9 ms·

A year of Meta's news ban in Canada

119 points by ikesau 2y ago

sour-taste 2y ago
This is super interesting, but I think the question everyone wants an answer to is how are the news orgs doing? Are they going out of business or does the ban just not matter to them? Looking at revenue or other metrics would have been the study I'd want to see.
- jejeyyy77 2y ago
  CBC is publicly funded so they aren't going to go out of business. The smaller outlets maybe, but remains to be seen.
  - thrusong 2y ago
    I mean, they'll probably shut down if Pierre Poilievre assumes power, though.
    - thrusong 2y ago
      Not sure why I got downvoted— for context to non-Canadians, a core policy of the Conservatives is to defund the CBC.
  - dredmorbius 2y ago
    One of the oldest (though smaller) dailies, the Whitehorse Star, folded this past May: <https://thewalrus.ca/whitehorse-daily-star/ https://thewalrus.ca/whitehorse-daily-star/>
- Scoundreller 2y ago
  They’re going out of business/further consolidating/mass layoff for a lot of reasons but this doesn’t help. A lot of newsrooms have already done mass layoffs over the years and there isn’t much more to cut other than shutting down. https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-wire-news-releases-pmn/postmedia-enters-agreement-to-acquire-saltwire https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-wire-news-releases-pm... https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/corus-entertainment-says-ongoing-job-cuts-will-amount-to-25-of-full-time-positions-1.6964489 https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/corus-entertainment-says-ong... Can sort by date here and see a pile of newspaper closures in 2023: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_newspapers_of_Canada https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_newspapers_o... Metromedia filed for bankruptcy and shut down all papers in August 2023: https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/an-atomic-bomb-for-local-news-metro-media-shuts-down-all-publications-1.6515921 https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/an-atomic-bomb-for-local-news-me...
- humanlion87 2y ago
  This is especially having a huge negative impact on some of the smaller newspapers. One example from a recent article - https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/one-year-after-news-ban-canadian-journalism-is-suffering-but-meta-isn-t-budging-1.7281101 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/one-year-after-news-ban-can...
- jsnell 2y ago
  Yeah. This study is almost entirely about vanity metrics. Like, who cares about the number of social media engagements for news companies? Nobody. They're not worth anything to anyone. Or how is the proportion of people who don't know that news content is blocked interesting? Basically, this appears to be a study of data that was easy to get, not of data that could produce any kind of actionable insights for anyone. In addition to the kind of data you asked for, data on whether use of FB/Instagram went down when the block was put in place would be fascinating.
apatry 2y ago
I am curious if the reduction in quantity of news consumed resulted in an increase in average quality of news consumed.
- tossandthrow 2y ago
  Seems like both a reduction in quality and quantity. > 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.
  - stanleykm 2y ago
    Although this makes me wonder about the nature of news that tends to get shared on social media. Is it factual reporting or is it opinions we pretend are factual because they’re on the right domain?
    - tossandthrow 2y ago
      All media are under some influence and has an agenda. "factual" information is another way to say that the narrative is controlled in accordance with societal values. I think the take away is that Canada is loosing the ability to keep macro beliefs in check. It I'd going it be interesting to see what the long term management of this is. Interesting previous cases is how we shaped the media landscape after the second world War in order to (attempt to) eradicate nazist beliefs.
- Stefan-H 2y ago
  If there is an increase in the quality of news consumed it is not the result of the quantity of news consumed decreasing. It would have to be the result of the consumers seeking alternate sources, or some other factor.
  - meiraleal 2y ago
    > If there is an increase in the quality of news consumed it is not the result of the quantity of news consumed decreasing. If you read 10x less news from Joe and Billy on Facebook but start reading from professional sources of news, they still might be bad but it will probably be a better article to read.
bfung 2y ago
Other curiosity/follow-up questions: * has this impacted biases or political stances (extreme or middle) in any direction? * has this impacted individual happiness in any way?
kredd 2y ago
My neighbourhood Facebook groups have gotten much more tolerable, if I’ll be honest. People stopped polluting them with provincial/federal news, and just talk about hyper local stuff, which I really like.
- kbos87 2y ago
  For what it's worth I see a similar trend in the US. I'm in a few neighborhood/city Facebook groups in different places and over the past year or so there does seem to be a new, reasonable consensus of opinion against divisive topics or offensive/rude behavior. Posts have taken a turn toward being people-oriented (e.g., this person needs your help) and utilitarian (recommendations for tradespeople.) Angry, overly political, or confrontational posts are quickly called out or deprived of engagement. It's refreshing!
  - kredd 2y ago
    Yeah it is great, isn’t it? Someone told me there was an announcement from Meta how they’re deranking all political posts (maybe only on Threads?) and there was a lot of curfuffle that said stuff like “censorship”, but I genuinely believe it’s a very good idea. It sucks for big name political commentators, I guess, but I really don’t want to see anything election related when I’m trying to find the opening hours for my farmer’s market.
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      This is one of the reasons politics is (loosely) a banned topic on HN: right or wrong, it has a tendency to just suck all the air out of the room if it's allowed to run rampant in every forum.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
PaulHoule 2y ago
I think social sharing of screenshots is a disease and I'm thinking about making a filter that blocks them. Yikes!
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- rpdillon 2y ago
  It's a common technique to get around censorship. Won't last long with how AI is progressing, though.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    I've been thinking about a "mastodon reader that doesn't suck" and one of them would use OCR to eat image memes.
  - abdullahkhalids 2y ago
    If I interact with a tweet, twitter will show me later if someone has used a screenshot of it in their own tweet without linking/quoting the original. I don't know if it's because of network effects or because they are OCRing screenshots that look like tweets to make these links.
seryoiupfurds 2y ago
This whole fiasco was such an obvious own-goal cooked up by an unholy coalition of newspaper industry lobbyists and progressive politicians who are explicitly hostile to understanding the simplest economic principles. To illustrate the absurdity, imagine if a newspaper had a community section containing blurbs about upcoming local events. Some well-meaning politician comes in and says that the newspaper should pay $10 to every event they feature, because they're benefitting from selling ads on the next page. The obvious outcome would be for the newspaper to decide that it's just not worth the trouble and remove the community events page. Now everyone is crying and blaming the rich evil newspaper because the events are struggling with less attendance than before. It turns out that having free links to their stories all over social media really was beneficial to the media, and they were the ones who would be harmed the most by punishing social media companies for allowing it. I've even seen news organizations' official accounts posting obfuscated links to their stories to get around the ban. Why would they do that, if the core premise that uncompensated links are "stealing" were even remotely close to being true?
- SpecialistK 2y ago
  Very well put. The whole legislation is completely backwards to how the web has always worked. I run a website. I can pay Google, MS, Meta, etc money to make my site show up higher in search results. Or gain an audience through SEO and organic growth, including on social media. I'm happy when someone shares a link to it, because that means more eyeballs on what I'm putting out. Then I can choose if and how to monetize it. By suggesting that this harms the publisher makes no sense. Why would anyone ever pay for Google sponsored search results if it's harmful to their business? The lobbyists and politicians have framed it as "using" or "stealing" the content, which is an outright lie: reproducing content without permission is already covered by copyright law. Many of these news sites even have abstracts and social cards specifically for preview when shared. The other analogy I like is "journalists drink coffee when writing. Starbucks has lots of money. Let's force Starbucks to give journalists free coffee, and a dollar out of their till whenever a journalist walks in." It's backwards! Offensively so! If these publishers didn't want their content on Facebook or Google, they can use paywalls, robots.txt, or referral blocks to stop it showing up. But none did - they just wanted to bite the hand that feeds for a few bucks, and we see how well that worked out for them.
wkat4242 2y ago
> Less news is being consumed by Canadians I don't think this is a bad thing tbh. I've also started reducing my news consumption years ago. First there was the pandemic where there was only bad news not worth watching. And now we have an extreme-right government in Holland so I'm simply disillusioned and I don't care what they do anymore. At the same time most news sites (like the mainstream nu.nl) require either payment or logging in with an account which I refuse so I'm just skimming the news headlines on the national state broadcaster (NOS) once a day or so. I still follow the local city news a bit because those things actually matter in my life. But not on social media, I've blocked all news outlets there (on the few i still check because I've greatly disconnected from socials since even before the pandemic). I simply don't care anymore. And guess what? I'm a lot happier for it. A lot less things to get angry about. I just spend my time talking to friends and people I do actually care about. I think it's because both socials and the regular news love promoting controversial topics because they get more engagement. People get all wound up and that makes them stay on the platform to argue and thus see more ads. I'm kinda done with that. And most news is really not that important anyway. My life is not noticeably changed by not knowing all but the most important news facts. I'm fine without it, most of it was just FOMO. Ps I really appreciate HN for not doing this. I still learn a lot of nice and interesting things here.
- pegasus 2y ago
  > And now we have a fascist government in Holland so I'm simply disillusioned and I don't care what they do anymore. If that's indeed the case, it should be an alarm call for all citizens to start caring and getting politically involved even more than before. It's not like the world owes us not to go up in flames, and if it does, we shouldn't just sit down shaking our head in disappointment.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    Yeah it's really sad when our own minister of immigration was promoting the "displacement theory" :'( And I'm already politically active, I always was. But I the these people thrive on dissent just like social media does. Anger is a very strong emotion. Ps I have since edited the term fascist to extreme-right as it's a more appropriate description. Though both apply IMO. For example the party in question doesn't even permit members. It's all about the one guy who decides everything.
tedunangst 2y ago
> 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. Until Facebook bans screenshots as well. Or maybe they can switch tactics to prosecute the users posting screenshots for copyright infringement. They're at least equally to blame, no?
- meiraleal 2y ago
  Yeah. They could also pay for the news but that's outrageous, right?
  - seryoiupfurds 2y ago
    Why should they be obliged to pay for the news if they don't want it because it isn't valuable for them? Is it immoral not to buy the $15 hotdog at a sports stadium even if you decide you're not that hungry?
    - meiraleal 2y ago
      If news isn't valuable to Facebook that's great for everybody then. Users leave facebook to look for news in place of getting informed by their echo-chambers. Win-win-win.
      - phyrex 2y ago
        Except it doesn’t seem to have worked out this way
        meiraleal 2y ago
        It did. They are complaining that people spent less time enganged on social media. This is positive.
bitshiftfaced 2y ago
Seems like Meta could and should detect the image-of-article workaround. It's easy enough to use OCR and then match to a known news source.
- beej71 2y ago
  At FB scale, this seems like a non-trivial computational expense, meaning they'll do it if they're forced to.
  - bobthepanda 2y ago
    I would imagine they have similar systems in place from back when ISIS used Facebook Live to stream beheadings.
  - bitshiftfaced 2y ago
    Fair enough. I was thinking maybe long term it could save compute and business complexity, since the idea of undoing the law won't gain momentum if people just use workarounds.
- da768 2y ago
  People share links to linktr.ee pages and said page has a link to the news article. OCR would be no use unless Facebook started crawling links
racl101 2y ago
I'm a millennial, probably Facebook's original primary demographic, and I still have no idea where the hell you'd go and read the news on it. It's just not a place I think of when I think of getting the news of the day. That would be Reddit or HN instead. Heck, sometimes I even still kick it old school and go to Yahoo News. But never Facebook.
- seryoiupfurds 2y ago
  It's when your friend/uncle posts a link to the latest headline about what Trump/Biden said today.
- howard941 2y ago
  I'm gen X in the US. I haven't seen any news on FB in the last few months other than what my connections post. Was news a big thing in Canada on FB?
  - simonbw 2y ago
    I believe it's referring to those links that your connections post.
  - rnotaro 2y ago
    When you're in Canada, all news links are blocked / not visible. Most media pages are also blank and not able to post on their Facebook pages. https://m.facebook.com/help/2579891418969617/ https://m.facebook.com/help/2579891418969617/
- ipsum2 2y ago
  Newsfeed.
z5h 2y ago
Nevermind the quantity of news read. What about the quality and variety of news read?
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Related: Canadian journalism is suffering – but Meta isn't budging https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41131615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41131615
cperciva 2y ago
There is no such thing as "Meta's News Ban". This is the federal government's ban on non-fee-paying websites sharing links to news stories.
- sharkjacobs 2y ago
  > ban on non-fee-paying websites sharing links to news stories There's a couple important caveats there that you're eliding. > made available by dominant digital news intermediaries and generates economic gain https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-charte/c18_1.html https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-charte/c18_...
mewse-hn 2y ago
> Canadians continue to learn about politics and current events through Facebook and Instagram, but through a more biased and less factual lens than before [citation needed]
TheRealPomax 2y ago
> Canadian news outlets have lost 85% of their engagement on Facebook Okay, but what kind of engagement? Because "engagement" alone is not a metric. > Less news is being consumed by Canadians Again: that's not a metric in and of itself, given that constant cries of information saturation. How much news is being consumed, and is that still to much?
SoftTalker 2y ago
"Three quarters of the Canadian public are unaware of the ban" In other words most people don't care about the news and weren't paying attention anyway. Doesn't seem like much has been lost.
- nox101 2y ago
  I'd assume there are knock on effects. The people that did get news via FB no longer share it because they aren't getting it. So, even people that don't use FB become less informed. Like if one member of a family used to read news via FB and share some of it with the rest of the family. Note: I'm not saying whether that result is good or bad I'm only saying that not being aware of the ban doesn't mean nothing has been lost.
  - cwillu 2y ago
    I strongly suspect that such people have simply moved to other sources, and more importantly, the statistics on who was reading news was _strongly_ biased by the ease with which that information could be tracked. If 1% of the population was responsible for seeking out interesting news and sharing them, and 4% was reading what was being directly provided to them, and then the ability to see what that 4% is reading disappeared, it would look like an 80+% reduction in people reading the news, even though all that happened was that the sharing is now occurring in an illegible fashion.
jrgaston 2y ago
It's but one data point, so don't draw any conclusions, but my Canadian household's news consumption is unchanged. We get lots of news from the CBC, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, the Guardian, and the NY Times. Oh, and there's a local tv channel that has pretty good local (Vancouver Island) news.
nightshift1 2y ago
This is only a short summary. There is a couple of full reports on the main page of their website. Unfortunately, is is not very interesting because the study seems to rely almost completely on Facebook data. The effects on that platform were pretty predictible. There are obvious questions left unanswered: - What was the effect on direct traffic ? - What was the effect on paid subscriptions ? - Are people effectively less informed ?
- MattyMc 2y ago
  As a Canadian active on social media, I’ll also add that the quality of news I consume and am exposed to has dramatically increased.
ipaddr 2y ago
This is positive. Media in Canada is concentrated by a few large orgs (Postmedia, Quebecor, Bell media, Rogers). Most independent newspaper, radio stations are being bought and speaking with the same voice. Deplatforming themselves is turning out to be a good thing for everyone else.
pingou 2y ago
Canada also introduced the digital services tax recently: https://globalnews.ca/news/10604912/digital-services-tax/ https://globalnews.ca/news/10604912/digital-services-tax/
al2o3cr 2y ago
Re: people sharing screenshots of news sites This arguably should make Meta subject to the requirements of the Online News Act. LOL gotta get rid of that last 15% of engagement, I guess. Maybe ban even mentioning the NAMES of news outlets just to be sure /s
vlovich123 2y ago
> 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. Is this because these sites were already failing and failed regardless of the ban? Or did they see enough of a drop in engagement to matter? Or did this ban just help entrench the big players at the expense of the smaller ones and forced consolidation? In other words, it’s hard to draw conclusions of a larger story just from raw data points.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 2y ago
  Local news in Canada is in dire straights. Consolidation has made it incredibly fragile or non existent in places, and the government's solution is to always turn on a faucet of $$$ to the entrenched media companies, only for them to back out or disappear after the money runs dry. The "outcome" of the bill and the deal with Google was essentially a slush fund for entrenched media companies in Canada. Instead of fostering competition, the government just funnels more money into old guard monopolies, as is tradition in Canada where monopolistic behaviour usually gets explicit government endorsement. Commentators and lawyers like Micheal Geist have argued for years at this point that the ban and deal are blatantly counterproductive to ensuring a functioning and competitive news and media ecosystem.
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    I think it’s easy to assume that because “old guard” is an easy villain (not sure where monopolies comes from though - media remains more competitive than something like tech for example). Similarly easy to blame government intervention as a failure when the problem continues. But to play devil’s advocate. How do you know that without government intervention even the big players would have failed even worse and the smaller players died even more quickly? I respect Michael Geist and he’s more knowledgeable in this space than I am, so if this is his position I’m more likely to believe it, but it’s really hard to say anything so definitively without a control to evaluate against.
- bl4kers 2y ago
nailer 2y ago
> On August 1, 2023, in response to Bill C-18, Meta blocked Canadians from viewing, accessing, and sharing news article links on its platforms. What makes a piece of content a news article? Is all written content banned from Meta?
zmmmmm 2y ago
Interesting point: > 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. I wonder if this will be a new argument from the news media lobbyists. It will loom as a new type of threat similar to removal of safe harbour protections : if web sites have to take full liability for what their users post and no amount of active measures to prevent infringing content are sufficient to relieve that, we arrive back at the end-game where user generated content is just not viable except for the giant monopolists that can pay off rights holders or defend against the liability.
hackerbeat 2y ago
Meta has no issue paying millions for AI voices or billions for their useless Metaverse, but refuses to even pay a penny for news they're heavily profiting from. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-02/meta-is-offering-hollywood-stars-millions-for-ai-voice-projects https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-02/meta-is-o...

119 points by ikesau 2y ago

This is super interesting, but I think the question everyone wants an answer to is how are the news orgs doing? Are they going out of business or does the ban just not matter to them? Looking at revenue or other metrics would have been the study I'd want to see.

jejeyyy77 2y ago
CBC is publicly funded so they aren't going to go out of business. The smaller outlets maybe, but remains to be seen.
- thrusong 2y ago
  I mean, they'll probably shut down if Pierre Poilievre assumes power, though.
  - thrusong 2y ago
    Not sure why I got downvoted— for context to non-Canadians, a core policy of the Conservatives is to defund the CBC.
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  One of the oldest (though smaller) dailies, the Whitehorse Star, folded this past May: <https://thewalrus.ca/whitehorse-daily-star/ https://thewalrus.ca/whitehorse-daily-star/>
Scoundreller 2y ago
They’re going out of business/further consolidating/mass layoff for a lot of reasons but this doesn’t help. A lot of newsrooms have already done mass layoffs over the years and there isn’t much more to cut other than shutting down. https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-wire-news-releases-pmn/postmedia-enters-agreement-to-acquire-saltwire https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-wire-news-releases-pm... https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/corus-entertainment-says-ongoing-job-cuts-will-amount-to-25-of-full-time-positions-1.6964489 https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/corus-entertainment-says-ong... Can sort by date here and see a pile of newspaper closures in 2023: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_newspapers_of_Canada https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_newspapers_o... Metromedia filed for bankruptcy and shut down all papers in August 2023: https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/an-atomic-bomb-for-local-news-metro-media-shuts-down-all-publications-1.6515921 https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/an-atomic-bomb-for-local-news-me...
humanlion87 2y ago
This is especially having a huge negative impact on some of the smaller newspapers. One example from a recent article - https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/one-year-after-news-ban-canadian-journalism-is-suffering-but-meta-isn-t-budging-1.7281101 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/one-year-after-news-ban-can...
jsnell 2y ago
Yeah. This study is almost entirely about vanity metrics. Like, who cares about the number of social media engagements for news companies? Nobody. They're not worth anything to anyone. Or how is the proportion of people who don't know that news content is blocked interesting? Basically, this appears to be a study of data that was easy to get, not of data that could produce any kind of actionable insights for anyone. In addition to the kind of data you asked for, data on whether use of FB/Instagram went down when the block was put in place would be fascinating.

apatry 2y ago

I am curious if the reduction in quantity of news consumed resulted in an increase in average quality of news consumed.

tossandthrow 2y ago
Seems like both a reduction in quality and quantity. > 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.
- stanleykm 2y ago
  Although this makes me wonder about the nature of news that tends to get shared on social media. Is it factual reporting or is it opinions we pretend are factual because they’re on the right domain?
  - tossandthrow 2y ago
    All media are under some influence and has an agenda. "factual" information is another way to say that the narrative is controlled in accordance with societal values. I think the take away is that Canada is loosing the ability to keep macro beliefs in check. It I'd going it be interesting to see what the long term management of this is. Interesting previous cases is how we shaped the media landscape after the second world War in order to (attempt to) eradicate nazist beliefs.
Stefan-H 2y ago
If there is an increase in the quality of news consumed it is not the result of the quantity of news consumed decreasing. It would have to be the result of the consumers seeking alternate sources, or some other factor.
- meiraleal 2y ago
  > If there is an increase in the quality of news consumed it is not the result of the quantity of news consumed decreasing. If you read 10x less news from Joe and Billy on Facebook but start reading from professional sources of news, they still might be bad but it will probably be a better article to read.

bfung 2y ago

Other curiosity/follow-up questions: * has this impacted biases or political stances (extreme or middle) in any direction? * has this impacted individual happiness in any way?

kredd 2y ago

My neighbourhood Facebook groups have gotten much more tolerable, if I’ll be honest. People stopped polluting them with provincial/federal news, and just talk about hyper local stuff, which I really like.

kbos87 2y ago
For what it's worth I see a similar trend in the US. I'm in a few neighborhood/city Facebook groups in different places and over the past year or so there does seem to be a new, reasonable consensus of opinion against divisive topics or offensive/rude behavior. Posts have taken a turn toward being people-oriented (e.g., this person needs your help) and utilitarian (recommendations for tradespeople.) Angry, overly political, or confrontational posts are quickly called out or deprived of engagement. It's refreshing!
- kredd 2y ago
  Yeah it is great, isn’t it? Someone told me there was an announcement from Meta how they’re deranking all political posts (maybe only on Threads?) and there was a lot of curfuffle that said stuff like “censorship”, but I genuinely believe it’s a very good idea. It sucks for big name political commentators, I guess, but I really don’t want to see anything election related when I’m trying to find the opening hours for my farmer’s market.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    This is one of the reasons politics is (loosely) a banned topic on HN: right or wrong, it has a tendency to just suck all the air out of the room if it's allowed to run rampant in every forum.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

PaulHoule 2y ago

I think social sharing of screenshots is a disease and I'm thinking about making a filter that blocks them. Yikes!

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rpdillon 2y ago
It's a common technique to get around censorship. Won't last long with how AI is progressing, though.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  I've been thinking about a "mastodon reader that doesn't suck" and one of them would use OCR to eat image memes.
- abdullahkhalids 2y ago
  If I interact with a tweet, twitter will show me later if someone has used a screenshot of it in their own tweet without linking/quoting the original. I don't know if it's because of network effects or because they are OCRing screenshots that look like tweets to make these links.

seryoiupfurds 2y ago

This whole fiasco was such an obvious own-goal cooked up by an unholy coalition of newspaper industry lobbyists and progressive politicians who are explicitly hostile to understanding the simplest economic principles. To illustrate the absurdity, imagine if a newspaper had a community section containing blurbs about upcoming local events. Some well-meaning politician comes in and says that the newspaper should pay $10 to every event they feature, because they're benefitting from selling ads on the next page. The obvious outcome would be for the newspaper to decide that it's just not worth the trouble and remove the community events page. Now everyone is crying and blaming the rich evil newspaper because the events are struggling with less attendance than before. It turns out that having free links to their stories all over social media really was beneficial to the media, and they were the ones who would be harmed the most by punishing social media companies for allowing it. I've even seen news organizations' official accounts posting obfuscated links to their stories to get around the ban. Why would they do that, if the core premise that uncompensated links are "stealing" were even remotely close to being true?

SpecialistK 2y ago
Very well put. The whole legislation is completely backwards to how the web has always worked. I run a website. I can pay Google, MS, Meta, etc money to make my site show up higher in search results. Or gain an audience through SEO and organic growth, including on social media. I'm happy when someone shares a link to it, because that means more eyeballs on what I'm putting out. Then I can choose if and how to monetize it. By suggesting that this harms the publisher makes no sense. Why would anyone ever pay for Google sponsored search results if it's harmful to their business? The lobbyists and politicians have framed it as "using" or "stealing" the content, which is an outright lie: reproducing content without permission is already covered by copyright law. Many of these news sites even have abstracts and social cards specifically for preview when shared. The other analogy I like is "journalists drink coffee when writing. Starbucks has lots of money. Let's force Starbucks to give journalists free coffee, and a dollar out of their till whenever a journalist walks in." It's backwards! Offensively so! If these publishers didn't want their content on Facebook or Google, they can use paywalls, robots.txt, or referral blocks to stop it showing up. But none did - they just wanted to bite the hand that feeds for a few bucks, and we see how well that worked out for them.

wkat4242 2y ago

> Less news is being consumed by Canadians I don't think this is a bad thing tbh. I've also started reducing my news consumption years ago. First there was the pandemic where there was only bad news not worth watching. And now we have an extreme-right government in Holland so I'm simply disillusioned and I don't care what they do anymore. At the same time most news sites (like the mainstream nu.nl) require either payment or logging in with an account which I refuse so I'm just skimming the news headlines on the national state broadcaster (NOS) once a day or so. I still follow the local city news a bit because those things actually matter in my life. But not on social media, I've blocked all news outlets there (on the few i still check because I've greatly disconnected from socials since even before the pandemic). I simply don't care anymore. And guess what? I'm a lot happier for it. A lot less things to get angry about. I just spend my time talking to friends and people I do actually care about. I think it's because both socials and the regular news love promoting controversial topics because they get more engagement. People get all wound up and that makes them stay on the platform to argue and thus see more ads. I'm kinda done with that. And most news is really not that important anyway. My life is not noticeably changed by not knowing all but the most important news facts. I'm fine without it, most of it was just FOMO. Ps I really appreciate HN for not doing this. I still learn a lot of nice and interesting things here.

pegasus 2y ago
> And now we have a fascist government in Holland so I'm simply disillusioned and I don't care what they do anymore. If that's indeed the case, it should be an alarm call for all citizens to start caring and getting politically involved even more than before. It's not like the world owes us not to go up in flames, and if it does, we shouldn't just sit down shaking our head in disappointment.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Yeah it's really sad when our own minister of immigration was promoting the "displacement theory" :'( And I'm already politically active, I always was. But I the these people thrive on dissent just like social media does. Anger is a very strong emotion. Ps I have since edited the term fascist to extreme-right as it's a more appropriate description. Though both apply IMO. For example the party in question doesn't even permit members. It's all about the one guy who decides everything.

tedunangst 2y ago

> 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. Until Facebook bans screenshots as well. Or maybe they can switch tactics to prosecute the users posting screenshots for copyright infringement. They're at least equally to blame, no?

meiraleal 2y ago
Yeah. They could also pay for the news but that's outrageous, right?
- seryoiupfurds 2y ago
  Why should they be obliged to pay for the news if they don't want it because it isn't valuable for them? Is it immoral not to buy the $15 hotdog at a sports stadium even if you decide you're not that hungry?
  - meiraleal 2y ago
    If news isn't valuable to Facebook that's great for everybody then. Users leave facebook to look for news in place of getting informed by their echo-chambers. Win-win-win.
    - phyrex 2y ago
      Except it doesn’t seem to have worked out this way
      - meiraleal 2y ago
        It did. They are complaining that people spent less time enganged on social media. This is positive.

bitshiftfaced 2y ago

Seems like Meta could and should detect the image-of-article workaround. It's easy enough to use OCR and then match to a known news source.

beej71 2y ago
At FB scale, this seems like a non-trivial computational expense, meaning they'll do it if they're forced to.
- bobthepanda 2y ago
  I would imagine they have similar systems in place from back when ISIS used Facebook Live to stream beheadings.
- bitshiftfaced 2y ago
  Fair enough. I was thinking maybe long term it could save compute and business complexity, since the idea of undoing the law won't gain momentum if people just use workarounds.
da768 2y ago
People share links to linktr.ee pages and said page has a link to the news article. OCR would be no use unless Facebook started crawling links

racl101 2y ago

I'm a millennial, probably Facebook's original primary demographic, and I still have no idea where the hell you'd go and read the news on it. It's just not a place I think of when I think of getting the news of the day. That would be Reddit or HN instead. Heck, sometimes I even still kick it old school and go to Yahoo News. But never Facebook.

seryoiupfurds 2y ago
It's when your friend/uncle posts a link to the latest headline about what Trump/Biden said today.
howard941 2y ago
I'm gen X in the US. I haven't seen any news on FB in the last few months other than what my connections post. Was news a big thing in Canada on FB?
- simonbw 2y ago
  I believe it's referring to those links that your connections post.
- rnotaro 2y ago
  When you're in Canada, all news links are blocked / not visible. Most media pages are also blank and not able to post on their Facebook pages. https://m.facebook.com/help/2579891418969617/ https://m.facebook.com/help/2579891418969617/
ipsum2 2y ago
Newsfeed.

z5h 2y ago

Nevermind the quantity of news read. What about the quality and variety of news read?

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Related: Canadian journalism is suffering – but Meta isn't budging https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41131615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41131615

cperciva 2y ago

There is no such thing as "Meta's News Ban". This is the federal government's ban on non-fee-paying websites sharing links to news stories.

sharkjacobs 2y ago
> ban on non-fee-paying websites sharing links to news stories There's a couple important caveats there that you're eliding. > made available by dominant digital news intermediaries and generates economic gain https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-charte/c18_1.html https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-charte/c18_...

mewse-hn 2y ago

> Canadians continue to learn about politics and current events through Facebook and Instagram, but through a more biased and less factual lens than before [citation needed]

TheRealPomax 2y ago

> Canadian news outlets have lost 85% of their engagement on Facebook Okay, but what kind of engagement? Because "engagement" alone is not a metric. > Less news is being consumed by Canadians Again: that's not a metric in and of itself, given that constant cries of information saturation. How much news is being consumed, and is that still to much?

SoftTalker 2y ago

"Three quarters of the Canadian public are unaware of the ban" In other words most people don't care about the news and weren't paying attention anyway. Doesn't seem like much has been lost.

nox101 2y ago
I'd assume there are knock on effects. The people that did get news via FB no longer share it because they aren't getting it. So, even people that don't use FB become less informed. Like if one member of a family used to read news via FB and share some of it with the rest of the family. Note: I'm not saying whether that result is good or bad I'm only saying that not being aware of the ban doesn't mean nothing has been lost.
- cwillu 2y ago
  I strongly suspect that such people have simply moved to other sources, and more importantly, the statistics on who was reading news was _strongly_ biased by the ease with which that information could be tracked. If 1% of the population was responsible for seeking out interesting news and sharing them, and 4% was reading what was being directly provided to them, and then the ability to see what that 4% is reading disappeared, it would look like an 80+% reduction in people reading the news, even though all that happened was that the sharing is now occurring in an illegible fashion.

jrgaston 2y ago

It's but one data point, so don't draw any conclusions, but my Canadian household's news consumption is unchanged. We get lots of news from the CBC, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, the Guardian, and the NY Times. Oh, and there's a local tv channel that has pretty good local (Vancouver Island) news.

nightshift1 2y ago

This is only a short summary. There is a couple of full reports on the main page of their website. Unfortunately, is is not very interesting because the study seems to rely almost completely on Facebook data. The effects on that platform were pretty predictible. There are obvious questions left unanswered: - What was the effect on direct traffic ? - What was the effect on paid subscriptions ? - Are people effectively less informed ?

MattyMc 2y ago
As a Canadian active on social media, I’ll also add that the quality of news I consume and am exposed to has dramatically increased.

ipaddr 2y ago

This is positive. Media in Canada is concentrated by a few large orgs (Postmedia, Quebecor, Bell media, Rogers). Most independent newspaper, radio stations are being bought and speaking with the same voice. Deplatforming themselves is turning out to be a good thing for everyone else.

pingou 2y ago

Canada also introduced the digital services tax recently: https://globalnews.ca/news/10604912/digital-services-tax/ https://globalnews.ca/news/10604912/digital-services-tax/

al2o3cr 2y ago

Re: people sharing screenshots of news sites This arguably should make Meta subject to the requirements of the Online News Act. LOL gotta get rid of that last 15% of engagement, I guess. Maybe ban even mentioning the NAMES of news outlets just to be sure /s

vlovich123 2y ago

> 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. Is this because these sites were already failing and failed regardless of the ban? Or did they see enough of a drop in engagement to matter? Or did this ban just help entrench the big players at the expense of the smaller ones and forced consolidation? In other words, it’s hard to draw conclusions of a larger story just from raw data points.

beezlebroxxxxxx 2y ago
Local news in Canada is in dire straights. Consolidation has made it incredibly fragile or non existent in places, and the government's solution is to always turn on a faucet of $$$ to the entrenched media companies, only for them to back out or disappear after the money runs dry. The "outcome" of the bill and the deal with Google was essentially a slush fund for entrenched media companies in Canada. Instead of fostering competition, the government just funnels more money into old guard monopolies, as is tradition in Canada where monopolistic behaviour usually gets explicit government endorsement. Commentators and lawyers like Micheal Geist have argued for years at this point that the ban and deal are blatantly counterproductive to ensuring a functioning and competitive news and media ecosystem.
- vlovich123 2y ago
  I think it’s easy to assume that because “old guard” is an easy villain (not sure where monopolies comes from though - media remains more competitive than something like tech for example). Similarly easy to blame government intervention as a failure when the problem continues. But to play devil’s advocate. How do you know that without government intervention even the big players would have failed even worse and the smaller players died even more quickly? I respect Michael Geist and he’s more knowledgeable in this space than I am, so if this is his position I’m more likely to believe it, but it’s really hard to say anything so definitively without a control to evaluate against.
bl4kers 2y ago

nailer 2y ago

> On August 1, 2023, in response to Bill C-18, Meta blocked Canadians from viewing, accessing, and sharing news article links on its platforms. What makes a piece of content a news article? Is all written content banned from Meta?

zmmmmm 2y ago

Interesting point: > 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. I wonder if this will be a new argument from the news media lobbyists. It will loom as a new type of threat similar to removal of safe harbour protections : if web sites have to take full liability for what their users post and no amount of active measures to prevent infringing content are sufficient to relieve that, we arrive back at the end-game where user generated content is just not viable except for the giant monopolists that can pay off rights holders or defend against the liability.

hackerbeat 2y ago

Meta has no issue paying millions for AI voices or billions for their useless Metaverse, but refuses to even pay a penny for news they're heavily profiting from. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-02/meta-is-offering-hollywood-stars-millions-for-ai-voice-projects https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-02/meta-is-o...