Catching Up on MediaPolicy – TikTok on the precipice – the Meta block, the Australian tackle – the media fund heist – corks a-poppin’ for Jordan Peterson

December 14, 2024

In the past weeks MediaPolicy has hosted some interesting thoughts on the future of the CBC. We’ve had contributions from Chris Waddell, co-author of End of the CBC? and Richard Stursberg, the former chief of CBC English services and author of The Tower of Babble and The Tangled Garden.

On Monday I will post a third piece, a question and answer session with veteran journalist Peter Menzies of The Rewrite.

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This coming January 19th, the day before President-elect Trump is inaugurated, the US Congress’ “sell or else” ban on the Chinese-owned TikTok app comes into effect.

A US court of appeal has upheld the ban and its unanimous ruling (the judges only differed on the severity of the legal test for deferring to the elected Congress) does not bode well for a successful appeal to the US Supreme Court on the basis of First Amendment expression rights.

Constitutional protection of unrestricted speech gets more traction in the US than Canada because a measured deference to government intervention is baked into our Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the “reasonable limits” text of section 1. 

The US appeals court was impressed that the Congressional ban was bipartisan. The judges did not demand the US Department of Justice present actual (and secret) evidence of espionage, misuse of consumer data, or improper manipulation of content.

In fact, the court was satisfied with stating “what the [congressional ban] targets is the People’s Republic of China’s ability to manipulate that content covertly” and therefore promoted free expression.  

The wild card is Trump’s inauguration. He campaigned on reinstating TikTok.  It’s unlikely he could wrest a repeal of the ban even from the Republican controlled House and Senate, so instead it’s possible his Attorney-General Pam Bondi will stop the Justice Department from enforcing it.

Don’t be surprised if the ban is minted as a bargaining chip in the Trump’s coming trade war with China.

In the meantime, there’s a lot of collateral damage. In Canada, the federal government has tried to have it both ways, aligning and not aligning with US Congress. The Liberals have banned TikTok from operating on the ground in Canada —-essentially a corporate expulsion—- while permitting Canadians to access and upload to the app over the Internet. 

Michael Geist has raised the question of how Canada is going to deal with potential privacy issues or other things that the government would ordinarily hold TikTok to account if it is now an offshore entity. 

TikTok will lay off its Canadian staff. The company’s Canadian spokesperson says that means the end of TikTok’s local support for Canadian artists.

And it’s the video creators’ career development that is the biggest casualty, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that their audiences are the biggest losers.

Readers will be aware of how YouTube and TikTok have busted the gatekeeping that long held back rising talent from reaching mass audiences. The TikTok platform is immensely popular with teen and 20-something audiences. 

These creator platforms are also a big opportunity for news organizations to reach casual news consumers, although Ottawa’s TikTok expulsion does not inhibit professional news outlets from continuing to upload content.

But without public visibility into the national security concerns behind the US and Canadian bans, it’s hard for ordinary Canadians to assess the wisdom of Ottawa’s actions (although it’s tempting to assume we are just falling in line with the senior partner in our strategic alliance). 

Here’s a pro tip: when the Americans sort out what they are doing with TikTok, so will we.

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The drip-drip-drip continues in the CRTC’s investigation into Meta for gaming federal efforts to compel news licensing payments to Canadian publishers.

Last week CRTC staff successfully badgered Meta into dropping its insistence on redacting content from a letter it sent to the Commission on October 17, 2024 staking out its position on how Meta screens out Canadian news content on Facebook and Instagram so it can evade liability under the Online News Act.

You can now read the unredacted Meta letter. It never contained confidential information in the first place. It’s mostly a restatement of Meta’s public post from June 2023.

Unfortunately neither the 2023 Meta post nor the recent letter elaborates on how Meta is interpreting the Online News Act in a manner that distinguishes between “blocked” and “unblocked” Canadian news content and publishers. 

Meta acknowledges that it has its own appeal process for news publishers to convince Meta that their content should not be blocked. MediaPolicy posted about this issue previously.

The ball is now in the CRTC’s court to investigate further. 

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I’ve buried the lede, putting Canada ahead of Australia.

Earlier this year Meta refused to renew its licensing deals with Australian news outlets and threatened to block news if the Labor government enforced the existing bargaining code. Google renewed some of its Australian agreements at lower compensation than its 2021 deals.

The Australians aren’t having it and last week announced a new law effective in 2025 that will tax Big Tech companies earning more than $250 million (AUS). The yet to be determined tax rate will be the price for news and the funds will be distributed to Australian news outlets.

The law will cover Google, Meta, and TikTok; and possibly Apple and Microsoft (for LinkedIn).

Any of the tech companies can fully reclaim the tax paid so long as they achieve voluntary deals with Australian news outlets worth no less than 90% of their tax bill.

More detailed coverage can be found here in The Guardian and the Australian Financial Review.

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Amazon Prime now has a six-episode comic drama The Sticky, (very) loosely based on the famous maple syrup heist in Québec in 2011 and chock full of on-screen Canadian talent. The “Hollywood-making-CanCon” angle is worth reading about in this CBC review. The Québecois characters speak to each other in English, but why be picky about the sticky?

Perhaps the next great “Canadian heist” caper will end up being the story that the Globe and Mail’s Josh O’Kane is following right now: somebody has cyber stolen $10 million from FACTOR, the musician development fund that is fed by industry levies and government subsidies.

It’s come to light because FACTOR is suing its bank for alleged negligence.

One of the weirder things about the case is the Globe report that FACTOR is in a queue waiting for the police to investigate.

The $10 million is about a third of the fund’s annual disbursements to Canadians musicians and bands for things like touring expenses and studio costs. The Globe has good coverage of the impact on artists, here.

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As the New Year approaches, keep an eye out for predictions.

Hub Entertainment Research has listed some trends that it expects to see in 2025:

• More streamer consolidation, perhaps one of NBC Peacockrr, Paramount Plus or HBO Max Discovery merging with each other or a bigger player.

• More ISP and cable company bundling of streaming subscriptions.

• Greater streamer efforts to fight subscription churn by enticing customers to take subscription holidays instead of binging and cancelling. 

• More exclusive content, especially sports, on free ad supported platforms (for example, Roku, Tubi or Pluto TV).

• And my personal favourite to make its mark: a bigger content play by television manufacturers like Samsung through their “connected television” software.

If sometimes you think this video industry stuff is going over your head because of a hole in your background understanding, I’ve been retweeting media savant Doug Shapiro’s 30-day overview of where the industry has been and where it’s going. 

He’s half-way through his daily posts, I suggest you start at Day One.

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Last but not least. My downtown Toronto neighbour, author and media personality Jordan Peterson, is moving to the United States.

Says Jordan in the Toronto Star:

^{Peterson didn’t say exactly where he lived in Toronto, but a Toronto Life profile from 2021 noted that he had “modest semi in Seaton Village.” On the podcast episode he said he lived in a “kind of champagne socialist neighbourhood” and was “less popular in my own neighbourhood than I am anywhere else in the world, literally.”}

The champagne is modest too, I assure you.

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