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News Is Blocked on Meta's Feeds in Canada. Here's What Fills the Void

30 points by bko 1y ago

bko 1y ago
https://archive.is/D1ERY https://archive.is/D1ERY
bko 1y ago
> Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, blocked news from its apps in Canada in 2023 after a new law required the social media giant to pay Canadian news publishers a tax for publishing their content. The ban applies to all news outlets irrespective of origin, including The New York Times. > Paying publishers would most likely cost Meta, which generated $164.5 billion in revenue last year, 62 million Canadian dollars a year, or about $44 million. Banning news was likely an economic decision. The amount they would have to pay publishers and the costs associated with payment outweighed the benefits of having news on the platform. So Meta responded accordingly based on a law that would make them pay publishers. I think it says more about the Canadian law-makers and publishers that pushed for this law than it does about Meta, AI generated content, and fake news. Who benefits from this law? Seems like everyone is worse off.
- bryanlarsen 1y ago
  Note that Google decided to pay $100M per annum because of this law. So it seems lawmakers successfully chose close to the maximal amount. Much higher and Facebook's example indicates that Google would likely have not paid. Much lower and even both paying would have been less than $100M p.a.
  - o11c 1y ago
    In other words, it sounds like the subgoal of "subsidize the news" is partially being reached. The open question is whether "subsidize the news" is sufficient for society's real goal, "trustworthy news".
  - paxys 1y ago
    The two aren't really comparable. Google runs a news service, and shows ads on that service. Google News isn't a feasible business without crawling and aggregating the content that media organizations provide, so signing deals with them (whether forced or not) makes sense. Facebook meanwhile would have to pay publishers for news links that you and I post on our feeds. That is much closer to a shakedown, and the service can work just fine (better, one may argue) without this category of links. So regardless of the dollar amount saying no is the better option for them.
    - goosedragons 1y ago
      IIRC Facebook would have had to pay for links posted by the media companies themselves too. It was ridiculous and poorly thought out law.
- KMnO4 1y ago
  I think it also sets a precedent. All the news publishers who lobbied for the bill expected it to be an easy payday, and now they lost one of their largest platforms. If you run a similar Facebook-adjacent company, you’ll think twice before trying to squeeze any money from them.
- barbazoo 1y ago
  Plus it's probably nice to not have the journalism get in the way of all the made up garbage that people share instead.
- thatguysaguy 1y ago
  Looks like Meta studied their game theory and the news outlets didn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chainstore_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chainstore_paradox
- like_any_other 1y ago
  > Paying publishers would most likely cost Meta, which generated $164.5 billion in revenue last year, 62 million Canadian dollars a year, or about $44 million. What a deceptive sentence. First it quotes worldwide numbers instead of only the Canadian share, and then uses revenue instead of profit.
  - testing22321 1y ago
    Of course. This is written by the New York Times lamenting that meta doesn’t pay them the infinitesimal millions it wants.
  - signatoremo 1y ago
    Why deceptive? It shows how much their revenue was compared to how much they’d have to pay. No judgement, no misleads. Only facts. Anyone who reads can immediately have an idea of their financial strength. How does using profit help as opposed to revenue? And it’s not like FB can only use Canada’s profit to pay for expenses there. Did you channel your own bias?
    - like_any_other 1y ago
      > It shows how much their revenue was compared to how much they’d have to pay. I bought an oil tanker for $100,000,000, and sold it for $100,020,000. My revenue was $100,020,000, so an extra tax of $400,000 should be no problem for me, right?
      - esalman 1y ago
        It's billions in revenue vs millions in extra expense. There's the real deception. Even their net income was over 60 billions.
bryanlarsen 1y ago
From my fleeting experience shoulder surfing, Facebook in Canada was dominated by right wing content well before this law too.
- barbazoo 1y ago
  I thought it was 100% duct cleaning ads at this point, who knew.
- deeThrow94 1y ago
  I'd be surprised if there were a place on earth where Facebook isn't dominated by fearmongering, conspiracy theories, and content generally taking advantage of people who might have dementia.
s1artibartfast 1y ago
The interesting counterpoint is Australia, which did not allow google and facebook to simply pull news. Instead it gave itself the power to assign fees to the companies for not showing the news. this forced the companies to the negotiating table because the question wasn't to pay for news or not, but pay for news, pay a fine for no news, or leave the market entirely.
- _aavaa_ 1y ago
  Which I don’t agree with. Why should social media companies be forced to carry the news?
  - s1artibartfast 1y ago
    IMO it is just a shakedown. The "why" is simply that the government has the ability and leverage to extract the money.
    - _aavaa_ 1y ago
      I agree, especially given that the media companies that got the money was largely Murdoch’s empire.
  - BurningFrog 1y ago
    Because they're rich foreign owned companies that you can force to pay.
    - alephnerd 1y ago
      But you're paying a rich Australian (Murdoch) who is trying to manipulate Anglo democracies and directly enabled the election of a President who has dramatically undermined Australia's foreign policy. Australia has the 2nd most concentrated media industry in the world - only China is even more concentrated [0] Like everything else, morals are for chumps. It's oligarchs fighting each other. [0] - https://gmicp.org/communications-media-and-internet-concentration-in-australia-2019-2022/ https://gmicp.org/communications-media-and-internet-concentr...
bearcobra 1y ago
Fundamentally, I think laws like this miss the mark on what the actual problem facing news publishers is. Obviously Meta/Google shouldn't be allowed to scrape a large portion of an article and display it for users without compensation to the publisher. On the other hand, allowing users to see a link, headline, and maybe a bit of the opening paragraph are almost certainly a benefit to the publisher, encouraging more users to view the article and potentially generate revenue for them. But the issue is news is competing with so much other stuff for our attention and consumers don't really care about where it originally comes from. I pay for multiple newspaper subscriptions but a bunch of my social media is "news" but not from a media outlet. It's commentators I like discussing a story. It's my Aunt posting "Can you believe the mayor is so corrupt". It's hacker news threads. I'm getting enough of the information to feel informed without feeling like I need to go pay for the original reporting.
- dmix 1y ago
  The main issue is Canadian politics/news is pretty boring so why would I pay for Globe and Mail or The Star when I can get the main gist from social media? Sometimes your product simply isn't interesting enough to be a big business like it used to be. Propping them up with taxes is just that, propping up something people don't really want. You can never shield them from competition on the internet unless you go full China.
  - bearcobra 1y ago
    Your point on competition is a good one. I find the news interesting, but watching a TikTok is a much easier way to find out what's going on. Not to mention the competition in my feeds to show me the craziest thing that happened in Australia or Morocco today. It's impossible for a single entity to compare with that. I think a major problem that creates is news becoming more sensationalized than before. I think it's also leading to a lot more misinformation (both intentional and not). That's led me to think that more public funding of media, including privately owned publications, would be a good thing. Information is valuable even when the market doesn't recognize it, and I think we're becoming worse off as the public relies on institutions less and less. A tax on algorithmic social media & search to pay for it seems like a better plan than laws that just result in news being blocked
jpalawaga 1y ago
gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/technology/canada-election-facebook-instagram-meta.html?unlocked_article_code=1.CE8.Z8eq.O3OUY6sd1KIE&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/technology/canada-electio...
averageRoyalty 1y ago
> This type of online content — hyperpartisan and often veering into misinformation — has become a staple in the Facebook and Instagram feeds of Canadians as the country heads toward a crucial federal election on April 28 > Amid the news void, Canada Proud and dozens of other partisan pages are rising in popularity on Facebook and Instagram before the election. At the same time, cryptocurrency scams and ads that mimic legitimate news sources have proliferated on the platforms. > Canada Proud, which also has hundreds of thousands of followers on X and TikTok > Canada Proud has also bought more than $250,000 in ads on Facebook and Instagram since January, according to Facebook’s ad tracker I don't see anything whatsoever that shows a potential different outcome had Meta not blocked news sites (2 years ago). This right wing campaign group still would have bought ads, they clearly resonate with many voters (hence their high numbers on other platforms with news) and I'm unconvinced Meta would have shown "legitimate news sources" algorithmically instead. It's in Meta's best interest to show what creates the most engagement, which is likely whatever infuriates you or you passionately agree with. My guess is Facebook users would have been seeing very similar to what they're currently seeing anyway.
chiffre01 1y ago
Google and Facebook thrive in a winner-take-all environment. Both companies profit from advertising, just as traditional media outlets did before Google and Facebook captured all the ad revenue. There used to be some accountability in the media-advertising model, but that is largely gone in the era of slop, targeted propaganda and automated rage bait.

30 points by bko 1y ago

bko 1y ago

https://archive.is/D1ERY https://archive.is/D1ERY

bko 1y ago

> Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, blocked news from its apps in Canada in 2023 after a new law required the social media giant to pay Canadian news publishers a tax for publishing their content. The ban applies to all news outlets irrespective of origin, including The New York Times. > Paying publishers would most likely cost Meta, which generated $164.5 billion in revenue last year, 62 million Canadian dollars a year, or about $44 million. Banning news was likely an economic decision. The amount they would have to pay publishers and the costs associated with payment outweighed the benefits of having news on the platform. So Meta responded accordingly based on a law that would make them pay publishers. I think it says more about the Canadian law-makers and publishers that pushed for this law than it does about Meta, AI generated content, and fake news. Who benefits from this law? Seems like everyone is worse off.

bryanlarsen 1y ago
Note that Google decided to pay $100M per annum because of this law. So it seems lawmakers successfully chose close to the maximal amount. Much higher and Facebook's example indicates that Google would likely have not paid. Much lower and even both paying would have been less than $100M p.a.
- o11c 1y ago
  In other words, it sounds like the subgoal of "subsidize the news" is partially being reached. The open question is whether "subsidize the news" is sufficient for society's real goal, "trustworthy news".
- paxys 1y ago
  The two aren't really comparable. Google runs a news service, and shows ads on that service. Google News isn't a feasible business without crawling and aggregating the content that media organizations provide, so signing deals with them (whether forced or not) makes sense. Facebook meanwhile would have to pay publishers for news links that you and I post on our feeds. That is much closer to a shakedown, and the service can work just fine (better, one may argue) without this category of links. So regardless of the dollar amount saying no is the better option for them.
  - goosedragons 1y ago
    IIRC Facebook would have had to pay for links posted by the media companies themselves too. It was ridiculous and poorly thought out law.
KMnO4 1y ago
I think it also sets a precedent. All the news publishers who lobbied for the bill expected it to be an easy payday, and now they lost one of their largest platforms. If you run a similar Facebook-adjacent company, you’ll think twice before trying to squeeze any money from them.
barbazoo 1y ago
Plus it's probably nice to not have the journalism get in the way of all the made up garbage that people share instead.
thatguysaguy 1y ago
Looks like Meta studied their game theory and the news outlets didn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chainstore_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chainstore_paradox
like_any_other 1y ago
> Paying publishers would most likely cost Meta, which generated $164.5 billion in revenue last year, 62 million Canadian dollars a year, or about $44 million. What a deceptive sentence. First it quotes worldwide numbers instead of only the Canadian share, and then uses revenue instead of profit.
- testing22321 1y ago
  Of course. This is written by the New York Times lamenting that meta doesn’t pay them the infinitesimal millions it wants.
- signatoremo 1y ago
  Why deceptive? It shows how much their revenue was compared to how much they’d have to pay. No judgement, no misleads. Only facts. Anyone who reads can immediately have an idea of their financial strength. How does using profit help as opposed to revenue? And it’s not like FB can only use Canada’s profit to pay for expenses there. Did you channel your own bias?
  - like_any_other 1y ago
    > It shows how much their revenue was compared to how much they’d have to pay. I bought an oil tanker for $100,000,000, and sold it for $100,020,000. My revenue was $100,020,000, so an extra tax of $400,000 should be no problem for me, right?
    - esalman 1y ago
      It's billions in revenue vs millions in extra expense. There's the real deception. Even their net income was over 60 billions.

bryanlarsen 1y ago

From my fleeting experience shoulder surfing, Facebook in Canada was dominated by right wing content well before this law too.

barbazoo 1y ago
I thought it was 100% duct cleaning ads at this point, who knew.
deeThrow94 1y ago
I'd be surprised if there were a place on earth where Facebook isn't dominated by fearmongering, conspiracy theories, and content generally taking advantage of people who might have dementia.

s1artibartfast 1y ago

The interesting counterpoint is Australia, which did not allow google and facebook to simply pull news. Instead it gave itself the power to assign fees to the companies for not showing the news. this forced the companies to the negotiating table because the question wasn't to pay for news or not, but pay for news, pay a fine for no news, or leave the market entirely.

_aavaa_ 1y ago
Which I don’t agree with. Why should social media companies be forced to carry the news?
- s1artibartfast 1y ago
  IMO it is just a shakedown. The "why" is simply that the government has the ability and leverage to extract the money.
  - _aavaa_ 1y ago
    I agree, especially given that the media companies that got the money was largely Murdoch’s empire.
- BurningFrog 1y ago
  Because they're rich foreign owned companies that you can force to pay.
  - alephnerd 1y ago
    But you're paying a rich Australian (Murdoch) who is trying to manipulate Anglo democracies and directly enabled the election of a President who has dramatically undermined Australia's foreign policy. Australia has the 2nd most concentrated media industry in the world - only China is even more concentrated [0] Like everything else, morals are for chumps. It's oligarchs fighting each other. [0] - https://gmicp.org/communications-media-and-internet-concentration-in-australia-2019-2022/ https://gmicp.org/communications-media-and-internet-concentr...

bearcobra 1y ago

Fundamentally, I think laws like this miss the mark on what the actual problem facing news publishers is. Obviously Meta/Google shouldn't be allowed to scrape a large portion of an article and display it for users without compensation to the publisher. On the other hand, allowing users to see a link, headline, and maybe a bit of the opening paragraph are almost certainly a benefit to the publisher, encouraging more users to view the article and potentially generate revenue for them. But the issue is news is competing with so much other stuff for our attention and consumers don't really care about where it originally comes from. I pay for multiple newspaper subscriptions but a bunch of my social media is "news" but not from a media outlet. It's commentators I like discussing a story. It's my Aunt posting "Can you believe the mayor is so corrupt". It's hacker news threads. I'm getting enough of the information to feel informed without feeling like I need to go pay for the original reporting.

dmix 1y ago
The main issue is Canadian politics/news is pretty boring so why would I pay for Globe and Mail or The Star when I can get the main gist from social media? Sometimes your product simply isn't interesting enough to be a big business like it used to be. Propping them up with taxes is just that, propping up something people don't really want. You can never shield them from competition on the internet unless you go full China.
- bearcobra 1y ago
  Your point on competition is a good one. I find the news interesting, but watching a TikTok is a much easier way to find out what's going on. Not to mention the competition in my feeds to show me the craziest thing that happened in Australia or Morocco today. It's impossible for a single entity to compare with that. I think a major problem that creates is news becoming more sensationalized than before. I think it's also leading to a lot more misinformation (both intentional and not). That's led me to think that more public funding of media, including privately owned publications, would be a good thing. Information is valuable even when the market doesn't recognize it, and I think we're becoming worse off as the public relies on institutions less and less. A tax on algorithmic social media & search to pay for it seems like a better plan than laws that just result in news being blocked

jpalawaga 1y ago

gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/technology/canada-election-facebook-instagram-meta.html?unlocked_article_code=1.CE8.Z8eq.O3OUY6sd1KIE&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/technology/canada-electio...

averageRoyalty 1y ago

> This type of online content — hyperpartisan and often veering into misinformation — has become a staple in the Facebook and Instagram feeds of Canadians as the country heads toward a crucial federal election on April 28 > Amid the news void, Canada Proud and dozens of other partisan pages are rising in popularity on Facebook and Instagram before the election. At the same time, cryptocurrency scams and ads that mimic legitimate news sources have proliferated on the platforms. > Canada Proud, which also has hundreds of thousands of followers on X and TikTok > Canada Proud has also bought more than $250,000 in ads on Facebook and Instagram since January, according to Facebook’s ad tracker I don't see anything whatsoever that shows a potential different outcome had Meta not blocked news sites (2 years ago). This right wing campaign group still would have bought ads, they clearly resonate with many voters (hence their high numbers on other platforms with news) and I'm unconvinced Meta would have shown "legitimate news sources" algorithmically instead. It's in Meta's best interest to show what creates the most engagement, which is likely whatever infuriates you or you passionately agree with. My guess is Facebook users would have been seeing very similar to what they're currently seeing anyway.

chiffre01 1y ago

Google and Facebook thrive in a winner-take-all environment. Both companies profit from advertising, just as traditional media outlets did before Google and Facebook captured all the ad revenue. There used to be some accountability in the media-advertising model, but that is largely gone in the era of slop, targeted propaganda and automated rage bait.