Move comes in response to Canadian legislation requiring internet giants to pay news publishers
Guardian staff and agencies
Tue 1 Aug 2023 22.14 BST
Meta has begun the process to end access to news on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada, the company said on Tuesday.
The move comes in response to legislation in the country requiring internet giants to pay news publishers.
The findings suggest that Facebook users seek out content that aligns with their views.
Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, said the changes will roll out in the coming weeks.
Canada’s heritage minister, Pascale St-Onge, who is in charge of the government’s dealings with Meta, called the move irresponsible.
“[Meta] would rather block their users from accessing good quality and local news instead of paying their fair share to news organizations,” St-Onge said in a statement on Tuesday. “We’re going to keep standing our ground. After all, if the government can’t stand up for Canadians against tech giants, who will?”
Canada’s public broadcast CBC also called Meta’s move irresponsible and said that it was “an abuse of their market power”.
The Online News Act, passed by the Canadian parliament, would force platforms like Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and Meta to negotiate commercial deals with Canadian news publishers for their content.
The legislation is part of a broader global trend of governments trying to make tech firms pay for news. Canada’s legislation is similar to a ground-breaking law that Australia passed in 2021 and had triggered threats from Google and Facebook to curtail their services. Both the companies eventually struck deals with Australian media firms after amendments to the legislation were offered.
In the US, the state of California has also considered a similar law. In that case, too, Meta has threatened to withdraw services from the state if the legislation goes through.
On the Canadian law, Google has argued that it is broader than those enacted in Australia and Europe as it puts a price on news story links displayed in search results and can apply to outlets that do not produce news.
Meta had said links to news articles make up less than 3% of the content on its users’ feed and argued that news lacked economic value.
Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, had said in May that such an argument was flawed and “dangerous to our democracy, to our economy”.
I understand how this works for Google because they are a news aggregator and search engine.
But as much as I hate Facebook, I don’t see how it’s their problem that news outlets post to their website. Is Facebook doing something to discourage clickthroughs, like not respecting their unfurl/link preview layouts?
We have this law in Australia and it never made sense to me. Noone is forcing these mega news corps (and Murdoch was a heavy pusher on these laws) to join Facebook and post their news there. Facebook et al drive traffic to the news sites, that otherwise would not have gone there. I think something could be said for preventing amp links, or some other option that ensures the viewer is directed to the true source for a story.
But this money doesn’t get divided up with smaller news creators either, so the MSM get even more money thrown their way, while smaller, better quality, media continues to struggle with YT demonitisation for covering topics MSM wont, and trying to finance their outlet thru Pateron. It’s a rort, not a true solution.
I’m just here with the popcorn for when Canadian media finally realize they made a terrible decision with this bill. Everyone consumes American media anyway, so nothing lost.
They said the same crap when it came to Australia requiring very similar legislation. Eventually they came to an agreement and moved on. That’s what’ll happen here
The amendments were passed and enacted before the Australian media code ever received royal assent. Meanwhile Bill C-18 already received royal assent in Canada, so amendments won’t be anytime soon. You’re right that it can happen, but if the government or our news publishers cared to avoid any fallout, then they would have negotiated on agreements and possible amendments prior to royal assent (which is what Australian news corporations did), not after.
And so as long as a difference exists, we can’t expect the Canadian situation to develop in the same way as Australia. And the interim fallout in terms of lost revenue for our own news publishers is actually very significant, despite everyone saying ‘good riddance to Meta and Alphabet’.
Except that would mean we’d have a great firewall of Canada just like China. Not the way the internet was intended to function, and it just leads to censorship
Good riddance. We dont need these apps, no matter how much they try to convince us we do. There are other sources for news in Canada already, and others will no doubt appear to fill this gap left by Meta. The less our country has to do with sketchy companies like them, the better off we are in my opinion.
What’s a good compromise for now. I wasn’t getting my news from Facebook/instagram, but it might be nice to have a consistent and direct source for it.
I see news agencies have RSS feeds, is that the way to go? Does anyone have a list?
I use the Ground News app. It pulls news from hundreds of sources, and provides multiple news outlets to choose from for each story. You can customize your feed based on your country, topics that interest you, and so on. Its sources also provide useful information to help you choose; for example, Ground News accounts for things like bias across the political spectrum.
Its also a great way to discover news outlets you trust, and you can always just go directly to your favorite news providers’ website once you get a feel for what’s out there.
Although I haven’t set mine up yet, I feel like RSS is the best way to go. There’s lots of news aggregation apps out there, but we need to keep in mind that those are all using some sort of algorithm to determine what surfaces to you, and that if you aren’t paying for the app that they need to make money somehow and keep pulling you back in - without knowing how the algorithms work, these could be favoring news that’s “engaging” which isn’t necessarily an even distribution of everything from the media outlets you like to follow. RSS gives you exactly what you put into it for feeds and you can determine what to read or skip over at least.
Yep that’s pretty much it. While I value seeing the most important news in each category, I could also get that through my normal interactions on Lemmy and other places.
It’s nice to have a regular feed I can fall back on
RSS is mostly how I find content to repost here. I don’t have a list, but this page was hugely helpful.
The one particularly helpful hint was that a huge number of sites are built on WordPress which does rss by default. So even if a site doesn’t advertise an rss feed, try opening url.com/feed and there is a good chance they will have one.
This is such a BS law. It should be framed as paying for headlines, not news.
I have no love for Meta but I have to side with them on this one. This law makes no sense. People post headlines on social media and users click on those to go to the news outlet and read the article. In the end, the news outlet still gets the advertising revenue and the visits to their site.
I love how Meta changed “we can’t link to Canadian news for free and monetize those clicks so we’re going to take our ball and go home” to “Canada’s being mean, somehow different from Australia, and we can’t link to it now”.
If reddit is anything to go by, which I expect it is, people don’t click through to the article. But they see the headline and the news platform and take that as evidence enough.
I wonder whether news not being on social media is almost better? It prevents that behaviour, meaning less impact from inflammatory and sensationalised headlines, and forces consumers that actually want news to go and find it directly - in the process being more likely to actually read an article and be more informed.
We’ve known since before the Internet that most people don’t read past the headline, the sub-title (if present) and sometimes the first paragraph. This was true before headlines were separately transmitted. The whole journalistic “inverted pyramid structure” writing style developed because we know that people don’t read far into news stories.
So to express surprise at something we’ve known for … I want to say over a century now? … is kinda, well, surprising to me.
It seemed to work well here since it’s introduction. These multinational juggernauts like Facebook and Google said the sky was going to fall down and the they simply couldn’t pay for news
Making sure that the big players negotiate in good faith with local media producers has worked (and will be assess continually when new players come into the market)
These massive sites are making bank from advertisements, advertisements which are only profitable because of engagement (in part generated from sharing local media content), it’s about time they paid up
The government should up the ante. Facebook should be treated as a publisher. Make them legally liable for all of the libel, defamation and slander etc being thrown around on their sites. Now THAT would throw a monkey wrench into profitability.
Having said that, even my 83 year old father can navigate his way to CBC, CTV and Toronto Star without issue, and he still gets a paper home delivered. He’s only ever gone to FB for family stuff, never news. I’m not sure how much effect Zuck’s hissy fit is going to have on most people.
It would throw a monkey wrench into Canadian profitability. Something tells me Meta would be a-okay leaving the Canadian market if Trudeau tries to pull something like this.
Having said that, even my 83 year old father can navigate his way to CBC, CTV and Toronto Star without issue, and he still gets a paper home delivered. He’s only ever gone to FB for family stuff, never news. I’m not sure how much effect Zuck’s hissy fit is going to have on most people.
I recently got a library card with comes with free access to PressReader. To be honest, I’ve found myself really enjoying reading digital copies of paper newspapers again through it. I can finally just read an article and not have to have it immediately followed by all the bullshit comments that social media and the direct news agency websites have. It felt so simple and fresh.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !canada@lemmy.ca
I’m torn.
I understand how this works for Google because they are a news aggregator and search engine.
But as much as I hate Facebook, I don’t see how it’s their problem that news outlets post to their website. Is Facebook doing something to discourage clickthroughs, like not respecting their unfurl/link preview layouts?
We have this law in Australia and it never made sense to me. Noone is forcing these mega news corps (and Murdoch was a heavy pusher on these laws) to join Facebook and post their news there. Facebook et al drive traffic to the news sites, that otherwise would not have gone there. I think something could be said for preventing amp links, or some other option that ensures the viewer is directed to the true source for a story.
But this money doesn’t get divided up with smaller news creators either, so the MSM get even more money thrown their way, while smaller, better quality, media continues to struggle with YT demonitisation for covering topics MSM wont, and trying to finance their outlet thru Pateron. It’s a rort, not a true solution.
I’m just here with the popcorn for when Canadian media finally realize they made a terrible decision with this bill. Everyone consumes American media anyway, so nothing lost.
They said the same crap when it came to Australia requiring very similar legislation. Eventually they came to an agreement and moved on. That’s what’ll happen here
Australia implemented amendments that were sought by Facebook, not at all the same.
They passed the legislation and then amendments followed after negotiations. There’s nothing to say similar can’t happen here.
The amendments were passed and enacted before the Australian media code ever received royal assent. Meanwhile Bill C-18 already received royal assent in Canada, so amendments won’t be anytime soon. You’re right that it can happen, but if the government or our news publishers cared to avoid any fallout, then they would have negotiated on agreements and possible amendments prior to royal assent (which is what Australian news corporations did), not after.
And so as long as a difference exists, we can’t expect the Canadian situation to develop in the same way as Australia. And the interim fallout in terms of lost revenue for our own news publishers is actually very significant, despite everyone saying ‘good riddance to Meta and Alphabet’.
The headline I’d really like to see now:
Canada to end Meta access over anti-democratic overreach
Just cut off any Meta property. Boot any of Meta’s .ca properties and cut all access to Meta’s IP addresses going into or out of Canada.
Except that would mean we’d have a great firewall of Canada just like China. Not the way the internet was intended to function, and it just leads to censorship
Sounds good but there are probably a lot of unintended consequences. For example, everyone who bought and uses a Quest VR system.
Eh, you can de-Meta their VR offerings, and arguably should.
Sounds fine to me. Let them see actual reality instead.
Meta okay fine bye. For Google though, if this passes, don’t they drive traffic to the news sites?
It says they are force to negotiate with publishers. I guess the news publisher can just accept to not get paid
Good riddance. We dont need these apps, no matter how much they try to convince us we do. There are other sources for news in Canada already, and others will no doubt appear to fill this gap left by Meta. The less our country has to do with sketchy companies like them, the better off we are in my opinion.
What’s a good compromise for now. I wasn’t getting my news from Facebook/instagram, but it might be nice to have a consistent and direct source for it.
I see news agencies have RSS feeds, is that the way to go? Does anyone have a list?
I use the Ground News app. It pulls news from hundreds of sources, and provides multiple news outlets to choose from for each story. You can customize your feed based on your country, topics that interest you, and so on. Its sources also provide useful information to help you choose; for example, Ground News accounts for things like bias across the political spectrum.
Its also a great way to discover news outlets you trust, and you can always just go directly to your favorite news providers’ website once you get a feel for what’s out there.
Although I haven’t set mine up yet, I feel like RSS is the best way to go. There’s lots of news aggregation apps out there, but we need to keep in mind that those are all using some sort of algorithm to determine what surfaces to you, and that if you aren’t paying for the app that they need to make money somehow and keep pulling you back in - without knowing how the algorithms work, these could be favoring news that’s “engaging” which isn’t necessarily an even distribution of everything from the media outlets you like to follow. RSS gives you exactly what you put into it for feeds and you can determine what to read or skip over at least.
Yep that’s pretty much it. While I value seeing the most important news in each category, I could also get that through my normal interactions on Lemmy and other places.
It’s nice to have a regular feed I can fall back on
RSS is mostly how I find content to repost here. I don’t have a list, but this page was hugely helpful.
The one particularly helpful hint was that a huge number of sites are built on WordPress which does rss by default. So even if a site doesn’t advertise an rss feed, try opening url.com/feed and there is a good chance they will have one.
Thank you, I’ll look that over!
Also, I appreciate your posts :)
This is such a BS law. It should be framed as paying for headlines, not news.
I have no love for Meta but I have to side with them on this one. This law makes no sense. People post headlines on social media and users click on those to go to the news outlet and read the article. In the end, the news outlet still gets the advertising revenue and the visits to their site.
How interestingly naive in thinking people actually read past the headline and sometimes the little sub-title blurb.
Read the article. Sure bud.
I love how Meta changed “we can’t link to Canadian news for free and monetize those clicks so we’re going to take our ball and go home” to “Canada’s being mean, somehow different from Australia, and we can’t link to it now”.
If reddit is anything to go by, which I expect it is, people don’t click through to the article. But they see the headline and the news platform and take that as evidence enough.
I wonder whether news not being on social media is almost better? It prevents that behaviour, meaning less impact from inflammatory and sensationalised headlines, and forces consumers that actually want news to go and find it directly - in the process being more likely to actually read an article and be more informed.
I was thinking this as well. If people won’t click past the headlines then we are truly doomed.
I do think news not being on social media might not be a bad thing. I guess we’ll have to see how it plays out.
We’ve known since before the Internet that most people don’t read past the headline, the sub-title (if present) and sometimes the first paragraph. This was true before headlines were separately transmitted. The whole journalistic “inverted pyramid structure” writing style developed because we know that people don’t read far into news stories.
So to express surprise at something we’ve known for … I want to say over a century now? … is kinda, well, surprising to me.
I think you do wonder, but I’m not sure. Glad I could answer that for you.
K bye
I guess this is a hot take because everyone seems happy, but this law is dumb as fuck and not the way to solve the problem.
It seemed to work well here since it’s introduction. These multinational juggernauts like Facebook and Google said the sky was going to fall down and the they simply couldn’t pay for news
Here’s a 2022 summary of how the changes have been working
Making sure that the big players negotiate in good faith with local media producers has worked (and will be assess continually when new players come into the market)
These massive sites are making bank from advertisements, advertisements which are only profitable because of engagement (in part generated from sharing local media content), it’s about time they paid up
The government should up the ante. Facebook should be treated as a publisher. Make them legally liable for all of the libel, defamation and slander etc being thrown around on their sites. Now THAT would throw a monkey wrench into profitability.
Having said that, even my 83 year old father can navigate his way to CBC, CTV and Toronto Star without issue, and he still gets a paper home delivered. He’s only ever gone to FB for family stuff, never news. I’m not sure how much effect Zuck’s hissy fit is going to have on most people.
It would throw a monkey wrench into Canadian profitability. Something tells me Meta would be a-okay leaving the Canadian market if Trudeau tries to pull something like this.
Nature would finally heal itself. People would rejoice in the streets. I hope social media in it’s current form dies off in my lifetime.
I recently got a library card with comes with free access to PressReader. To be honest, I’ve found myself really enjoying reading digital copies of paper newspapers again through it. I can finally just read an article and not have to have it immediately followed by all the bullshit comments that social media and the direct news agency websites have. It felt so simple and fresh.