The leaky Meta news ban is roiling Canadian journalism

From the McGill Report on Meta news engagement

August 11, 2024

The beginning of August marked the first anniversary of Meta’s 2023 ban on Canadian news content, its response to mandatory licensing payments required by the Online News Act, Bill C-18.

McGill University researchers released a report taking stock of the ban’s impact on the distribution and consumption of news on social media platforms including Meta’s Facebook and Instagram but also Twitter, YouTube and TikTok.

The Report’s headline finding is that engagement with Canadian news on Meta’s platforms is down 85% from before last year’s ban, to the tune of eleven million views daily. It’s not an airtight 100% disengagement, according to the Report, because Meta is not weeding out the user uploaded workarounds, screen shots of news items and modified hyperlinks to online news.

The Facebook/Instagram presence on social media is so dominant that an 85% reduction in Meta news engagement results in a 43% decline in total social media distribution of news. TikTok was up 24%, but Google’s YouTube was down 22%. Twitter held its ground. (See the right-side graphic above).

It’s unclear what role is played by the known increase in “news avoidance” by consumers. The Canadian breakout of the global Reuters survey of digital news noted that news engagement on Facebook had been declining long before its news ban came into effect: from 46% to 29% of Canadians seeking news at least weekly on Facebook in the seven years preceding Meta’s news ban. The downdraft of news engagement on the ban-free YouTube also suggests there is more going on than the Meta news block.

Nevertheless, the loss of news engagement on Meta platforms has a major (and alarming) impact on news consumption by “incidental” consumers who graze for news about current affairs on social media instead of conventional print, broadcast and digital news platforms. According to the McGill Report:

Some highly-motivated Canadians seek news outside of social media platforms through other means, either via news subscriptions, digital news websites, or television and radio, and are likely not severely impacted by the ban. However, active news seekers are the minority. The average Canadian does not frequently consume news, particularly about politics (in fact, 40% actively avoid it) and will likely only become aware of current events by being incidentally exposed to content about it online. Much of this incidental exposure to news is facilitated by social media, such as through friends and family discussing politics online or algorithmic feeds pushing trending content whenever a major event happens. This news exposure has been dramatically reduced due to the Meta news ban.

The McGill Report’s dismal findings about post-ban news consumption on Meta platforms, expected as they were, reignited public criticism of both the government’s decision to legislate in the first place or, on the other hand, Meta’s response.

One of the fuse lighters was Chuck Lapointe, publisher of Narcity.com, a chain of local news and lifestyle websites. Like many other small or local publishers, Lapointe describes the loss of Meta platforms as a disaster for his content distribution.

The first anniversary of the Meta ban coincided with Lapointe’s Narcity losing its appeal of eligibility for the federal Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization (QCJO) program that subsidizes the salary of each employed journalist provided the news site is “engaged” in publishing “original news.” 

According to Lapointe, his publications were declared ineligible for being insufficiently “engaged” in producing original news; that’s legalese for not publishing first-hand reporting frequently enough. Lapointe says that his site posted original news —-as opposed to aggregated or re-written content—- once or twice weekly. 

There is no bright red line in federal QCJO guidelines on how frequently a news site must publish original news to be eligible for QCJO. The only useful benchmark in the guidelines is that once a news outlet is determined to publish original news on a frequent basis, the news outlet is remunerated up to $30,000 for the annual salary of each journalist who works at least 75% of their working hours “engaged in the production of original written news content.”

As you can see, the QCJO funding rules for “per journalist” payroll subsidies are not the same as Online News Act licensing payments that instead are tied to the publication of “news content” that is “made available” by a “Digital News Intermediary” platform, i.e. Facebook or Google. The “news content” does not have to be original reporting and there is no requirement for the frequency of “availability.”

On the heels of that QCJO ruling, Lapointe announced that his site has been welcomed back on Facebook and Instagram because, as he said in a LinkedIn post, Meta has accepted his argument that Narcity’s ineligibility for QCJO means the publication is no longer a “news outlet” that Meta bans so that it can avoid financial liability for “making news available” under Bill C-18. 

Lapointe characterized Meta replatforming his editorial content as Narcity “opting out” of the Online News Act itself, encouraging other news outlets to forgoing QCJO payments in exchange for regaining distribution on Facebook:

All news publications — who are QCJO designated — even if you want no part in Bill C-18, are LOCKED-IN. The Online News Act automatically includes you if you are designated as QCJO… 

You have no way to opt-out and no way to get your Meta distribution back.

I hope that the news of our Re-instatement on Meta will trigger a re-evaluation of the Online News Act and allow the option for people to opt-out if they don’t see the business benefits of participating.

We should’ve done this earlier. What a f*cking trip. Anywho, we’re back on Meta, see you there.

Meta has always maintained a portal inviting outlets such as Narcity to declare themselves not to be “news outlets” as defined by the Online News Act (which is not quite the same as being disqualifying from the QCJO program which requires frequent original news reporting). Says the Meta attestation: 

“Furthermore, you acknowledge that this submission constitutes a legally binding statement acknowledging that you are not a news outlet or business producing news content within the meaning of the Canadian Online News Act.”

No doubt Meta’s lawyers have thought about this, but a news site’s ineligibility for QCJO payments is not dispositive of whether a media website is a “news outlet” publishing “news content” under the Online News Act Bill C-18 (for example, digital news published by television companies is ineligible for the QCJO program but they are clearly C-18 “news outlets” whose “news content” is being blocked by Meta). 

Just as an illustration of this strange state of affairs, it didn’t take me long yesterday to locate on Facebook an organic posting of my own linked news content (published by Monitormag.ca) posted last January in the thick of the news ban:

The question then arises, how much of the 15% of remaining news engagement on Meta platforms is not screen grabs or modified links but rather organic posts of “news content” cleared for flight by Meta? Could Meta be ghosting into “making news available,” the legal trigger for licensing payments under the Online News Act?

Heritage Minister Pascale St.-Onge, whose government certainly did not appreciate being punked by Meta last August, publicly expressed her concerns but acknowledged that Meta’s status as a Digital News Intermediary (DNI) under Bill C-18 is something for the CRTC to determine.

For its part, the CRTC’s response to a Canadian Press reporter was an audible diving beneath a desk. A Commission spokesperson confirmed that section 7 of the legislation requires a company like Meta to self identify as a DNI. Section 7 is oddly silent on the consequence of a DNI failing to notify the Commission of DNI status, although there exist general provisions for the CRTC assessing fines for non-compliance under the Act.

“Some reports have claimed that Meta continues to make news available; however, the CRTC would require further evidence to take further action,” the Commission stated.

Where does that leave us? If Meta is making news content available on its platforms, whether posted by users or media “opt-outs,” then any one of several hundred news outlets that have lost access to Facebook and Instagram might take it badly.

The “undue preference” rules in section 51 of C-18 could come into play as news outlets might ask the CRTC to get out from beneath the desk and consider whether Meta is favouring some media outlets and discriminating against others in the operation of its leaky news ban.

The context for all of this remains Meta’s global strategy to resist mandatory news licensing payments wherever it can. 

Although the European Union’s scheme of licensing payments for news appears cemented, Meta has announced its refusal to renew compensation agreements in Australia, with a preemptive threat of another news ban, while the Australian government is considering its legislative response “imminently.”

Within the walls of Big Tech’s Alamo, that is to say in California, the state legislature is proceeding with a version of Canada’s Bill C-18 that has cleared legislative committee votes by large voting margins.

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In commenting on the Big Tech issues above, I may have buried the lede.

Last week a US federal judge ruled that Google is operating an illegal monopoly in its Search Engine business. The case turned on the judge’s finding that Google’s multi-billion dollar deals with Apple to become the default search engine on iPhone browsers was an abuse of market power. Matt Stoller has an excellent summary here.

I can’t help but observe that Google’s Search monopoly was the policy starting point for Ottawa legislating the Online News Act.

Google also chose the first of August to pass along corporate tax liabilities to its customers in Canada, Italy, Turkey and Spain in response to national Digital Services Taxes activated in each of those countries. MediaPolicy published an analysis of the Canadian DST and the retaliatory Google increase to Canadian advertising rates here.

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