Zuckerberg’s Harsh Blow to Canadian Democracy

A new report is highlighting the ghost town that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has made of news publishers on its platforms Facebook and Instagram one year after its ban on Canadian news content.

The Media Ecosystem Observatory, a collaboration between the Montreal-based McGill University and the University of Toronto, released the report on Aug. 1.

The report — the first to take a comprehensive look at the impact of the news ban — found that one-third of previously social-media-active local news outlets in Canada (212 total) are now inactive.

It also found that engagement (likes, comments and shares) with news on Facebook and Instagram specifically — the most-used and third-most-used social media platforms in Canada, respectively — is down 85 per cent.

“What we’ve seen is Meta’s decision straight up hurting Canadian democracy, hurting the abilities for Canadians to learn about their political world and get well informed,” said Aengus Bridgman, director of the Media Ecosystem Observatory and project lead.

“This report stresses that platforms exist to make a profit, but they also exist in a country, in a context, and have a corporate responsibility to that context,” he added. “Meta has recognized this many times through frequent election integrity projects, public announcements by Zuckerberg and others, that they are committed to democracy. This decision is extremely inconsistent with that.”

Another major takeaway from the report, noted Bridgman, is that Canadians don’t even know this ban has occurred and “have collectively shrugged their shoulders with regards to Meta removing news.”

Three-quarters of Canadians were found to be unaware that the news ban is even going on — including the users who say they get their news on these platforms.

“This is a critical point,” tweeted Taylor Owen, Beaverbrook chair in media, ethics and communications at McGill University, whose research contributed to the report.

“Meta normalized Canadians to expect news on their products. The company has benefited tremendously from this. And then took it away. Users continue to treat Meta’s platforms as reliable sources for news when they are now more biased and less factual.”

Facebook users are more aware of the ban than Instagram users, according to charts in the report.

Overall, these findings paint “a story of a relationship between media and Canadians that is very different than 30 years ago,” said Bridgman.

The ban on news content was Meta’s response to the Canadian government’s Online News Act, formerly Bill C-18, which set out to make large digital news intermediaries — namely Google and Meta — pay Canadian news organizations for the content they provide.

Meta and Google, which are worth a combined $2 trillion, vowed to get rid of Canadian news altogether on their platforms if the legislation was passed. It was, in June 2023.

Meta, which once touted its support for Canadian journalism and funded audience development training for struggling outlets, argued that users go to Facebook not for news but to keep their family and friends updated about their lives and for entertainment purposes. Citing NERA Economic Consulting, they claimed links to news stories made up less than three per cent of the content users see in their Facebook feeds.

Despite Meta’s intention to impose a blanket ban, not all Canadian news has been wiped from its platforms. News outlets and consumers alike have found loopholes to share information, using methods like screenshots, virtual private networks, or VPNs, or other creative techniques.

Still, the plummet in news sharing on Meta platforms within Canada has been steep, said Bridgman.

In the interim, Meta has excluded from its ban pseudo-news sites that don’t fall under the category of news but in some ways mimic journalism and that, in some cases, could contribute to disinformation. Meta has also allowed sharing in Canada of outlets that are purely sports and entertainment news.

“It was in Meta’s interest to keep those outlets on,” Bridgman noted. “Sports content outperforms news content significantly.”

In December, Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge said she wanted the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, overseeing the implementation of the act, to look into whether Meta could still be subject to the act, but the government has yet to force it to co-operate.

“Meta’s decision has not removed news from their platform and does not mean that news does not continue to drive conversation on their platform. So this workaround, ‘We’re going to block it so we’re not subject to the act,’ feels tenuous,” said Bridgman.

The loss in traffic on Facebook and Instagram has not been compensated for on other social media platforms, notes the observatory’s report.

Since before the ban, news engagement on TikTok has increased by 24 per cent, according to the report. This aligns with a finding from the 2024 Digital News Report that news consumption on TikTok is growing and that video in general is an increasingly crucial component for how people in Canada get their news.

But news engagement remained consistent year over year on X, formerly Twitter, and has dropped 22 per cent on YouTube.

As the observatory’s report pointed out, many news outlets aren’t on popular platforms like YouTube and TikTok because of the labour the platforms require.

“It requires a degree of creativity and production that is harder than just [taking] every article that I already publish and putting a link to it on my Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, which is, to an extent, what Canadian media outlets were doing before.”

The jump is a particularly difficult case to make since YouTube and TikTok don’t promote referral links, which is what brings traffic to news publishers’ websites, instead focusing on the in-app viewing experience.

Still, some outlets are taking a stab at long-term brand awareness on TikTok, as The Tyee reported, and are trying to find their footing on the creative app that boomed into popularity from dance videos during the early pandemic in 2020.

The shift toward people’s news consumption being integrated with their entertainment consumption and general engagement with the outside world is a transition that Canadian media was not ready for and hasn’t done particularly well, said Bridgman.

“Conversely, politicians primarily get their engagement through Twitter and Facebook, a little bit through Instagram, almost nothing on TikTok. So we have this real discrepancy,” he said.

Even accounting for the slight TikTok increase, the observatory reports that “engagement with Canadian news organizations has sunk dramatically as a result of the ban, with a total net loss of 8.2 million engagements per month.”

“Overall, Canadians are simply seeing less news online — an estimated reduction of 11 million views per day across Instagram and Facebook — due to the ban,” reads the report.

“The ban has effectively severed a key connection between the news industry and Canadian public,” it goes on.

This has “underscored the vulnerability of relying on a mediated connection with your audience,” said Bridgman.

The Tyee previously reported that some newsrooms have pivoted strategic direction, focusing on more direct contact with their readers, such as email newsletters.

“Rethinking that relationship has hopefully been part of the reflection over the last year,” Bridgman said, “although I will say the data showed that maybe that reflection hasn't happened and that news outlets have been slow to respond to this, perhaps in the hope that Meta would just turn news back on, that an agreement would be reached and life would go on.”

In November, Google, now the only platform carrying news and large enough to be subject to the act, came to an agreement with the Canadian government, which stipulated that, instead of striking private deals with publishers, it would provide the Canadian media industry with $100 million annually, indexed to inflation.

Then, in June, the ubiquitous search engine selected a collective of indie, digital-first news outlets to manage the distribution of the fund. It was met with controversy by a collective of broadcasters that also vied for the role, which accused the indie media group of conflict of interest and lack of experience for the gig.

“This is an ongoing fight between those who are trying to say Meta and Google have monopoly power over online ad revenue and that has severely damaged Canadian and local news and is negatively impacting societies across the world,” said Bridgman. “That disruption is likely to not go unchallenged.”

“The Online News Act was this government's attempt to reconcile the success of Facebook and Google with the harm to local industry. But I don't anticipate that this issue is over.”

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This article is part of an occasional series on how Canadian media became intertwined with major tech platforms, and how it’s affecting Canadians and their access to journalism.

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