Move comes in response to Canadian legislation requiring internet giants to pay news publishers
Guardian staff and agencies Tue 1 Aug 2023 22.14 BST
Meta has begun the process to end access to news on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada, the company said on Tuesday.
The move comes in response to legislation in the country requiring internet giants to pay news publishers.
The findings suggest that Facebook users seek out content that aligns with their views.
Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, said the changes will roll out in the coming weeks.
Canada’s heritage minister, Pascale St-Onge, who is in charge of the government’s dealings with Meta, called the move irresponsible.
“[Meta] would rather block their users from accessing good quality and local news instead of paying their fair share to news organizations,” St-Onge said in a statement on Tuesday. “We’re going to keep standing our ground. After all, if the government can’t stand up for Canadians against tech giants, who will?”
Canada’s public broadcast CBC also called Meta’s move irresponsible and said that it was “an abuse of their market power”.
The Online News Act, passed by the Canadian parliament, would force platforms like Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and Meta to negotiate commercial deals with Canadian news publishers for their content.
The legislation is part of a broader global trend of governments trying to make tech firms pay for news. Canada’s legislation is similar to a ground-breaking law that Australia passed in 2021 and had triggered threats from Google and Facebook to curtail their services. Both the companies eventually struck deals with Australian media firms after amendments to the legislation were offered.
In the US, the state of California has also considered a similar law. In that case, too, Meta has threatened to withdraw services from the state if the legislation goes through.
On the Canadian law, Google has argued that it is broader than those enacted in Australia and Europe as it puts a price on news story links displayed in search results and can apply to outlets that do not produce news.
Meta had said links to news articles make up less than 3% of the content on its users’ feed and argued that news lacked economic value.
Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, had said in May that such an argument was flawed and “dangerous to our democracy, to our economy”.
This is such a BS law. It should be framed as paying for headlines, not news.
I have no love for Meta but I have to side with them on this one. This law makes no sense. People post headlines on social media and users click on those to go to the news outlet and read the article. In the end, the news outlet still gets the advertising revenue and the visits to their site.
If reddit is anything to go by, which I expect it is, people don't click through to the article. But they see the headline and the news platform and take that as evidence enough.
I wonder whether news not being on social media is almost better? It prevents that behaviour, meaning less impact from inflammatory and sensationalised headlines, and forces consumers that actually want news to go and find it directly - in the process being more likely to actually read an article and be more informed.
I was thinking this as well. If people won't click past the headlines then we are truly doomed.
I do think news not being on social media might not be a bad thing. I guess we'll have to see how it plays out.
We've known since before the Internet that most people don't read past the headline, the sub-title (if present) and sometimes the first paragraph. This was true before headlines were separately transmitted. The whole journalistic "inverted pyramid structure" writing style developed because we know that people don't read far into news stories.
So to express surprise at something we've known for ... I want to say over a century now? ... is kinda, well, surprising to me.
I think you do wonder, but I'm not sure. Glad I could answer that for you.
I love how Meta changed "we can't link to Canadian news for free and monetize those clicks so we're going to take our ball and go home" to "Canada's being mean, somehow different from Australia, and we can't link to it now".
How interestingly naive in thinking people actually read past the headline and sometimes the little sub-title blurb.
Read the article. Sure bud.