Online News Act Supporters Continue to be Divided on How to React to Meta Dropping Links

Some supporters of the Online News Act have called for legal action against Meta while others argue that publishers are doing just fine and dandy.

There’s no question that the Online News Act has been an abysmal failure. Meta dropped news links in response, ending $230 million in value for publishers in the process. With Google on the way of doing the same thing, the Canadian government panicked and folded to Google, handing them the originally asked for $100 million fund model and calling it a “deal”. As a result, the media found itself operating at a loss. The result was that the link tax law effectively died in Canada, unleashing considerable harm onto the media sector.

In response, the government desperately issued massive bailouts to the sector. With the media’s scam more or less running its course, the large media companies went ahead and issued massive waves of layoffs. Bell media slashed 9% of its workforce while the CBC slashed 10% of its workforce. After all, the large companies had no more use for those employees now that they were able to, sort of, get what they wanted out of these debates.

Worth noting is the actual impact of all of this. Meta’s stock value soared, Meta’s traffic remained unchanged, users didn’t really notice much of a difference, the media’s Facebook traffic collapsed, and the media’s overall traffic to their website was negatively impacted.

Critics have long predicted this outcome was going to happen. Meta never depended on news links in the first place and arguments to the contrary was simply misinformation or disinformation. Yet, critics experienced waves of abuse from supporters as their accurate predictions caused them to be accused of being “Big Tech shills” and being somehow paid off to point out such obvious things. Stating the obvious was ultimately going nowhere as supporters have long engaged in these debates in bad faith.

A net result was that supporters basically found themselves living in their own reality bubble. It’s a reality bubble that dictated that platforms depended exclusively on news links for their success and that Meta is going to go bankrupt overnight after blocking news links. Obviously, that reality bubble has been popped long ago. So, just for the amusement factor, I decided to see how they are spinning their way out of their current obviously hopeless situation. As it turns out, things are actually quite hilarious right now.

Supporters of the failed Online News Act are seemingly sitting in two camps. In one camp, supporters are simply putting on a brave face and saying that Meta’s news links block has had no negative impact on publishers websites at all and that publishers never needed Meta in the first place. In the other camp, supporters are arguing that Meta has unleashed considerable harm by dropping news links and that what Meta is doing is anti-competitive and that legal action needs to be taken against the Meta to reverse the damage. While the latter argument is a little more grounded in reality, their proposed solution is hilariously far removed from how actual law works in the first place.

So, let’s start with the one camps spin on the situation. That being the ones that are falsely claiming that Meta blocking news link had absolutely no impact on publishers at all. This lie was recently pushed by Barry Kiefl. For those who follow the debate closely like us, Kiefl is famous for cherry picking data and pushing the obviously disproven conspiracy theory that Meta depends almost entirely on news links and that without news links, Meta would practically fold overnight, so the threats that they would drop news links is little more than a “bluff”. As we know now, Meta can very easily live without news links as they continue to marginalize news links.

The more recent comments he made was this:

Today @comscore gave a sweeping presentation on the state of the internet in Canada. The impact of Meta blocking news in Canada was addressed twice. Comscore concluded: while some individual news sites may have been affected, Meta’s block had no negative effect on news websites.

Today @comscore gave a sweeping presentation on the state of the internet in Canada. The impact of Meta blocking news in Canada was addressed twice. Comscore concluded: while some individual news sites may have been affected, Meta’s block had no negative effect on news websites. pic.twitter.com/7o2VCb7hvw

— Barry Kiefl (@BarryKiefl) March 27, 2024

The tweet contained the following image:

Basic logic would dictate that the provided screenshot doesn’t really line up with the claim “Meta’s block had no negative effect on news websites”. The reasons for this are quite numerous, but we’ll start with the less obvious one.

You’ll note the arrow where it claims was the start of news link blocking and the large bump up in traffic afterwards. As many Canadians who follow the news knows, when Meta pulled the plug on news links, the media companies engaged in a massive advertising blitz. Broadcasters ran ads saying that Meta chose to block news links, but you can still follow them by visiting the site directly or downloading their app. Half page and even full page ads on newspapers were advertising the very same things on their front pages. The media companies hit the panic button when they realized their scheme was backfiring on them spectacularly. As a result, you get that large jump in overall traffic which lasted all of four months.

Another major problem is that you’ll notice that the post pandemic recovery was happening a full 7 months prior to the blocking of news links. Specifically, a recovery was happening starting in February and the link blocking started in August. If you drew an average line between February of 2023 and February of 2024, you’ll actually see that the growth started slowing down in November, December, January, and February – the last four months on the chart.

What’s more, an argument can easily be made to say that there isn’t really enough data on that chart to make the conclusion that Meta’s news link blocking had no material impact on websites. You would need at least another full year worth of data to come to any conclusion at all (and even then, that’s questionable given the many factors going on in the news).

Then there’s the more obvious points to make. Over top of the CBC flat out admitting that the Meta news links blocking had a negative impact on their sites performance, you have plenty of other evidence showcasing the impact the Online News Act had on the publishers. News organizations have announced a slowdown in their operations. Some news organizations announced that they were shutting down completely. Other outlets were saying that the impact of not being able to share news links on Facebook was devastating to their operations.

Even more hilarious is the contradictory nature of the original statement by Kiefl. That’s, specifically, this: “while some individual news sites may have been affected, Meta’s block had no negative effect on news websites.”

I mean, this raises a fundamental question to the claim. Was there “some” impact on news outlets or was there “no negative effect”? If you’re going to be making a claim in this debate, it should be one or the other, not both. You can’t have both “some” impact while, simultaneously, having “no” impact. It’s a claim that makes absolutely no sense on face value.

The attempted spin appears to be a variation of what another self-described “journalist” made back in December where she claimed that publishers never needed Meta in the first place. Obviously, at the time, my response was that if they didn’t need Meta, then the debate is over and the media companies can move on.

Both claims appear to be a cheap effort to hear what us critics are pointing out and just reversing what we are saying. We’ve been saying all along that news has little to no material impact on the bottom lines of large platforms. In the months since the news link block happened, this was proven to be completely accurate. So, supporters are seemingly trying to reverse that and say that news link blocking has no material impact on publishers. The evidence pretty much speaks for itself on that front. It’s what us critics have been pointing out all along.

Perhaps what further undermines these claims of how Meta’s news link blocking having no material impact on publishers is what the other camp has been pushing. The other camp of supporters of the failed Online News Act are arguing that Meta dropping news links has had a devastating impact on their operations (which does at least have some semblance on reality at least). They are arguing that Meta should be hit with an anti-trust probe for… exiting the news market. I know, facepalm indeed. This was showcased pretty well in an Al Jazeera article from last year:

“Through its decision to block news content from its digital platforms, Meta seeks to impair Canadian news organizations’ ability to compete effectively in the news publishing and online advertising markets,” news industry groups said on Tuesday in an application with Canada’s Competition Bureau.

The application was filed by industry bodies News Media Canada and the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, along with public broadcaster CBC/Radio-Canada, and asks the Competition Bureau to investigate Meta and stop it from blocking news.

“Meta’s anticompetitive conduct, which has attracted the attention of regulators around the world, will strengthen its already dominant position in advertising and social media distribution and harm Canadian journalism,” the applicants said in a statement.

The Competition Bureau did not have an immediate comment.

The two charges really highlights how supporters of the failed Online News Act really can’t seem to make up their minds on how to spin the situation. You have one camp arguing that Meta pulling the plug hasn’t dented the operations of publishers on the web and the other saying that the decision to pull the plug is so harmful to journalism, that it requires government intervention before the sector dies off completely. I mean, which is it? Did Meta dropping news link have an impact on publishers or did it not? Can supporters make up their minds and stick with a single talking point at least?

To make matters even worse, the idea of trying to file anti-trust charges against Meta for… exiting the marketplace… is hilarious on the face of it. We’re talking about a talking point that gets even basic economics wrong.

Simply put, a company abusing the marketplace for anti-competitive purpose is a company using its advantageous market position to run its competitors out of business. So, for example, a maker of soap has a market share in an area of, say, 75%. That leaves the remaining 25% of the market for the remaining players. So, the company in the dominant position decides to lower prices to below the cost of producing said soap. This drives consumers to purchase their soap over the competitors. The idea is that the remaining competitors would lose sales to the point where they are forced to declare bankruptcy. This, in turn, would allow the dominant soap company to control and even larger share of the marketplace afterwards. That is what anti-competitive behaviour from a company is. It is also why anti-trust laws were established (not that they are really enforced these days, but they do exist).

Even if you take the position that a company like Meta takes a portion of the news marketplace, the argument that what Meta is doing is anti-competitive is complete nonsense on the face of it. Met dropped news links. From a technical perspective from the Canadian government itself, Meta ‘exited the marketplace’. Exiting the marketplace is literally the exact opposite of anti-competitive behaviour. To use the soap company example (yes it’s not quite the same thing, but lets just run with it to humour people), it would be basically the soap company with the 75% of the market share saying, “you know what? Let’s not bother with selling soap and sell forks and knives instead”. They then make the decision to end their presence in the soap industry and go into selling utensils instead. On what planet is it a viable argument to say that the hypothetical company is being anti-competitive by exiting the market? Heck, if anything, the remaining competitors in the market would be popping the champagne as they see massive opportunities to claim a larger share of the market.

It’s complete and utter nonsense. What’s more, I’ve skimming through the news releases on the Competition Bureau’s website and I’ve seen nothing that says that the Bureau is taking up such a case. Honestly, if I were the Bureau, I’d tell the publishers that they are complete idiots and, no, we’re not looking into this because the claims make absolutely no sense whatsoever. I would not be surprised if the Bureau never looks into this. There’s no case to be made here. All it is is the media companies throwing a temper tantrum for not getting their way and wanting to exact some sort of revenge on Meta for not giving them free money.

At the end of the day, supporters of the Online News Act have lost their little war. They had no shot at succeeding and, predictably, their efforts to try and steal money from the platforms by charging for news links have failed. Supporters, at this point, are out of options. There’s no law they can use that would compel Meta to restore news links. Meta holds all of the cards in this debate. If recent moves in Australia are any indication, they aren’t exactly slowing down in their efforts to disassociate themselves from news links entirely.

The efforts by supporters of the failed law are just sad at this point. They’ve made so many contradictory claims to try and bolster their position that only an idiot would buy into their talking points at this point. Whether it was the claims that Meta “steals” and scrapes news articles, the claims that Meta is “censoring” the news, the claims that Meta depends exclusively on news links, the claims that disallowing news links is “anti-competitive”, the claims that dropping news links had no impact on publishers websites, or a whole host of other really bad talking points, it makes it harder and harder to even believe a word they say on this whole debate in the first place. The latest efforts to spin their way out of the mess they created are just downright pathetic at this point.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.