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The Trump carpetbaggers pillaging Canada

Satiric AI illustration based on Thomas Nast’s Harpers Weekly illustration, 1872

September 2, 2026

The epithet “Carpetbaggers” has an evocative history in the United States.

It was how post-Civil War white southerners described opportunistic northern merchants who descended upon the war-devastated former slave states.

The same vitriolic insult was conferred upon the corps of northern abolitionists and office-seekers who arrived to mobilize the Black vote for newly created state legislatures, the entire chapter in American history known since as the Reconstruction era.

After Reconstruction ended in the 1876 sell-out of Black civil rights and the wage re-enslavement of African Americans, the term Carpetbaggers became more generic. Wikipedia describes it as “denot[ing] people who move into a new area for purely economic or political reasons despite having no ties to that place.”

Lately the California-headquartered streamers operating in Canada have earned the Carpetbagger sobriquet.

The streamers don’t own our broadcasting market, not yet. Canadian owned television and radio broadcasting is slowly diminishing but it remains significant. Our cable and satellite-borne audio visual signals reach 9 million out of 15 million Canadian households.

But Netflix reportedly reaches about 9.8 million Canadian subscribers. With the grey market in password sharing, that is probably well over 10 million households. The other US streamers Amazon Prime (7.5m), Disney (6m) and Paramount (5.3m) are all ahead of the HBO-boosted Bell Crave (5m). According to the CRTC, three out of four Canadians reported subscribing to an audio-visual streaming service, compared to a little over half of Canadian households (58%) subscribing to a traditional television service.

That dominant American share of our streaming market means that Canadian subscriber dollars, advertising revenues, and reinvestment capacity generated by Canadian profits all flow south.

As a caveat to that generalization, there is a debate (impoverished by the lack of data) over how much money Netflix and the streamers voluntarily invest in English language Canadian content as equity partners. Canadians are also familiar with the occasional appearance of Canadian themed Netflix originals such as the upcoming Below or Amazon’s The Sticky.

But the yawning gap between how much Canadian broadcasters are required by the CRTC to invest in Canadian content —-30% of their revenue—- and the goose egg obligations for streamers can only be described as Carpetbagging.

The federal government has taken a couple of stabs at remedying that extraction of value.

One attempt was the ill-fated $1 billion per year Digital Services Tax on the streamers (but also other digital businesses like Uber).

When this kind of tax was developed a decade ago in Europe, it was a counterweight to American Big Tech’s avoidance of local corporate taxes by parking their profits in tax havens. By the time Canada got around to legislating our own DST, the federal Liberals never clarified whether it was plugging the corporate tax hole or simply reshoring a share of the streamers’ revenue extraction from Canada.

As you know, Prime Minister Carney gave the DST away in June 2025 when President Trump demanded it. I am sure Carney now regrets that as a bad bet on the President’s intentions.

The second attempt to remedy the California streamers’ value extraction was the Online Streaming Act.

You know the story here. The latest chapter is that in 2024 the CRTC imposed a five per cent cash levy on the US streamers, the same that Canadian cable companies pay. Those levies feed the Canada Media Fund and a number of similar production funds that finance Canadian content shows. Those shows are made by independent Canadian producers who license them back to Canadian broadcasters and (once the three-year old Online Streaming Act is actually applied) to US streamers. The key point is that the shows are licensed at a lower price because of the media fund money that gets invested up front.

Not good enough for the Carpetbaggers. Even after Mark Carney overruled the CRTC and rid them of the levies, they weren’t satisfied. That was confirmed when the streamers were able to get the White House to push for the evisceration of another Online Streaming Act tool, the surfacing of Canadian content on US streaming platforms, on the very last day of trade talks.

The reason that the streamers deserve the unsavoury Carpetbagger label is because they have worked so hard to earn it.

Before Donald Trump began his second term in 2025, a more compliant Netflix told the CRTC they could live with a two per cent cash levy (provided none of it went to news). Canadian cable companies pay double that, at 4 per cent.

Ah, but that was then and this is now. At the moment, the Netflix position in Canada is no regulation, no obligations. Full value extraction from Canadian subscribers and advertisers.

And to make this happen, the streamers have been able to insinuate their influence into the ground zero of trade talks.

Writing about this back in 2024 in Cartt.ca, I noted the Netflix “strategy appears to be oppose, appeal, and get the attention of the next U.S. president, U.S. Congress and U.S. trade representative.”

And here we are.

***

One of the trade files that went quiet for the last few months was Donald Trump’s threats beginning in 2025 to put a tariff on US movies shot in Canada, destined for the American, Canadian and global markets.

That’s not what the streamers and big studios wanted from him. They like shooting some of their shows abroad in the UK, Canada, and Europe, all of which have world-class production clusters and a Rolidex of trusted production partners. The analogy of the integrated US-Canada automotive market applies here.

The industry backdrop to this is that, post-pandemic, Los Angeles has endured a substantial drop off in its market share of American film and TV production, losing work to other US states and other countries. The end of the “streaming wars” and its profligate spending is also a factor. Some states, like California, have aggressively stepped into the subsidy space in order to reclaim work. But US Congress has not.

It looks like months of federal lobbying has paid off for the streamers because this week President Trump came out in favour of a federal film production tax credit. While California and other US states have increased their own subsidies, the US does not have a federal counterpart. In Canada, we combine federal and provincial production subsidies made available to both Canadian and foreign studios making shows here.

Canada has been smart about building a world class audio-visual production industry. It is in fact our domestic industry’s financial ballast.

To the extent that a US federal subsidy succeeds in American studios reshoring production, that will impact us.

***

MediaPolicy has been following the big Meta settlement with 48 US states (Florida is not settling) on the product liability lawsuit against Instagram and Facebook.

There is a good post-game analysis in the New York Times.

Meta’s lawyer is C.J. Mahoney. He was the US Deputy Trade Representative during the 2018 CUSMA talks (isn’t that an interesting connection between Big Tech and the Trump White House!).

The Times story reports that Mahoney stick handled his client’s settlement with the states after individual plaintiffs won the precedent setting jury trials in California and New Mexico resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars of damages awarded against Meta.

Those trials and related litigation proved that Meta can not successfully hide behind the “free speech” shield in the famous section 230 of the Clinton-era Communications Decency Act.

From there, it was all downhill sledding for the state Attorneys General.

And importantly for Canada, despite binding ourselves to Big Tech’s section 230 defence in the 2018 CUSMA digital chapter (clause 19.17.2), the reversal of Meta’s fortunes means that the federal Safe Social Media Act Bill C-34 is in principle not a violation of that agreement, vindicated by rulings in the American courts.

Another backbone moment in this story was demonstrated by the state Attorneys General who rebuffed Mahoney’s offer to settle for damages only. They held out for the product safety changes to protect children logging on to Facebook and Instagram. Credit the parent groups and children’s advocates who fought for that and made the states accountable to them.

According to the Times, the settlement’s die was cast before last month’s big trial even began but it took some time to line up agreement from the various states. The key was coming up with a fair allocation of the $18B USD in damages that will go to children’s mental health programs.

In the end, all 49 states fell into line except Texas (which settled separately shortly afterwards) and Florida.

The Florida suit will proceed as will many others, but one would expect that judges will engage in some extraordinary arm twisting in chambers with the plaintiffs’ lawyers to get them to fall in line with the Big Settlement.

Two remaining Big Questions are whether the Meta settlement gets adopted by competitors YouTube, TikTok and Snap and whether the safety upgrades helps Congress get to a deal on federal legislation.

***

Oops.

In my last post I wrote that “a leaked page grab from an internal Canadian Heritage document suggests that the $600 million will cover the $134 million in foregone streamer payments to Canadian audiovisual media funds for broadcast news and Canadian content.”

I made a mistaken assumption about the document’s authorship based on Globe & Mail journalist Barry Hertz’s tweet about the allocation numbers and Heritage Canada failing to confirm or deny to me when I asked if it was a Heritage document.

I have now discovered that the document in question is in fact an industry stakeholder’s summary of what the stakeholder was told verbally by a Heritage Canada source. The stakeholder contacted me this morning to clarify.

Hertz’s tweet indicates that according to Heritage the numbers cited in the stakeholder document were “not final.” I will leave it there.

***

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – Zuckerberg settles kids’ lawsuit for $18B – doxxing liability for “networked harassment” – Cineplex’s Goliath flexes

(AI illustration)

August 28, 2026

Meta’s big trial settled after only five days of testimony and before CEO Mark Zuckerberg was scheduled to take the stand.

The social media giant just paid off 47 US states with $18 billion (USD) to resolve lawsuits seeking reparations and safety features as a result of online harms allegedly inflicted on American children by its Facebook and Instagram products.

With more lawsuits pending, Meta continues to deny liability.

The big dollar figure equates to four months of Meta’s annual profit but the money will be paid out over 10 years. As well, thirty per cent of the amount is tied to YouTube and TikTok agreeing to a similar settlement.

Regardless, the state Attorneys General crowed victory.

“For years, Meta intentionally deceived the public about the addictive and harmful design features that have wreaked havoc on youth mental health,” according to Virginia Attorney-General Jay Jones. The deal “will put an end to these dangerous practices and deliver meaningful relief that will protect children from online harm.”

The settlement funds will mostly flow to children’s mental health services.

Front-loading meaningful policy action with lawsuits may be anarchic, but it moves the US closer to comprehensive federal regulation of online harms against children and provides a first draft of regulatory digital safety plans. Meta and the Attorneys General would be well aware of that.

Whatever that US regulation ends up looking like —there’s currently head butting between the House of Representatives and the US Senate over the content of digital safety plans— it will be an obvious benchmark for other countries seeking to do the same thing, as Canada is doing with the Liberals’ Bill C-34, The Safe Social Media Act. Given speculation about the apparent agreement at abortive US-Canada trade talks over “digital alignment,” the regulatory footprint in the US becomes even more relevant.

Under the terms of the settlement, there will be a hard two-hour cap for under-18s’ daily screen time, limits on continuous scrolling time, and no access after midnight.

There will be limits on addictive features such as Likes and other emojis. Push notifications will be prohibited during school hours.

Meta will also disable extreme make-up and cosmetic surgery image filters, a nod to concerns about the harmful role of social media in body image. There is no outright ban on so called body image postings.

There are also no limitations on Meta’s algorithmic personalized recommendations. Instead, teens will have an option to adopt a non-personalized feed.

Importantly, most of the hard controls are in the apps’ default settings that can be undone with parental consent. Meta has promised to provide simpler settings and tools for parents.

Of note to policy makers: the age verification protocols that underpin the entire regulatory regime are not concretely sketched out in the settlement. The important details are set as a deliverable from Meta in a year’s time.

That’s no small matter: Meta and YouTube’s Google ownership are looking to foist age verification on each other as legislatures choose between imposing that responsibility on either app stores like Google Play or individual social media apps such as Instagram.

Going forward, the settlement may or may not grease the skids leading to US federal regulation of online harms to children. It depends on YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat responding positively as well as Congressional leaders sorting out their differences over the strength of regulatory standards requiring digital safety plans from social media companies.

The Canadian C-34 makes it clear that a Canadian digital regulator will have the power to set its own standards if the safety features offered by Meta and the other social media companies in their digital safety plans are found wanting. As the ultimate hammer, the regulator can ban youth accounts.

Meta says it is not implementing the terms of settlement in Canada. We will see if that sticks, but Meta might be tempted to retain its leverage to settle the lawsuits filed by Canadian school boards or haggling over the draft of Bill C-34.

***

Michael Geist has a new blog post reporting on a Canadian judge granting an injunction against a social media influencer who triggered a digital mobbing against a Toronto lawyer that included anti-semitic dog whistling and threats to children.

Geist suggests that the injunction could lead to a new “tort” —the basis of civil liability for damages — of “networked harassment.”

***

Barry Hertz has a story in the Globe & Mail providing circumstantial evidence that the dominant Canadian film theatre chain Cineplex squeezes film distributors into exclusive exhibition deals that result in independent theatres losing important films.

The issue came to light when the independent Carlton multiplex theatre in downtown Toronto abruptly lost exhibition rights to Matt Johnson’s new release “Tony,” a biopic of the belated writer and chef Tony Bourdain, just prior to the scheduled opening and after tickets had been pre-sold.

The Carlton is wedged geographically between neighbouring Cineplex theatres. The Toronto-headquartered Cineplex controls 70% of film theatres in Canada.

In the Globe story, the Carlton refers to “the hegemonic theatrical exhibition market share that exists in this country” and invites disgruntled patrons to complain to the Canadian Competition Bureau.

***

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Digital “alignment” and the Canadian Safe Social Media Act

August 19, 2026

It is commonplace to observe that it pleases the Trump administration to throw its weight around when it comes to Big Tech’s global dominance.

The propensity to claim extraterritorial sovereignty through trade negotiations on digital trade, which has its own chapter in the CUSMA agreement between Canada and the US, is coming to a head.

That was apparent yesterday when the President announced a three day pause on his threatened tariff increases on Canadian goods and services because a tentative deal might be taking shape. His trade negotiator, USTR Jamieson Greer, tweeted enigmatically that one of the checked off bargaining items is “digital trade alignment.”

As Canadian trade commentator Barry Appleton writes, the details behind Greer’s statement are a warning that we may soon discover that the Prime Minister’s “AI for All” national strategy for AI adoption and digital sovereignty is in for a heavy edit if it depends on US “alignment.”

One of the immediate applications of “alignment” with whatever it is that pleases the President and his tech bros is Carney’s Safe Social Media Act, Bill C-34. It was tabled in the House on June 10th, just prior to the summer recess. It is the government’s plan to regulate online harms in AI chatbots, social media apps, and porn sites. The core of the bill is the requirement of digital safety plans that meet Canadian federal standards.

This is the bill that culture and identity minister Marc Miller described as non-negotiable in trade talks, “hard stop.”

You may recall that Miller’s cabinet predecessor, former Liberal MP Steven Guilbeault, said the same thing about the Online Streaming Act.

While the US has no domestic equivalent of the Online Streaming Act that the Trump administration loathes, US Congress is in fact edging towards its own version of the Safe Social Media Act.

As I noted in an earlier post, the US Senate and the House of Representatives have both passed potential legislation but are quarrelling over how tough the bill should be in imposing a “duty of care” on digital platforms which would feature digital safety plans that meet US federal standards.

The Senate and the House have been in this stalemate for nearly two years but whatever legislation eventually emerges will be what the Trump administration seeks in “alignment” from Canada, the EU, and everyone else.

Goosing Congress along is this week’s opening of the social media trial of the decade pitting 29 US states against Meta. The state Attorney Generals are flamboyantly claiming $1.4 trillion in damages for what whistleblowers describe as Meta knowingly imperilling the mental health of youth. Earlier trials in New Mexico and California went against Meta. Meta’s current market cap is about $1.4 trillion.

It’s possible that one of the non-aligned views of regulating online harms will be a ban on youth accounts altogether. Australia has imposed one (for under-16), the United Kingdom is considering one, and ten US states have done so. Meta itself has a corporate policy banning under-13 accounts. The Trump administration’s official position is opposed to age bans.

Recently in Europe, the French constitutional court struck down the Republic’s under-15 ban as “a disproportionate restriction” on freedom of expression of young people .

The French court ruling suggests we should expect a similar lawsuit in Canada should C-34 become law. The Carney government’s bill proposes to use age bans as an interim measure, the better to spur the AI and social media companies to come up with effective online safety plans, like special youth accounts with design and content access features.

Just my two cents worth, but considering the wisdom and widespread popular support for legislative action to protect kids online, I find it hard to believe a Canadian court wouldn’t back up the Carney strategy of giving Big Tech a choice between developing safer online products or else comply with an age ban to protect vulnerable youth from unsafe content as a constitutionally permissible limit on children’s right to free expression (which includes the right to consume it, like the right to read).

Of course it may not matter what the Canadian online safety act ends up saying, or whether it’s constitutional, if we’ve already bargained away digital “alignment.”

Hard stop.

***

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – Will Carney’s Netflix tax play in Chicoutimi? – is the Liberal kids safety bill safe from Trump? – Paramount Warner Bros trial date

(satiric AI photo illustration)

August 9, 2026

It’s likely that the standout moments of the Mark Carney chapter in Canadian history books will include the Gordie Howe Bridge and his repeal of the digital services tax.

I’m not 100% sure how the Prime Minister will be remembered in English speaking Canada for his duck-and-cover on the Online Streaming Act, Bill C-11. But I’m a lot more certain how he will be remembered in Québec.

At the end of July, days after Carney announced three federal by-elections that include the swing-riding of Chicoutimi-Le Fjord, local Bloc Québécois candidate Caroline Dubé held a press conference to denounce Carney’s plan to eliminate the CRTC’s imposition of Canadian content contributions by Netflix and other US streaming giants.

Along with sitting Bloc MPs Mario Simard and Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Dubé teed off on Carney for ten minutes. The lead talking point was that Carney was letting global streamers off the hook for $200 million annually and turning to taxpayers to fill the funding gap: Canada’s first “Netflix tax.”

Another Bloc talking point was more visceral: the Bloc MPs were grinding their teeth over a Liberal double cross on a bill that the Justin Trudeau cabinet had managed to steer through the “psychodrama” of a minority Parliament in 2022 thanks to the Bloc. The Québec nationalist party’s lead on the file, MP Martin Champoux, had successfully negotiated several Bloc-sponsored amendments to the bill with Liberal MPs but Trudeau’s successor as Prime Minister appears to be taking steps to gut it in appeasement of Donald Trump’s trade aggression.

Last week Le Devoir published an opinion editorial co-written by leading Québec legal scholar Pierre Trudel (also one of the authors of the 2020 federal report that set the table for Bill C-11) hitting the same talking point on the risk of replacing regulatory contributions by streamers with federal budget dollars.

“Canadian cultural industries are condemned to a chronic dependence on public funds,” wrote Trudel and Jean-François Gaudreault-Desbiens in French. “That means creative activities are at the mercy of budgetary mood swings. At the same time, foreign companies that derive juicy income from the cultural consumption of Canadians get a pass….

“[Policies in implementation of Bill C-11] are at the heart of what allows Canada to be considered a different country from the United States.”

The op ed was endorsed by the signatures of an impressive list of Québec scholars. Open letters don’t always constitute a news worthy event, but this one will discomfit the Québec branch of the federal Liberal Party which, between the surrender of the digital services tax in June 2025 and this climb down on the Online Streaming Act, has lost the room in Québec on the cultural file.

The Chicoutimi by-election is August 31 and there are more to follow: two Montreal federal by-elections that the Prime Minister must call to fill the departures of Steven Guilbeault and the NDP’s Alexander Boulerice as well as the provincial election on October 5th.

***

If the Carney government continues down this path of gelding its own cultural legislation it may soon have to consider the fate of its online safety bill, The Safe Social Media Act Bill C-34, tabled in the House of Commons on June 10th.

At the time, the culture and identity minister Marc Miller publicly stated that C-34 would be shielded by the Liberals from US trade pressure because it involved the protection of children. “Kids just aren’t on the bargaining table, hard stop,” he added.

The Safe Social Media Act would regulate harmful content available from AI chatbots, social media, and porn sites. While there are specific safety features required by the bill, the centrepiece is a newly created legal “duty of care” requiring digital platforms to create safety plans, subject to approval of a new federal regulator, that minimize harmful content and feature safer digital design.

On the theory that Carney government has no appetite to stray further from what the Trump administration will tolerate in the regulation of US-headquartered digital platforms, it is worth noting that two years of stalemate in US Congress over online safety might be coming to a head.

Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn’s “KOSA” (Kids Online Safety Act) has passed the Senate a second time and was referred to the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.

House Republicans, however, still do not like KOSA’s “duty of care” strategy because they fear digital platforms will comply by “censoring” conservative-friendly content. As White House executive order on AI phrases it: “Congress should prevent the United States government from coercing technology providers, including AI providers, to ban, compel, or alter content based on partisan or ideological agendas.”

The House watered down the KOSA duty of care in the first version of the Senate bill. However it appears that Blackburn and a bipartisan Senate have drawn a line in the sand on the their version.

The White House has yet to pick a side, perhaps reluctant to make unpopular policy choices between protecting children and conservative speech on gay and transgender kids in the run-up to November’s mid-term elections.

Politico reported another wild card on this file; where Meta stands in all of this.

Meta lobbied against the earlier Senate version of KOSA two years ago because it didn’t support the Meta position that age gating or parental consent check-offs for minors accessing social media should be imposed on the Apple and Google app stores, not on Meta and other digital apps and platforms.

Meta is advancing the same position on age-gating in Canada, having pitched its case to the public on CBC. Meta has also been lobbying the Carney government on this issue.

It’s reasonable speculation that Meta might be prepared to both reinstate Canadian news on its platforms and pay publishers for it if it got something in return on the Safe Social Media Act.

***

A quick update on the Paramount-Warner Brothers merger that MediaPolicy has been tracking.

A federal court judge sided with the plaintiff state governments, who oppose the merger on anti-trust grounds, who asked for more time to prepare their case. A twelve-day trial will begin March 27, 2027.

***

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I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Catching up on MediaPolicy – AI news scraping deal in Australia – who will pay for non-partisan journalism? – two paths to liberal democracy

July 12, 2026

Canadians are familiar with the story of the Online News Act. True policy nerds know that it’s part of a bigger story in which Google and Meta grappled with mandatory news licensing in the European Union, Australia, Canada and the United States.

Something similar might be playing out again between digital news publishers and global AI companies. But it is in its early stages, as large news publishers with lots of content to offer, and a modicum of leverage, choose between launching copyright lawsuits against AI companies or settling for licensing agreements. Here’s a list.

The latest news —- relevant to Canada because it occurred in our parallel policy universe, Australia—- is that Microsoft Co-Pilot has a content deal with Nine News (roughly, the equivalent of Canada’s Bell Media) to license its digital news content. Neither party is saying if cheques are being written, but certainly audience traffic will flow.

Co-Pilot has licensed Nine’s paywalled content as feedstock for its AI summaries but will embed Nine’s hyperlinks and enough paywalled content to push Co-Pilot consumers back to Nine’s full stories.

As Ulrike Langer wrote last week, publishers of premium news content such as Time, The Economist, and Dow Jones are making different kinds of AI deals that license content scraping in different ways: full archive access, data-only access, or journalism-only access.

The beginnings of a commercial market in AI-digested news content is an obvious way that AI companies can deflect or minimize any government efforts to come to the rescue of domestic news companies getting illegally scraped by the AI giants. Google and Meta did something similar a decade ago. They made voluntary agreements with a cherry-picked assortment of big media companies until sovereign governments decided to back the claims of news companies that Google and Meta bargained unfairly or not at all because they were monopolists in Search and social media.

The prevalence of ongoing copyright lawsuits against the AI companies suggests that news companies again believe they are getting ripped off but don’t have the leverage to get adequate settlements without the intervention of their domestic judiciaries. Yet litigation is a long and uncertain path and it’s probably a non-starter strategy for local publishers anyway.

At some point, sovereign nations are going to think about legislating mandatory licensing of news content by AI companies with a dispute resolution mechanism that drives a fair market price. You might have heard of the idea.

***

Editorial strategy in news journalism hasn’t changed much over time: most publishers curate their news feed with “biased” or standpoint content stemming from a politically partisan, ideologically driven or simply a “watchdog” philosophy of keeping an eye on powerful political and corporate actors.

It’s hardly a secret that publishers are keenly aware of who their audience is, particularly their paying audience.

As the advertising revenue stream for professional news journalism continues to collapse, two public policy imperatives meet: providing the people with fair and balanced news content and getting them to pay for it. Only 12% of Canadians pay for or share a digital news subscription, a stubborn statistic that hardly moves from year to year.

The policy sweet spot is to foster a commercial market in broad spectrum news reporting on current affairs that gets citizens out of their self-imposed filter bubbles, whether on social media or from conventional news sources.

The newly released 2026 Reuters Oxford Digital News report offers some audience data that’s relevant to what readers want and, perhaps, what they will pay for.

The report includes an inquiry by Denmark’s highly esteemed Rasmus Nielsen where polling respondents were asked to declare the strength of their allegiances to news sources they considered neutral, ideologically comfortable, or offering an editorial standpoint that challenged their own.

As you can see from this graph above a strong plurality of respondents fancied their favoured news source were neutral. But significant minorities openly declared their allegiances to either intellectually comforting or challenging news sources.

Here’s Nielsen’s take away from his research:

But the outsize role played by the minority who seek partisanship is easier to understand when we take into account that those who say they prefer news from sources that share their point of view are, in our survey data, also more likely to:

Share and comment on news online and on social media

Be very or extremely interested in news and in politics

Place themselves on the left or the right of the political spectrum

Access news many times daily and pay for online news

The people who prefer news that aligns with their own views are a minority. But they tend to be more vocal, more highly engaged, more partisan, and more commercially important for many news publishers than the public at large.

I’ll translate that passage as “an audience that is very tuned in to politics with very clear political views of their own will pay for news.”

This is not surprising, is it.

For Canadians, this troubling disconnect between the willingness to pay for news and non-partisan content leads us back to another conclusion: the important role of CBC Radio-Canada as a news content provider for citizens who stubbornly won’t pay for news.

To change tack here, Nielsen also makes some other conclusions from the data with the benefit of polling from around the world.

The first is that there is a correlation between audience preferences for ideologically friendly news sources and the prevalence of social media as a news platform. Not a surprise either.

Another is that perhaps we in the global north and citizens that enjoy the privilege of living in liberal democracies ought not to be too judgmental about that lack of journalistic detachment in autocracies and conflict zones.

“When core democratic institutions or the fundamental rights of whole swaths of the public are under concerted political attack,” says Nielsen, “what does it mean to report the news in a way that doesn’t have a particular point of view?”

Discuss.

***

Open to being pleasantly amused? I recommend a short and compelling weekend read written by a friend of mine, historian David Wilson (among many endeavours, he has just stepped down from a ten-year stint as the editor of the prestigious Dictionary of Canadian Biography).

Published last week on the American July 4th holiday, Wilson asks whether the birth of the republic was a better choice than Canada’s own (but more patient) path to independence and responsible government. A cheeky but serious piece, worth your five minutes.

***

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved.

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Catching up on MediaPolicy – Your trust in news – Zuckerberg’s your daddy – Seeing Red – CBC is vulnerable – Do AI chatbots lean left? – Explaining Age Bans

(AI illustration)

June 27, 2026

Every year the Reuters Oxford Digital News conducts a global survey of online news journalism. It frequently leads its public release with a headline-grabbing number for “trust in news.” Every year, the number goes down. It sunk by 3% this year to 37%. A further 34% of respondents neither trust nor distrust news.

Every year, that single “trust” metric dominates the conversation. Here’s the problem with making too much of that.

First, what do polled respondents think “trust in news” means? The survey doesn’t offer a definition, so it’s in the eye of the beholder. My beholding eye thinks it describes confidence in, and comfort with, news sources.

Second, the precise wording of the question that generates an answer across 48 participating countries is whether the individual respondents have trust in the “most news, most of the time” in their countries.

“Most news, most of the time” means news from all sources on all digital platforms, from news apps to social media. In other words, respondents are passing judgment on the entire news ecosystem they encounter or are aware of.

A related metric is “trust in news that I use” and runs a little higher at 45% in Canada.

On the other hand Reuters Oxford asks about trust in selected news outlets, favoured or not. When asked that way in Canada, “trust in news” suddenly jumps to the 50s and 60s in percentage of “trusting” new consumers and clocks in at less than 20% for those that “don’t trust.”

My own theory is that the 37% “overall trust” number is being weighed down by the respondents’ disapproval of news sources they think other Canadians should not be consuming.

Third, the global “trust in news” number is a mean average across 48 participating nations. Make of this what you will, Canada was 37% this year and so was the global mean average. Finland, Denmark and Norway are in the 50s and 60s percentage ranges. The United States is at 25%. Is our journalism really so different or is it possible “trust in news” is heavily culturally determined?

Helpfully, the Reuters survey moves on to ask a lot more questions (not just about “trust”) and you can digest it all in two places: the brief Canada chapter (at page 128) in the global report and the in depth Canada-only report. Both are prepared by Sébastien Charlton and Colette Brin of Laval University.

Let’s have a look.

Mark Zuckerberg’s your daddy

This year in Canada we crossed a Rubicon of sorts. For the first time, social media became the most widely used platform for finding news. That surpasses the long time leader, television.

Sure, TV is still the most popular “main source” of Canadian news consumers. But if you take the French language responses out of the equation, social media has become the leading “main source” for English speaking Canadians.

There’s a disturbing trend buried in the data: the remarkable 10 percentage point upward swing in consuming news on social media that you see in the chart above came mostly at the expense of digital news apps, especially among younger Canadians. That doesn’t bode well for Canadian news outlets controlling their own distribution and proprietary audience data.

To fill in the picture of what it means to consume news on “social media,” the survey notes that YouTube is the leading social media app for news (and traditional television news outlets re-publish their digital content extensively).

Following behind YouTube’s 35% share of social media news consumers, Meta’s various social media apps rank second (Facebook, 33%), third (Instagram, 17%), fourth (Messenger, 14%) and seventh (WhatsApp, 10%). Of course Meta bans news content published by conventional news outlets from appearing on Facebook and Instagram.

Seeing Red

Right wing Canadians see a widespread news media bias on almost all key political issues (on that, see the item on AI chatbots at the end of this post).

Left wing Canadians only see news media bias on environmental issues.

Centrists give the news media a modest endorsement. Note that centrists were 60% of the respondents, the other 40% are split evenly between left and right.

The CBC is vulnerable

Canadians who are “very negative” about CBC/Radio Canada —-the CBC-killers to whom the Conservative Party has promised action —- tally only 8% of respondents (and 4% in Quebec).

And the public broadcaster continues to score top of the charts against private media for online news consumption that measure viewing in the prior week. It must be doing something right.

That’s the good news. But “top of the charts” or not, CBC news content is consumed by 29% of Canadians offline and 26% online. That means 70%+ of taxpayers don’t go there for news.

Still, the CBC is not just any news outlet, it is a guardian of cultural sovereignty and many Canadians support it without watching it. Forty per cent of Canadians view CBC as “having a positive effect on Canadian life,” compared to one in five Canadians who don’t. There’s another 34% who can’t make up their minds.

That undecided vote is the CBC’s vulnerability.

No way, we won’t pay

So many of the leading sources of online news are free, ad-supported or buried in our cable TV package, that it’s difficult to get Canadians to dig into their pockets for a digital news subscription fee (after paying for Netflix, Spotify et al).

That’s why Reuters tracks the cohort of digital news paid subscribers as an important metric. Alas, the upward trend in 2024 and 2025 has fallen back from 16% last year to 12% in 2026 (and that number includes those Canadians accessing someone else’s subscription).

***

US conservatives have long claimed that mainstream media is biased against them. Not long ago, Elon Musk had his knife out for the volunteer-curated Wikipedia, threatening to buy it and practice his version of conversion therapy upon it as he did with Twitter (X). More recently, Donald Trump alleged that AI chatbots were biased too. He issued an Executive Order in July 2025 saying so.

This week a story by Kevin Schaul in the Washington Post, building on research from three academics affiliated with the conservative think tank Hoover Institution, suggests the President might have more to say on this.

Schaul pitched 30 prompts adopted from the academic research (at page 21 of this document) querying —to pick the first question as an example— “should the United States abolish the death penalty or retain the death penalty?”

The reporter then evaluated whether the brief 30-word answers were “left wing,” “right-wing” or “both sides.” The original research preferred the labels for these answers as Democrat, Republican, or Independent (the latter described as “ideologically neutral.”).

Schaul’s scorecard of the chatbot responses was heavily weighted towards “left” or “both sides” but very few to the “right.” Even Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot favoured left over right!

***

Parliament is adjourned for the summer and the Safe Social Media Act Bill C-34 will be back in September.

Two weeks ago I posted my “first explainer” of the legislation. For my next explainer, I will just send you to Emily Laidlaw’s analysis of age bans and age verification because it is so helpful and easy to follow.

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I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

MediaPolicy’s First Explainer on the Safe Social Media Act

2024 Opinion Poll, The Dais

June 16, 2026

I will make a confession. I was at first overwhelmed by the breadth and detail of the federal government’s new Safe Social Media Act Bill C-34. The dense legalese of the bill is a terrific sleep aid.

But of course both the good and bad vibes in the legislation deserve a hearing if you are keen to follow the ups and downs of the bill’s parliamentary journey, soon to unfold.

In sorting all of that out, you really need to know: what does the proposed statute actually say and do?

Read the bill. But if I’ve discouraged you, here’s an explainer.

The top of line summary is that the bill creates a Digital Safety Commission to shepherd in a regulatory regime to protect children from online harm and reduce harms for adults.

Some of the harms, like child porn, hate and some forms of the online incitement of violence, are already illegal. The bill is intended to supplement the state’s formidable powers of criminal investigation, arrest and prosecution.

Other harms like revenge porn (my shorthand for posting intimate content without consent), bullying or inducing kids to self-harm, or the hate or incitement falling short of illegality is often called “awful but lawful” content because the speech embedded in the online content is free speech.

But free speech, like the banana peel on the sidewalk, has never been free of consequences or civil liability.

Awful but lawful online content has been the subject of years and years of civil lawsuits launched against US-headquartered social media platforms around the world, slow walking towards a day of reckoning before the US Supreme Court. This Canadian bill is about making the awful unlawful in Canada if it’s harmful enough.

The legal breakthrough is that the bill creates a legal duty of care ——the one that an American or Canadian court may or may not create in some distant future—- that social media platforms, AI chatbots, and porn sites must live up to.

If you read the bill, you will see that it is organized by codifying those legal duties for social media, AI chatbots, and “other” regulated services. Then for each of those categories, the statute describes the content of those duties and how the online services can stay out of legal trouble for hosting it.

Most of the action in the bill is for social media apps. I’ll get to that below.

As for AI chatbots, regulation is narrowed down to the AI companies doing or not doing a few simple things:

Not posing as a human, especially a lawyer or medical professional.
Not using emotionally manipulative techniques or being deceptive about being an AI agent.
Ending interactions with users by refusing to provide information on self-harm or harm to others and instead directing the user to health services.

Interestingly, the bill does not require AI companies to report these dangerous or self-harming users to the police, something that took no small measure of political forbearance after the Tumbler Ridge shooting. Calling the cops will still be up to the AI company.

Also as an overall safety measure, the bill requires AI chatbots to submit a Digital Safety Plan to the new Digital Safety Commission. The Plan must assess the potential harms in their services, the measures they take to mitigate those risks, and how effective those measures are.

As for porn sites (just one of the potential members of the third “other” class of regulated online services) the main obligation is to protect children from viewing porn by setting up age verification or age estimation technology.

This age gating raises concerns about the secure storage of private data, meaning the risk that porn viewers will be publicly embarrassed or blackmailed. A key provision in the bill, picked up from Bill S-209, is that online age verification services are supposed to delete the personal data the moment they have confirmed the age of majority.

As for social media apps, they will be age gated for all users if they carry porn (sorry, not sorry Elon).

Even if they don’t carry porn, social media apps will be temporarily age gated (below age 16) until such time their proprietors satisfy the Digital Safety Commission that they have a Digital Safety Plan that assesses harms to children and adults, puts online design features and measures in place that reduce harms, and then documents how effective they were. “Temporary” age gating may last months or years, although the mere requirement will light a fire under the social media platforms to submit their Digital Safety Plans to the Commission on day one.

But any age verification requirement for social media apps, even if temporary, suggests that all adult users will be subject to it, or at very least those adults who don’t get through the gate with a minimum of fuss and information. For example, your social media platform may be satisfied by a quick scan of your social media profile and activity.

As for protecting kids from the proliferating harms on social media apps, the federal cabinet will have the power to set regulations (that first get published in the Canada Gazette for debate) detailing at least some of what is expected in a Digital Safety Plan.

At the very least, the Carney government might see this regulation-making opportunity to take credit for some high level principles of child safety —- perhaps a command to “do something about addictive design”—- while leaving the fine points of implementation to the platforms drafting their Digital Safety Plans and the Commission that has to approve those Plans.

In fact it will be important to hear the presentations made at parliamentary committees considering Bill C-34 as to how much of the line by line of the Digital Safety Plans will be left to the social media companies to conceptualize and design versus how much will be effectively dictated by cabinet regulation and the Commission’s own views of how tough the Plans must be.

On that score, the bill already includes clear measures expected of the social media apps:

There must be blocking tools for users to shut out noxious harassers and child predators.

There must be user tools for flagging harmful content to bring to the attention of platform.

The social media companies must label “synthetic” content (deep fakes).

Bot-driven content must be labelled once it is discovered.

And there must be a public facing “resource person” to deal with user concerns.

As for actual content take-downs by the social media platforms, they are only required in limited circumstances, i.e. child porn, revenge porn and terrorist material.

These content take-downs are required on at least an interim basis within 24 hours of being flagged. But a final platform decision on the take-down is only due “as soon as feasible.” Since it’s likely there will be some contested judgments on making these difficult take-down calls, the social media companies must provide an internal appeal process (for both content viewer and content poster) and then ultimately a complaint can be made to the Commission.

All of this will be superintended by the five commissioners appointed by cabinet to the Digital Safety Commission.

The Commission’s powers are broadly similar to most federal administrative tribunals. After all, the whole point of the bill is to take the law and liability out of the hands of civil law and the civil courts and transfer them to a body capable of holding tech platforms accountable for harmful content on offer to 40 million Canadians.

Three Commission powers pop out already as notable.

The first is the ladder of substantial fines and “administrative monetary penalties” that the Commission can use, or threaten to use, to keep the Big Tech platforms in line. Depending on the circumstances, the fines can range from $5 million to $20 million, or from 1.5% to 5% of the tech platform’s global revenues.

The second is the possibility of secret Commission hearings that can be invoked when there a privacy concerns (for example revenge porn or anything concerning children).

The third is the Commission’s power to compel platforms to give data access to independent (but government-vetted) research academics. This will hopefully give the public interest independent information about how well the platforms are meeting their obligations.

This summary will have to do for now.

There’s enough in this lengthy and detailed bill to attract scrutiny and that has already begun.

As I wrote in my last post, this bill sits on at least two powder keg issues. One is protecting children and adults from poisonous content. The other is the possibility of creating a slippery slope of the state interfering with free speech through the proxy of platform accountability.

It would be easy to dismiss either policy perspective as being motivated by either nanny statism or, on the other hand, a dogged resistance to regulating any Internet content any time out of a fear for digital privacy, especially where porn is concerned.

From what I have already read, and from my own observations, here is a short list of issues that will and should get attention during the parliamentary debate:

Flag-a-mania. The statute contemplates ordinary Canadians flagging harmful content, even if it is not about them. They (and those that posted the content) get due process from both the platform and the Commission. It’s not hard to see that devolving into a new form of “lawfare.”

Age gating. This is going to happen no matter what because of the ban on children accessing porn. The question is not the digital security of personal data — leaks and hacks are always possible — but whether technology can reduce that unlikely event to something next to impossible. Social media platforms can make this easier by simply banning pornography from their platforms and leave that business to the porn sites.

The statute gives the platforms a get-out-jail-free card by relieving them of any obligation to pro-actively search for harmful content. I am sure they already do this voluntarily and may even incorporate that into a Digital Safety Plan, but enshrining this grant of platform immunity into law could be controversial.

The statute leaves a lot of digital rule-making to be determined by a combination of cabinet regulations, Commission guidelines, and platform Digital Safety Plans. That is a lot of regulatory power held in reserve and without fulsome debate in Parliament. On the other hand, it may be practically unavoidable.

***

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved.

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Miller explains the Netflix bailout – Federal ad vouchers to support Canadian media? – US DOJ approves the Paramount/ Warner Bros merger

June 14, 2026

There are few things more refreshing than CTV’s Vassy Kapelos grilling cabinet ministers.

The host of Question Period had culture and identity minister Marc Miller in the dock on Saturday to ask him bluntly why Canadians would expect that his new Safe Social Media Act Bill C-34 won’t be given away upon President Donald Trump’s insistence, as were the Digital Services Tax and the CRTC’s assessment of cash and investment contributions to Canadian content by US streaming services.

Miller’s answer: there will be no surrender by the Liberals on his new bill. Protecting kids is not on the table, he said, “hard stop.” The minister thinks that similar legislative efforts being passed or proposed in Washington and various US state houses to protect children from online harms bodes well for Canada pursuing the same strategy.

Also, he said protecting children is more important than “redistributing money within an industry,” a reference to the CRTC ruling. (Public polling on conceding ground on the Online Streaming Act under US trade pressure is here.)

As for overruling the CRTC on streamer contributions, Miller said he wouldn’t comment publicly. That lasted about ten seconds once Kapelos went after him for “capitulation” to US trade pressure and American companies.

Kapelos asked Miller what Canada got, or might get, in CUSMA trade talks for coughing up the Digital Services Tax and the CRTC ruling.

“I’m not going to tell you,” replied the minister.

The minister then gave up some fresh talking points on the CRTC ruling and the $600M in federal funds that includes replacement of the streamer contributions:

The CRTC “is not the final arbiter” on implementing the Online Streaming Act, the government is.
The Prime Minister may have overruled the CRTC’s 15%-of-revenues assessment on foreign streamers but it is only because the 15% number wasn’t the right one. When the minister formally instructs the CRTC “in a few months” on the make-over of the overturned decision, there will be “a number.”
The annual $600M in federal funds announced on June 3rd will compensate for giving away the $200M in annual streamer contributions ordered two years ago by the CRTC in part because that streamer money is “tied up in court.” (The escrowed streamer funds from 2025-26 will have to be refunded to the streamers).
The federal $600M will include money for “independent journalism.”

***

There was an unexpected media policy post from Narcity publisher Chuck Lapointe last week that is worth reading.

Narcity is a Canadian news outlet with a heavy bent towards travel content. But it also publishes conventional news content and on a daily basis it re-posts Canadian Press news stories on Facebook in order to draw traffic to Narcity’s websites.

Lapointe can get away with this despite the Meta banishment of news from its Canadian platforms because he signed off a Meta waiver saying his news product is not the kind of content that triggers financial compensation from Meta under the Online News Act, Bill C-18.

Speaking of Meta, Lapointe’s policy post points out how foreign platforms now completely dominate the Canadian market in digital advertising with the well known impact on the ability of Canadian media to monetize their content.

A good policy move, he says, would be for Ottawa to put new federal dollars in the hands of Canadian advertisers on the condition they spend it on Canadian digital platforms. That kind of voucher system might spur innovation by Canadian digital outlets competing for that ad spend.

It’s a smart idea that’s been circulating in various US states for some time now. In Canada, Senator Andrew Cardozo and I included the recommendation of an advertising voucher in our recent report, Making News Media Sustainable.

***

The US Federal Department of Justice has signed off on the blockbuster Paramount-Warner Brothers Discovery merger.

As often happens in government reviews of big mergers, the field of competition is configured to offer a rationale for the thumbs up or down. In this case, the FCC is saying it’s “pro-competitive” for Hollywood studios and streamers to consolidate in order to compete more effectively with Silicon Valley tech/media companies.

The merger story isn’t over. Some US state attorney generals, including California, are banding together to litigate an anti-trust action against it.

The merger also hasn’t been approved by the Canadian Competition Bureau. The European Union and the United Kingdom are also reviewing it: an early approval or the launch of further EU investigations might be announced in July.

***

Back to the Online News Act for a moment and attention all journalists.

An independent researcher from Simon Fraser University is running a survey on newsroom opinions on the consequences of the Online News Act. (She confirmed to me that she isn’t getting funding from foreign platforms. Her research appears to be supported by a federal grants).

English : The Online News Act and its consequences for Canadian Journalism

En français : La Loi sur les nouvelles en ligne et ses conséquences pour le journalisme canadien

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COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved.

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Feds table Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act

June 11, 2026

Even if you haven’t, Prime Minister Mark Carney has moved on from last week’s announcement of a $600 million taxpayer bailout of US streamers who were scheduled to make cash contributions to Canadian media funds.

Within days, federal government announced two other big things that bear heavily upon Canadian media policy.

The first was the “AI for all” federal policy which focusses mostly on AI investment, AI adoption by businesses and consumers, and some money for safety research. The words “creator copyright” or “content licensing” do not appear in the federal plan. That means that the unlicensed and uncompensated ingestion of online news and information content by AI companies will continue, although the Liberals say we should “stay tuned.”

The other big thing was Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, a reprise and redesign of the old Bill C-63 that sets up a regulatory regime of self-policing against harmful content by social media companies and now AI chatbots too. It effectively overtakes Bill S-209, the Senate bill that targets youth access to online pornography available for free on social media apps.

C-34 was tabled by the Heritage minister Marc Miller for First Reading in the House and will likely go into the theatrical window of Parliamentary committee in October. You’re going to hear a lot about the merits or dismerits of the government’s plan over many months and MediaPolicy.ca will offer updates as we go along. Together I hope we can educate ourselves as the public commentary comes, which will be thick and fast I guarantee you.

What is the Bill?

Social media content can be addictive and harmful, especially to impressionable kids. No one is going to dispute that reality, the arguments over C-34 are going to be over how far the government should intervene. Public polling demonstrates mass popular support for federal regulation of online harms and in particular age bans for kids.

The bill focusses on harm to kids, revenge porn, fomenting hate, inciting violence, and content published by terrorist and extremist cells. Again, all of them consensus picks for government action.

The platforms to be regulated are social media companies and AI chatbots, the latter being a response to and a painful reminder of OpenAI’s culpability in the Tumbler Ridge shootings.

The core of the bill is to make online platforms liable for harmful content by requiring them to meet a standard of self-policing the addictive and harmful content. Ultimately, a new government digital regulator (not the CRTC, praise be) will be the arbiter of whether the platform’s design features and content curation are good enough.

There’s lots to dig into there, and more to explain, but later.

As we go along you can expect that the contested features of the bill, wrapped in fine points of legalese or technological detail, are sitting to two powder kegs. One, is the harm to children. The other, is the fear that the age restrictions embedded in the legislation will usher in the end of anonymous online content consumption and create a treasure trove of personal data for hackers to steal.

***

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved.

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Catching up on MediaPolicy – journalism subsidies for news broadcasters ? – Australia lowers price on Big Tech news levy – Age verification bill tabled in House of Commons

AI Image

May 2, 2026

On Wednesday I posted about the new report written by Senator Andrew Cardozo and myself on the future of subsidies for news journalism.

One of the not so surprising options we propose is to extend the federal QCJO journalism labour tax credits to news websites operated by broadcasting companies. The Québec provincial government did it in March with their labour tax credit that parallels the federal QCJO. (A correction: the Québec labour credit directly supports news broadcasting on television and radio).

Entirely by an accident of timing (promise!), on Tuesday the Carney government announced a public consultation proposing to extend QCJO labour tax credits to “audio and audio visual news production,” which is not quite the same thing as digital news websites operated by broadcasting companies, but close enough.

Law professor Michael Geist was out of the gate fast opposing public journalism subsidies being paid to major broadcasters, in particular the three owned by telco pantomime villains Bell, Rogers and Québecor. It’s fair to say, Geist won’t be alone on this.

I have a long winded rebuttal which I will save for later.

***

AI Image

The Australian government has taken the next step in responding to Meta’s refusal in March 2024 to reboot news licensing agreements under the News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC). The 2021 NMBC legislation was the prototype for Canada’s Online News Act.

To counter Meta’s exit from news licensing agreements, the Australian government announced in December 2024 that it would replace the NMBC with a News Bargaining Incentive (NBI). The key provision in the proposed NBI is a default cash levy on Meta, even if it tries to elude payments by banning local news. The NBI news levy would be reduced by any licensing deals struck between tech platforms and news outlets. It also would extend the levy net to catch TikTok, in addition to Meta and Google.

The calendar months have flipped by and it was not until this week that the Australian government at last announced the next step for the NBI, a public consultation.

The most newsworthy item in the announcement was the proposed price point for the cash levy: 2.25% of a company’s Australian revenues.

At first glance, that number suggests a climb down from an old levy rate of 4% of revenues that in 2021 generated $190 million in annual licensing payments by Google and Meta. The de facto 4% figure was identified by reverse calculation back in September 2023 by Canadian officials commenting on the monetary value of the 2021 Australian deals with Google and Meta.

Canadian officials said at the time that applying the Australian 4% target under our Online News Act would mean Canadian outcomes of $172 million from Google and $62 million from Meta. When Ottawa finally settled in December 2023 with Google for $100 million instead of $172 million, that converted the Canadian 4% into 2.32%.

Which is awfully close to the 2.25% proposed now by the Australian government.

But the lower Australian levy rate is still intended to produce the same $190 million contribution outcomes from 2021 because the legislation adds TikTok revenues and reflects the growth of Google and Meta revenues in the last five years.

Back in Canada, it’s unclear what Ottawa is going to do about the Meta ban on mainstream news (going forward I am calling it “Meta’s mainstream media ban” as it’s now clear that Meta permits certain Canadian news outlets to post on Facebook and Instagram provided these outlets sign off that they are not, or would not be eligible for federal QCJO labour tax credits or a share of the $100 million in Google money under the Online News Act. Effectively, this means the Meta news ban on Facebook and Instagram targets mainstream Canadian news organizations who produce original news).

This selective news ban gives the peripheral news organizations —whether they behave as honest news outlets or political activists — a leg up on mainstream media in the quest for audience.

The policy boomerang that smacks mainstream media in the mug, whether you blame Meta or the legislators of the Online News Act for the ban, results in the loss of audience exposure and click-through referrals to news websites.

But there are self-help strategies.

On this, Torstar President Angus Frame appeared before the parliamentary Heritage committee on April 23rd and offered some interesting information.

In the course of testimony about Big Tech in Canada, Frame said that since Meta imposed the news ban in August 2023 the Torstar chain of dailies and community weeklies has neutralized the loss of referral traffic.

I asked how and his answer, about leaning into web traffic generated by Google Discover and e-mail distribution strategies, is succinct enough to quote in its entirety:

There are always a bunch of variables in the mix, but the simple story looks like this:

In July 2023 (the month before Meta pulled out of news in Canada) our community sites generated 1.6M page views from Facebook referrals. This was typical for the first half of 2023 though the number had been declining since about 2018.

In July 2023 we generated 550K page views from newsletter click-throughs (people visiting from our own newsletters). We had 5.2M page views from Google.

Last month we had 1.55M page views from our newsletters, which almost completely replaces the views lost to Facebook. Google referrals were at 5.1M.

So the way that all came together is this:

-With the Meta ban, we shifted focus to optimizing for Google and in particular Google Discover. This gave us a good recovery heading into 2024 but it has since declined a bit with some reductions in Google traffic.

-Once Google was in better shape, we started to emphasize newsletter growth and newsletter effectiveness. This involved a number of tactics to get more people to sign up for our newsletters, to make sure our newsletters were landing in people’s inboxes properly and to optimize the newsletters (both design and story selection) for the best possible click-through rate. And that gets us to where we are today with newsletter traffic almost completely replacing the lost Facebook traffic.

And the newsletter traffic is better for us — we have a direct relationship with that audience, they come back to us more frequently and we can continue to grow that audience channel without worrying about algorithm changes or other things that can disrupt the strategy.

***

The Senate Bill S-209 that would introduce age verification to block underage access to porn sites and porn on social media apps has now made its way into the House of Commons.

The Opposition Conservatives always supported S-209 and Saskatchewan MP Rosemarie Falk tabled it in the House for first reading on Thursday.

Now that the Liberals have a majority in the House, don’t expect the bill to get far, even if they find themselves on the wrong side of public opinion on this one.

The door isn’t completely shut. Heritage minister Marc Miller was quoted in the Globe and Mail as saying S-209 “has merit,” the opposite of what the Trudeau PMO used to say.

But Miller appeared to pour cold water on the bill anyway, simultaneously saying that age verification would not be in a Liberal online harms bill while referring the issue, along with the idea of a blanket age ban on social media, to his expert advisory committee.

As part of the debate over child safety and social media, expect the troubling privacy and compliance issues to keep bubbling up to the surface.

There are anecdotal reports of Australian teenagers circumventing the new social media ban in that country.

As well, the technical issues of privacy breaches keep arising, as they just did in Europe. The hacking of adult viewers’ age verification data is a problem that gets bigger depending on where the digital gatekeeping of age verification happens, from the narrow access to online porn sites to universally accessed social media or device operating system sign-ins.

***

Here’s a few things to read that follow up on issues followed in MediaPolicy:

The Paramount sneeze and the Canadian cold: The possibility that a soon-to-be- sanctioned merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery will sideswipe Bell Media, by cancelling HBO’s exclusive Canadian distribution through Crave, is further off in the future than previously thought. The Globe & Mail‘s Barry Hertz got Bell to talk.

Canadian book publishing: Hugh Stephens has reviewed Richard Stursberg’s Lament for a Literature. Stephens offers his skepticism of Stursberg’s “draconian” proposal for state intervention into the Canadian book publishing market. Knowing Stursberg, he wouldn’t flinch at “draconian” but would argue that drastic measures are required after 40 years of federal neglect.

CanCon: Cartt.ca is publishing Brad Danks’ seven-part series on the future of Canadian content in a small domestic market and a global streaming audience. So far there are two instalments and if you find the first one a little abstract, the second (“why Canadian media keeps missing the upside”) makes his arguments with brevity and persuasion. I won’t give away more than that.

Journalism standards: Are you a Canadian journalist? Colette Brin of Laval University is shaking your tree to get involved a survey supporting a study on whether there are consensus standards for news coverage that we should be articulating for the industry. If you don’t help, consider your dissenting privileges revoked!

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Lastly, a magnetic documentary to watch.

CBC is streaming Canadian filmmaker Ric Esther Bienstock’s two-part “Speechless,” profiling the pitched ideological battles staged on American university campuses and inside faculty lounges.

The film got a meh from Globe reviewer Kelly Nestruck, but I found it both riveting and kind of terrifying (after having tuned it all out for years for just that reason).

***

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved.

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

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