Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge and US Senator Amy Klobuchar talk Facebook news throttles
October 1, 2023
By now you have figured it out, I can’t resist a public opinion poll on media policy.
One must be careful: the quality of sampling and the leading nature of some questions can be a problem. But here’s a good one from the Québec-based CROP published last week on the topic of the Facebook C-18 news throttle. The 1000 respondents skewed a little older (including a lot of retirees) but CROP helpfully broke down the results by age cohort.
Question 1: How frequently do you access your news from these different sources?
Results: (Daily or Multiple times weekly)
Google: 82%
Facebook: 69%
Other Social Media (e.g. TikTok): 51%
News websites: 57%
Instagram: 34%
Twitter: 18%
Not surprisingly, these numbers skew towards younger readers visiting Google, Facebook and TikTok; and older readers to news sites. Only 16% of the 18-34 year old cohort visit news websites daily.
The only shortcoming of the poll is that it didn’t dig down further and ask the extent to which these news sources were the respondent’s exclusive source of news, relevant to the debate over the news throttle. Still, question 2 (how important is Facebook to informing yourself about the news?) tested the intensity of respondents’ loyalty to competing news platforms. Sixty-six percent of the 18-34 cohort described Facebook as very important/important to their news consumption (only 26% of the 55+ age group said that). Forty-five per cent of the younger group reported the Facebook news throttle had disrupted their news consumption habits although only 31% said they had already adjusted by going to other sources (another 21% were considering it).
As for the punch line question, whether Facebook should be compensating news organizations for their content, the results were 48% in favour, 24% against, and the remaining 28% of no opinion. The results were heavily skewed by age group, with 63% of the 55+ crowd in agreement but only 31% of the younger (18-34) group.
The poll was taken solely in Québec, so it’s a good bet you would get different results elsewhere. Here’s a MediaPolicy post on previous polls.
And here’s the CROP poll download:
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The Facebook news throttle took Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge to Washington D.C. for a solidarity visit with Senator Amy Klobuchar. The Democratic Senator from Minnesota has been gamely advancing her version of the Online News Act Bill C-18 for two years now but her Bill is stalled. Facebook has also threatened US Congress and the state of California with repeats of their news throttles from Australia and Canada.
St-Onge captured that tersely with the sound byte picked up by Canadian Press: “They [Facebook] don’t want to be regulated, period.”
After doing a photo op with our Heritage Minister, Klobuchar joined her bill’s House co-sponsor Ken Buck (R-Col) for a 25-minute video interview with the Washington Post. MediaPolicy wrote that one up here, finding Buck’s right-wing trust-busting stance of interest.
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In yet another canary-in-the-coalmine moment for Canadian television, Global TV announced its was discontinuing its long running in-house show Entertainment Tonight. The culprit: the steady downturn in television advertising revenue.
All television shows have a natural life cycle, but we can benchmark the overall trend by looking at CRTC data on ET’s competing channel E Talk! (CTV must report financials for that show because it holds a separate broadcasting licence, unlike Global’s ET where numbers are buried in Global’s network licences).
The bottom line: from 2017 to 2021, CTV’s E-Talk revenues dropped from $30 million to $23 million.
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There’s a good freelance piece by Alex Cyr in the Toronto Star that begins with a profile of Toronto-born Jeffrey Remedios who is now the head (and chief-talent spotter) of Universal Music Canada. The story then dives into the challenges facing the music streaming business model, in particular the impact of AI. Worth a read.
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