Lies. Damn lies. And Meta.

Photo courtesy of Meta

December 27, 2023

The Parliamentary House Ethics Committee has met on and off since last January to study threats of foreign election interference in Canada through social media platforms and, in its last meeting on December 13, the MPs hosted Meta’s Canadian representative (and former Stephen Harper policy chief) Rachel Curran. 

You may recall that in 2019 —“some years ago” Curran told MPs— Facebook paid a $5 billion fine in the United States for complicity in providing the right-wing political action group Cambridge Analytica with data gleaned from 87 million Facebook users during the 2016 US election and Brexit vote.

Witnesses don’t really have the option of declining an appearance before Parliamentary committees which often resemble the children’s party game of Piñata. Bloc MP René Villemure took the opportunity to get a little off topic with Curran, as she was glued helplessly to the spot across the room, to ask her about Meta’s ongoing blackout of news for Canadian users.

RV: You say that Canadians share information on social media, including news-related content. Meta has chosen to block local Canadian news on its platform. Do you think this is preventing people from accessing quality information?

RC: Monsieur Villemure, we would love to not be in this position. We would love to have news on our platforms. The problem is that the government, through Bill C-18, the Online News Act, has asked us to pay an uncapped amount, an unknown amount, for content that has no commercial value to us.

[Emphasis added]

Now of course the Meta narrative on C-18 has always been that news “has no commercial value to us.” Not a dime. Perhaps the statement is within the realm of spirited advocacy, even if it can’t possibly be true.

But Curran’s other assertion, that the Online News Act “asks us to pay an uncapped amount, an unknown amount” was a lie. Not spirited advocacy. Not some clever hair splitting. A lie.

Those who have followed the C-18 file will recall that the federal government took seriously Google and Meta’s objections to the lack of certainty over financial outcomes from the mandatory bargaining of compensation with news outlets (even though the platforms could benchmark those outcomes against agreements they reached in Australia and Europe). The federal government remedied this by tabling a draft regulation (now finalized) in September 2023 that fixed liability, set at four per cent of either Google or Meta’s Canadian revenues. 

Two weeks before Curran’s appearance before the Ethics Committee meeting, the federal government reached a well publicized agreement with Google to lower that fixed amount to $100 million annually in the case of Google, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 2.5% of revenues. Known and capped, as it were.

But consider the glimmer of hope in Curran’s comments that “we would love to have news on our platforms.”

“Mr. Villemure,” she continued, “if you could work with your government colleagues to make amendments to that legislation that would allow us to put news back on our platforms, we would love to do that.

“Meta was very involved in supporting media outlets and supporting journalism in Canada. We had private deals that were worth close to $20 million per year with news outlets across the country, including in Québec. … I think we need to figure out, as industry, as policy-makers, how to support journalism and how to support the local news ecosystem in a way that makes sense for all of us. It doesn’t make sense to try to extract money from two American tech companies to prop up the Canadian news ecosystem, so let’s figure out, together, a better solution.”

A better solution? The Bloc MP followed up:

RV: What can our committee do to bring local media back to Facebook?

 RC: I would suggest this, Monsieur Villemure. We have heard this from local publishers as well. We are a very different platform from Google. We do not scrape news content from the Internet or aggregate it in our search results. It has very little commercial value to Facebook or Instagram. If we were carved out of the Online News Act, so that the requirements of that act did not apply to us, or if there was a carve-out for local journalism, we could bring that back onto our platforms.

So there you have the Meta view on its C-18 news throttle and “a better solution.” With $20 million of voluntary licensing agreements cancelled by Meta dangling in the foreground, the Canadian government can either exempt Meta platforms from the Online News Act entirely or exempt all local journalism from the Act. In return, Meta will stop throttling news and allow news outlets that can’t reach their readers on Facebook anymore to resume doing so.

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