Earlier this month, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, started blocking Canadian users from seeing news on its platforms. When a user tries to post a link to a news story on their Facebook or Instagram page, an error message pops up: “In response to Canadian government legislation, news content can’t be shared.” In June, Meta started blocking news links for a small number of users as a test; then, on August 1, it announced that the block would be broadened to include all users and all news sources. Meta said its action was necessitated by a law that the Canadian government passed in late June, called the Online News Act, aimed at forcing digital platforms to pay news publishers for their content. It is set to take effect at the end of the year. (Google also said that it would block news links from its Search and News portals, citing the same legislation, but a recent test by CJR brought up news links from multiple Canadian publishers, in both Search and News.)
In a statement in June, Meta described the new law as “flawed legislation that ignores the realities of how our platforms work [and] the value we provide news publishers.” Google said that it amounted to a “link tax,” and that it was fundamentally unworkable because it creates “uncertainty for our products and exposes us to uncapped financial liability.” Meta’s decision to block the news was a replay of a tactic that it used in Australia in 2021, in protest of a similar law called the News Media Bargaining Code. (Canada’s law was based on the Australian one, as I wrote back in March.) After the Australian government made a number of changes to the law, Meta removed the news block, and both it and Google started cutting deals with news publishers. (Last year, Bill Grueskin, a professor at Columbia Journalism School, dug into that process in a piece for CJR).
Note: This was originally published as an email newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
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