as a failure when the problem continues.

But to play devil’s advocate. How do you know that without government intervention even the big players would have failed even worse and the smaller players died even more quickly?

I respect Michael Geist and he’s more knowledgeable in this space than I am, so if this is his position I’m more likely to believe it, but it’s really hard to say anything so definitively without a control to evaluate against.

I am curious if the reduction in quantity of news consumed resulted in an increase in average quality of news consumed.

Seems like both a reduction in quality and quantity.

> Canadians continue to learn about politics and current events through Facebook and Instagram, but through a more biased and less factual lens than before and many Canadians do not even realize the shift has occurred.

Although this makes me wonder about the nature of news that tends to get shared on social media. Is it factual reporting or is it opinions we pretend are factual because they’re on the right domain?

All media are under some influence and has an agenda. "factual" information is another way to say that the narrative is controlled in accordance with societal values.

I think the take away is that Canada is loosing the ability to keep macro beliefs in check.

It I'd going it be interesting to see what the long term management of this is.

Interesting previous cases is how we shaped the media landscape after the second world War in order to (attempt to) eradicate nazist beliefs.

If there is an increase in the quality of news consumed it is not the result of the quantity of news consumed decreasing. It would have to be the result of the consumers seeking alternate sources, or some other factor.

> If there is an increase in the quality of news consumed it is not the result of the quantity of news consumed decreasing.

If you read 10x less news from Joe and Billy on Facebook but start reading from professional sources of news, they still might be bad but it will probably be a better article to read.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. You are essentially saying that if you decrease the amount you read but increase the quality of what you are reading, the quality of what you are reading will likely go up. That is bordering on a tautology. In the situation you describe you happen to be able to consume less news but increase the quality. That is not the same as the increase in quality being a result of a decrease in news. You seem to be confusing correlation and causation.

Seeing that more users are getting their news from TikTok, I doubt that the average quality has increased. Considering that TikTok is under control of the authoritarian Chinese government, the Canadian Facebook ban may have opened the door for a far more concerning situation.

Canada also introduced the digital services tax recently: https://globalnews.ca/news/10604912/digital-services-tax/

Until Facebook bans screenshots as well. Or maybe they can switch tactics to prosecute the users posting screenshots for copyright infringement. They're at least equally to blame, no?

Yeah. They could also pay for the news but that's outrageous, right?

Why should they be obliged to pay for the news if they don't want it because it isn't valuable for them?

Is it immoral not to buy the $15 hotdog at a sports stadium even if you decide you're not that hungry?

If news isn't valuable to Facebook that's great for everybody then. Users leave facebook to look for news in place of getting informed by their echo-chambers. Win-win-win.

Except it doesn’t seem to have worked out this way

It did. They are complaining that people spent less time enganged on social media. This is positive.

One of the main points of the article is “Less news is being consumed by Canadians”. So clearly Canadians are not going to the news sites to get the news from there like you claimed

Here, I fixed it for you: “Less news is being consumed by Canadians on FACEBOOK”

You don’t need to “fix” this, it was a direct full quote from the article. Here’s another one: “They do not appear to be seeking news elsewhere”

Still great news :) Social media trash isn't informing anyway

Canadian journalism is suffering – but Meta isn't budging

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41131615

Other curiosity/follow-up questions:

* has this impacted biases or political stances (extreme or middle) in any direction?

* has this impacted individual happiness in any way?

I'm a millennial, probably Facebook's original primary demographic, and I still have no idea where the hell you'd go and read the news on it. It's just not a place I think of when I think of getting the news of the day. That would be Reddit or HN instead. Heck, sometimes I even still kick it old school and go to Yahoo News. But never Facebook.

I'm gen X in the US. I haven't seen any news on FB in the last few months other than what my connections post. Was news a big thing in Canada on FB?

When you're in Canada, all news links are blocked / not visible. Most media pages are also blank and not able to post on their Facebook pages.

https://m.facebook.com/help/2579891418969617/

I believe it's referring to those links that your connections post.

It's when your friend/uncle posts a link to the latest headline about what Trump/Biden said today.

Newsfeed.

I think social sharing of screenshots is a disease and I'm thinking about making a filter that blocks them. Yikes!

It's a common technique to get around censorship. Won't last long with how AI is progressing, though.

If I interact with a tweet, twitter will show me later if someone has used a screenshot of it in their own tweet without linking/quoting the original. I don't know if it's because of network effects or because they are OCRing screenshots that look like tweets to make these links.

I've been thinking about a "mastodon reader that doesn't suck" and one of them would use OCR to eat image memes.

> Canadian news outlets have lost 85% of their engagement on Facebook

Okay, but what kind of engagement? Because "engagement" alone is not a metric.

> Less news is being consumed by Canadians

Again: that's not a metric in and of itself, given that constant cries of information saturation. How much news is being consumed, and is that still to much?

> On August 1, 2023, in response to Bill C-18, Meta blocked Canadians from viewing, accessing, and sharing news article links on its platforms.

What makes a piece of content a news article? Is all written content banned from Meta?

> Canadians continue to learn about politics and current events through Facebook and Instagram, but through a more biased and less factual lens than before

[citation needed]

Seems like Meta could and should detect the image-of-article workaround. It's easy enough to use OCR and then match to a known news source.

People share links to linktr.ee pages and said page has a link to the news article. OCR would be no use unless Facebook started crawling links

At FB scale, this seems like a non-trivial computational expense, meaning they'll do it if they're forced to.

Fair enough. I was thinking maybe long term it could save compute and business complexity, since the idea of undoing the law won't gain momentum if people just use workarounds.

I would imagine they have similar systems in place from back when ISIS used Facebook Live to stream beheadings.

It's but one data point, so don't draw any conclusions, but my Canadian household's news consumption is unchanged. We get lots of news from the CBC, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, the Guardian, and the NY Times. Oh, and there's a local tv channel that has pretty good local (Vancouver Island) news.

Nevermind the quantity of news read. What about the quality and variety of news read?

Re: people sharing screenshots of news sites

    This arguably should make Meta subject to the requirements
    of the Online News Act.

LOL gotta get rid of that last 15% of engagement, I guess. Maybe ban even mentioning the NAMES of news outlets just to be sure /s

Meta has no issue paying millions for AI voices or billions for their useless Metaverse, but refuses to even pay a penny for news they're heavily profiting from.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-02/meta-is-o...

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