The Canadian government has ended it’s failed advertiser boycott, potentially capping off the endless failure of the Online News Act.
When the Canadian government passed the Online News Act, the moment was met by real experts with a collective facepalm. The link tax law was an extremely stupid idea based on a total misunderstanding on how social media platforms work. What’s more, the law was sold on the obviously false premise that platforms are unfairly profiting off of the publishers work. As a result, platforms, according to the idiotic supporters of the Act, should be giving them free money because they said so and that’s just the way it is. The consensus of people who know how the internet actually works was basically wondering how the Canadian government could be so stupid.
Despite the completely delusional arguments flying around by the supporters of this law that platforms are wholly dependent on Canadian news links for their survival, Meta made it clear that they would be blocking news links altogether all along and they carried that out despite the delusions of mainstream media where Meta totally depends on them for their survival. The results came to a surprise of no one paying attention. Media traffic plummeted, news organizations began going bankrupt and the traffic for Meta’s platforms remained unchanged. As a result, Big Lie 1.0 came crashing down.
Faced with a massive media crisis, the Canadian government issued massive bailouts over this self-inflicted crisis. To add insult to injury, Bell took the bailout money and laid people off anyway, opting to hand the bailout money over to shareholders in the form of additional dividend payments. After realizing that they had been completely hoodwinked in all of this, the Canadian government understandably got pissed off at Bell for their decision, raking Bell over the coals in a committee hearing after.
As that all happened, one of the main talking points in the aftermath of this policy failure was that Meta would eventually come crawling back to them. In their weapons grade delusion, they honestly believed that Meta was totally “hurting” after dropping news links and that it would only be a matter of days before Meta finally comes crawling back to them. The data obviously showed no such thing, but these supporters live in an alternate universe of their own making. So, facts and evidence doesn’t mean a darned thing to them. Days turns to weeks, weeks turned to months, and months went to a year and beyond with no change in sight.
So, one of the responses is to launch an advertiser boycott, supposedly to hit Meta right in the pocket book – a truly “good luck with that” desperate response to try and resuscitate a dead on arrival business theory. The campaign was spearheaded by then Heritage Minister, Pablo Rodriguez who kicked things off with a federal government advertising boycott worth an estimated $10 million. For many, that’s a big number, but for Meta, that is worth roughly less than one minute of revenue. So, a financial hole that Meta likely won’t be even noticing in the grand scheme of things. A couple other gullible suckers joined the boycott, suspending their ad campaigns that generally amounted to less than one second of revenue in multiple cases. The microscopic attacks made no real financial difference for Meta as they just let the lobbyists have their tantrums. It was a boycott so pathetic, even the Liberal party refused to participate in it.
Desperation on the part of the mainstream media became more obvious as they launched multiple user boycotts. The boycotts failed hard after almost no one participated in them.
With everything failing, the mainstream media eventually came crawling back to Meta after a number of the biggest “champions” of this whole stupid affair resumed their advertising on various platforms by November of last year. The move made it clear that this whole affair and the campaigns were an abysmal failure. This left only one holdout on all of this: the federal Canadian government. Well, today, we are learning that even the Canadian government couldn’t keep this boycott going after crawling back to Meta as well. From CTV:
The Canadian government has ended its ban on advertising on Meta platforms and allocated up to $100,000 for a campaign to promote the GST rebate, CTV News has learned.
The Privy Council Office (PCO) said the government deemed it “essential that Canadians receive credible information about government programs designed to support them,” when asked what informed the decision to reverse the policy of not spending taxpayer money to advertise on Facebook and Instagram.
According to the PCO, “up to $100,000” has been allocated for the GST holiday campaign advertising on Meta platforms. This ad buy began on Jan. 23.
Late last year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rolled out a two-month tax break on certain grocery items, children’s clothing and diapers, restaurant and pre-prepared meals, and other consumer goods.
Noting that social media “remains a primary source of information for many,” PCO spokesperson Daniel Savoie said in an email that the government has decided, going forward: “if Meta platforms align with campaign parameters, government departments may opt to advertise on them.”
This development marks the end of the last remnant of the Meta boycotts. Officially, the boycotts are dead as far as I’m concerned. Really, the last thing left standing in this whole sorry affair is the Online News Act itself. The media landscape has been left bloodied and bruised with nothing to really show for it (the $100 million Google fund doesn’t even come close to recovering what was lost with Meta). The mainstream media came out of this with arguably one of, if not, the biggest self-pwn in Canadian media history.
Really, the Canadian government didn’t have to go this long without the advertising. It was painfully obvious the boycott failed mere weeks into it. Lasting several months like this was only going to serve to sabotage the governments interests in the end. Given that the Canadian government came crawling back to Meta, it is clear that the government knows that they need the advertising arm of Meta to reach Canadians. What’s more, maintaining the boycott was impressing no one since it was largely forgotten by the general population long ago.
All of this was not only predictable, but was warned about by people like us. Of course, supporters of the Act dismissed us as little more than “shills” for Big Tech, so what would people who devoted their lives to understanding the internet and government policy know when personal beliefs trumps all of that? The fault for this whole mess truly lies at the feet of the corporate lobbyists who pushed for this and the federal government.
Of course, this all raises another question: what’s the point of even having the Online News Act in the first place? After all, it has demonstrably been shown to have damaged the media landscape in Canada, it undermines the media thanks to not being visible on Meta, it harmed the media’s credibility with how they behaved throughout this whole sorry affair, and the mainstream media themselves didn’t even really gain a net benefit in all of this once you account for the losses incurred due to a lack of Meta. I get that rescinding the law is unlikely before the next election, but more broadly, it’s hard to see what the point of having this law on the books really is at this point. If anything, rescinding the Act is the only logical step because at least at that point, the media sector can begin to recover from this idiocy.
Either way, this latest move by the government has shown that critics in this debate were right all along. While the mainstream media and the government doesn’t say that this is an admission of such, it does strongly imply that the government is finally acknowledging at least a portion of reality in this debate at this stage. All they will say is that advertising on the platform doesn’t imply that they endorse it:
As part of the PCO’s response, Savoie said “advertising on a social media platform does not imply endorsement of a platform’s actions or decisions.”
“Our approach strikes a careful balance: combating disinformation while ensuring Canadians receive accurate, essential information directly from the government,” Savoie said. “That is why we have taken strong action — and will continue to do so — to hold social media companies accountable, ensuring they operate responsibly and contribute fairly to Canada’s economy and culture.”
Stating the government “has made it a priority to help equip citizens with the tools and skills needed to critically assess online information,” Savoie pointed to the federal Digital Citizen Initiative. That effort received an additional $27.5 million in funding last week for “projects that build citizen resilience against online disinformation.”
That’s honestly a very softball exchange in all of this. I mean, the whole point of the boycott was to get Meta to “negotiate” a deal with news organizations. That never happened. Now, both the media and the government are back to advertising on the platforms. How does that not imply that both parties agree the boycotts were a failure?
Well, at least we are one step closer to going back to a more normal ecosystem after all that self-inflicted damage was done, so that’s something I guess. At least this will allow Canada to more closely focus on the more immediate problem of America going completely insane and demanding that they annex this nation. Hooray?
