New research is adding to the growing body of evidence that the Online News Act has been devastating to the news sector.
Critics and experts like us have long warned of the consequences of the Online News Act, yet the government and the then bills supporters dismissed those accurate warnings as wrong and talking points by “shills for Big Tech”. While some supporters tried pushing the message that those who were critical of the Online News Act were just working for platforms like Meta and Google (something that had compelled experts to deny before offering their expert opinion), the reality from the very beginning was that people like us were losing our minds because of the massively damaging consequences that were destined to occur should the government and mainstream media actually get what they wanted.
When the Online News Act passed last year, supporters were popping the champagne and declaring victory. Mainstream media outlets legitimately believed that they were in for a massive pay day and that it was the day they finally reigned in “Big Tech”. In fact, they largely reported it as such in their reporting as long established unquestioned fact. Of course, people like us knew better. People like us, in turn, knew that the mainstream media basically blew their own brains out in a crazed suicide pact, saying “we sure showed them!” before pulling the trigger. So, all people like us could do at that point was look on in horror before just documenting the carnage and chaos that ensued.
It would be that documentation of the carnage and chaos is precisely what we did.
As everyone who actually understood how the internet works accurately predicted, Meta dropped news links. As a result, user engagement for media outlets collapsed, innovative online news outlets slowed production, newspapers shut down, Bell slashed 9% of their workforce, CBC saw its traffic take a hit, and news organizations everywhere in Canada saw their traffic get completely gutted.
Yet, even as reality began to sink in, supporters of the Online News Act insisted that they will rule the day. They insisted that Meta is totally hurting because of their decision. Their conclusion? The news link blocking wouldn’t last a week. Meta would come crawling back to them any day now because without news links, their entire business model would collapse. Hilariously laughable claims to say the least, so it was of no surprise to us that Meta didn’t, in fact, come crawling back and, more than a year later, news links are still blocked.
So, the question then becomes, what really happened with Meta? The simple truth is that it did what people like us predicted all along. Meta, after all, doesn’t depend on news links to fuel their traffic. When they said as such, we agreed that Meta was giving a straight answer on that one. The facts would ultimately confirm this as time went on. Traffic on Meta remained unchanged as a result of the news link blocking, Meta’s stock value soared, and, for the most part, users didn’t even flinch at the lack of news links on their feeds, instead, just largely carrying on with business as usual after news links got dropped.
It’s extremely difficult to overstate just how devastating losing Meta was to the news sector. Yet, as bad as that was, it seemed, for a time, that even worse was yet to come. Google, for their part, responded to the Online News Act by saying that it would drop news links. As time wore on, Google said that their position was unchanged. It was a developing situation that was so bad, even I was seeing my career flashing before my eyes. Is this really the end of my writing career? Is my writing career on the verge of dying off completely because of arrogance and stupidity on the part of mainstream media? At the time, I was just thinking how my 18 year career could soon be coming to a crashing halt in all of this and I was reporting on the demise of my own career. It was devastating feelings to be sure.
As the deadline grew close for Google to drop news links, the question was whether the Canadian government was going to back down or were we going to see the entire news sector in Canada die off in a mass extinction level event. There was no clear way to tell which way things were going to go. Then, the news came that the Canadian government folded to Google. Clearly realizing that the entire news sector was going to massively die off, the Canadian government gave in to the pressure, handed Google everything they asked for and called it a “deal”. Freezenet was going to live to fight another day and the media sector was only going to be severely damaged rather than get nuked off the face of the internet entirely. Cold comfort? Perhaps, but at least we were allowed to live at all.
Supporters of the Online News Act, having faced loss after loss after loss, were desperate to spin this as some kind of “win”. “See?” they insisted, “we got $100 million! We came out on top after all!”. Yet, even the $100 million price tag was no victory. For one, existing deals would get wrapped up into this deal, meaning that some outlets actually lost money overall in all of this. Further, the $100 million wasn’t even half way there to covering the estimated $230 million loss that was the result of Meta dropping news links entirely. Channelling their inner Donald Trump, supporters insisted that all this silly thing called “math” was just trying to cover up their “total victory” over Google and that Meta would come crawling back to them any time after seeing the deal that was reached.
Yet, the evidence that followed pretty much spoke for itself. The Canadian government issued a massive media bailout, lobbyists pushed for even more government bailouts, and even the CBC received a massive separate bailout of their own. When the Online News Act was sold to politicians, it was sold as a solution to solve the financial crisis the media sector was facing without putting Canadian tax payers on the hook. In the end, Canadian tax payers were massively on the hook for the successive business failures of the mainstream media. This in a bid to make the mainstream media whole again after the Online News Act ended up being arguably one of the biggest legislative failures in Canadian history.
Today, we are learning of new research that basically surveyed the damage done on the Canadian news sector left behind by the Online News Act. The results were not good. It was estimated that the Canadian news sector’s engagement saw a staggering drop of 43%. The findings were made by the Media Ecosystem Observatory. The study itself can be read here (PDF) and it paints a rather grim picture:
As Canada marks one year since Meta’s unprecedented decision to block news access on Facebook and
Instagram for Canadian users, the Media Ecosystem Observatory offers a data-driven examination of the ban’s
impact on Canadians and Canadian news media. Using survey and social media data, we evaluate the extent to
which the ban has shaped the character of online news in Canada and changed the behaviour of news producers and consumers.
Their key takeaways they ended up having? They were just as bleak:
Key takeaways:
- Almost half of news media engagement has disappeared – Canadian news outlets have lost 85% of their engagement on Facebook and Instagram. This loss has not been compensated by increases on other social media platforms, resulting in an overall decrease of 43% in engagement.
- Almost one third of local news outlets are now inactive – The ban has reshaped the media landscape in Canada, with 212 or approximately 30% of local news outlets in Canada previously active on social media now inactive.
- Three quarters of the Canadian public is unaware of the ban – Only 22% of Canadians know that news is banned on Facebook and Instagram. Even among users of the platforms and those who say they get news from the platform, a majority do not know about the ban.
- News is still being shared on Facebook and Instagram – Despite the ban, news organization content is still available on Meta platforms through work-around strategies like screengrabs, with 36% of Canadian users reporting encountering news or links to news on Facebook or Instagram. This arguably should make Meta subject to the requirements of the Online News Act.
- Less news is being consumed by Canadians – 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. Canadians continue to learn about politics and current events through Facebook and Instagram, but through a more biased and less factual lens than before and many Canadians do not even realize the shift has occurred. They do not appear to be seeking news elsewhere.
That… is brutal, though one thing the study did get wrong is this idea that screen shots makes Meta subject to the Online News Act. There is no evidence to support this notion. Neither existing law, nor the relatively new Online News Act makes such an assertion. Further, even the CRTC, a long time supporter of the Online News Act, questions the legitimacy of such claims. It’s possible that the researchers had a heavy dose of wishful thinking when writing that, but they are obviously wrong on that point.
Nevertheless, one thing we’ve been long pointing to is the gutting of traffic, engagement, and massive shut downs across the Canadian news sector as a result of the Online News Act. The data they presented confirmed these observations, yet again:
These charts show that the data concluded that there are a whopping 215 fewer outlets on social media following Meta dropping news links. It also shows that there are now 8.2 million fewer engagements, representing a massive 43% drop. The third panel is missing multiple attributes, but the study goes on to describe the third chart with this:
Panel C shows that Canadian news organizations have thus far been unable to make up the loss on other platforms. Across the other three, non-Meta platforms, engagement (likes, comments, shares) has increased by 600,000 per month, primarily driven by a 24% increase in TikTok engagement, with consistent Twitter/X engagement year-over-year, and a 22% decrease in YouTube engagement. Even accounting for this slight increase, 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. The ban has effectively severed a key connection between the news industry and Canadian public.
In other words, even as media companies try moving to other platforms, they aren’t even close to making up for all the lost traffic after they pushed Meta out of their lives. These findings are actually quite funny on a number of levels.
For one, late last year, one self-described “journalist” concluded that media companies never needed Meta in the first place. They could get along just fine without Meta and Meta’s loss means nothing to them. The above findings completely eviscerates that notion, showing, instead, that the media companies were, indeed, highly dependent on Meta traffic after all. I know I was personally attacked by pointing this stuff out by Online News Act supporters, yet the evidence has now come in proving me correct all along. At this point, that’s a pretty normal cycle of things to happen these days here on Freezenet. I point out the obvious, I get called all sorts of nasty things by Online News Act supporters for pointing out the obvious, then the evidence would later come in proving my obvious points correct all along.
For another, it’s funny to see that the one thing that has been working well for mainstream media is TikTok. For months, the mainstream media has launched multiple volleys of TikTok conspiracy theories. They claim, among other things, that TikTok is just an arm of the Chinese government and the Chinese government is brainwashing its users to carry out the bidding and interests of the Chinese government. As if those crazed conspiracy theories weren’t enough, the mainstream media even took things a step further by openly lobbying the Canadian government to ban TikTok altogether on top of it all. Yet, in looking at the data here, you can clearly see that the Canadian mainstream media was actually shooting themselves in the foot, yet again, in pushing for these bans in the first place. You seriously can’t make this up.
All of this really paints a picture of just how self-destructive the Canadian mainstream media has become. They play a big game about how they are actively trying to avoid news deserts across this country, yet their actions have been instrumental in not only creating new media deserts, but massively expanding already existing ones. To put this in another way, the Canadian mainstream media has become the biggest threat to the Canadian mainstream media.
The Hub, for their part, has offered some thoughts on these findings as well:
Total Canadian news engagement fell on the social media site by 42 percent, according to the report published by the Media Ecosystem Observatory (MEO), a McGill University and University of Toronto think tank concerned with the health of Canada’s news industry.
The loss of engagement has meant approximately 11 million fewer views per day for all Canadian news outlets. Facebook and Instagram drove the decline, where Canadian news engagement fell by over six million (82 percent) and two million (90 percent), respectively.
A year following Meta’s news ban, the number of Canadian news outlets active on social media fell to 555; 501 local and 54 national. The vast majority of Canadian news outlets that went offline were local news: 212 outlets, representing 98 percent of those no longer active on social media. National Canadian news outlets active on social media, meanwhile, declined by three.
In 2023 alone, at least 36 local news outlets shut down across Canada, some even citing the Meta news ban as a main reason for their demise. Since 2008, a total of 516 local Canadian radio, print, TV, and online news outlets have closed.
“The ban has had the most severe impact on local news organisations in Canada. Many lack the resources to build an audience from the ground up on any other platform or are already struggling to stay afloat, so the overall visibility of local news in Canada has decreased and will likely only continue to go down. The worst part is that the majority of Canadians haven’t even noticed this is happening,” MEO analyst Sara Parker told The Hub.
Discussion of Canadian news across Facebook groups—at least concerning politics in the most preeminent discussion forums—was nevertheless essentially unaffected by Meta’s ban, according to the report from the MEO.
There’s no two ways about it, the Online News Act has been a total disaster for the Canadian news sector. The Canadian government was repeatedly warned by experts and observers such as myself of the consequences, but those warnings went ignored. Independent media outlets begged the Canadian government to not go through with this or, at the very least, allow an exception to be made by news organizations not wishing to participate in any of this. Those pleas for sanity went ignored and requests for change in the then legislation were denied.
Obviously, the only logical move to reverse all this damage is to repeal the Online News Act entirely, but unfortunately, due to a high degree of ego and a shoulder to the wheel push to never admit to a mistake no matter what the evidence shows, that’s unlikely to happen during this government. If anything, the most likely move by the Canadian government, if they are dumb enough to make another move in this disaster story, is to try and amend the new law to include screenshots, thereby making the situation even worse than it already is because now the Canadian government is encouraging Meta to simply block Canada altogether among other things. It clearly shows that the Canadian government has learned nothing from their mistakes already in this debate.
Still, this study is just one more piece of evidence to throw onto the pile of why the Online News Act was a complete disaster. It’s unlikely this evidence will actually change much of anything because, like all evidence before it, it is going to get ignored because it doesn’t support the narrative that the Online News Act is perfect in every way. As a result, the broader Canadian media sector will continue to pay the price for this ignorance.
(Via @Pagmenzies)
