Last year the Canadian government passed a law, the Online News Act, that would require platforms like Google and Meta to pay publishers for linking to their content. Rather than pay up, Meta removed news from Facebook and Instagram in Canada.
“News links and content posted by news publishers and broadcasters in Canada will no longer be viewable by people in Canada,” Meta said.
Months later, Canadian users appear to be doing pretty much fine with a news-less Meta, while publishers have suffered, according to a preprint paper released by The Media Ecosystem Observatory, a collaboration between McGill and the University of Toronto.
“We expected the disappearance of news on Meta platforms to have caused a major shock to the Canadian information ecosystem,” the paper’s authors — Sara Parker, Saewon Park, Zeynep Pehlivan, Alexei Abrahams, Mika Desblancs, Taylor Owen, Jennie Phillips, and Aengus Bridgman — write. But the shock appears to have been one-sided. While “the ban has significantly impacted Canadian news outlets,” the authors write, “Meta has deprived users of the affordance of news sharing without suffering any loss in engagement of their user base.”
Using CrowdTangle, the researchers analyzed six months’ worth of Facebook (not Instagram) posts from 987 Canadian news outlets, 183 non-news pages (belonging to “Canadian federal and provincial politicians, political and advocacy organizations, commentators, and content creators”), and 589 politics-related or local community groups. The posts, published between June 1 and December 31, 2023, allowed the researchers to track engagement before and after the news ban. (Meta will shut CrowdTangle down in August; the Media Ecosystem Observatory is waiting to hear about receiving access to Meta’s planned alternative.)
Here are some of the report’s findings:
The researchers tracked posts from 244 politics-related Facebook groups and 345 local community groups that had been “frequent sharers of Canadian news content.” They found that both the number of posts and engagement with posts after the ban remained largely stable.
“Either news was not all that important in these groups to begin with, or users within the groups identified ways to circumvent the ban and discuss news content,” the authors write.
One method of circumvention: Screenshots.
We observe a dramatic increase in posts containing screenshots of Canadian news stories in the post-ban period. Before the ban, only approximately 19 posts per week featured a screenshot of Canadian news. After the ban, the number of posts with Canadian news screenshots triples to an average of 68 posts per week. This increase in news screenshots after the ban does not correlate with an overall increase in non-news screenshot images, suggesting that the increase in news screenshots is indeed a result of the news ban.
“We saw a pretty wide range of types of news articles [screenshotted] — some from local news sources, but mostly from the bigger national level outlets,” Sara Parker, the paper’s lead author, told me in an email. “Often, people would just share one or two screenshots of the article — so the headline and some key paragraph in the article — but we did see users posting screenshots of the entire article.” The team is looking at screenshots more thoroughly for a follow-up study, Parker noted.
The ban did not seem to have an effect on engagement with influencers’ posts, the researchers found. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Canadian Facebook users aren’t getting more news from influencers, the researchers noted; per the paper, they “may be turning to influencers focused on other countries for their political content,” or Meta could be “suppressing the visibility of news or political content” including influencers’ posts related to those subjects.
After the ban, not surprisingly, Canadian national and local news outlets posted to Facebook much less frequently and started getting much less engagement (defined as reactions, comments, and shares).
“I was surprised — maybe shocked is a better word — by how profoundly the ban affected local news outlets,” Parker told me. “Obviously their engagement rates have decreased significantly, but many outlets have stopped posting [to Facebook and Instagram] entirely.”
“Additional analysis is necessary to identify the circumstances in which Canadian news outlets continue to be engaged with. We observe that some news outlets publish content relevant to non-Canadian audiences, particularly by posting entertainment or sports-related news,” the researchers note. And “a small number of news outlets” weren’t included in the ban, and therefore weren’t blocked.
You can read the report here. The researchers expect to release an expanded report this summer.
WINNIPEG – Police in Winnipeg say one person has died and three more were injured after a pickup truck smashed into a bus shelter on Portage Avenue during the morning commute.
Police say those injured are in stable condition in hospital.
It began after a Ford F150 truck hit a pedestrian and bus shelter on Portage Avenue near Bedson Street before 8 a.m.
Another vehicle, a power pole and a gas station were also damaged before the truck came to a stop.
The crash forced commuters to be rerouted and knocked out power in the area for more than a thousand Manitoba Hydro customers.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 13, 2024.
KAMLOOPS, B.C. – A 35-year-old man has been charged with second-degree murder after his mother’s body was found near her Kamloops, B.C., home a year ago.
Mounties say 57-year-old Jo-Anne Donovan was found dead about a week after she had been reported missing.
RCMP says its serious crime unit launched an investigation after the body was found.
Police say they arrested Brandon Donovan on Friday after the BC Prosecution Service approved the charge.
TORONTO – Strength in the base metal and technology sectors helped Canada’s main stock index gain almost 100 points on Friday, while U.S. stock markets climbed to their best week of the year.
“It’s been almost a complete opposite or retracement of what we saw last week,” said Philip Petursson, chief investment strategist at IG Wealth Management.
In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 297.01 points at 41,393.78. The S&P 500 index was up 30.26 points at 5,626.02, while the Nasdaq composite was up 114.30 points at 17,683.98.
The S&P/TSX composite index closed up 93.51 points at 23,568.65.
While last week saw a “healthy” pullback on weaker economic data, this week investors appeared to be buying the dip and hoping the central bank “comes to the rescue,” said Petursson.
Next week, the U.S. Federal Reserve is widely expected to cut its key interest rate for the first time in several years after it significantly hiked it to fight inflation.
But the magnitude of that first cut has been the subject of debate, and the market appears split on whether the cut will be a quarter of a percentage point or a larger half-point reduction.
Petursson thinks it’s clear the smaller cut is coming. Economic data recently hasn’t been great, but it hasn’t been that bad either, he said — and inflation may have come down significantly, but it’s not defeated just yet.
“I think they’re going to be very steady,” he said, with one small cut at each of their three decisions scheduled for the rest of 2024, and more into 2025.
“I don’t think there’s a sense of urgency on the part of the Fed that they have to do something immediately.
A larger cut could also send the wrong message to the markets, added Petursson: that the Fed made a mistake in waiting this long to cut, or that it’s seeing concerning signs in the economy.
It would also be “counter to what they’ve signaled,” he said.
More important than the cut — other than the new tone it sets — will be what Fed chair Jerome Powell has to say, according to Petursson.
“That’s going to be more important than the size of the cut itself,” he said.
In Canada, where the central bank has already cut three times, Petursson expects two more before the year is through.
“Here, the labour situation is worse than what we see in the United States,” he said.
The Canadian dollar traded for 73.61 cents US compared with 73.58 cents US on Thursday.
The October crude oil contract was down 32 cents at US$68.65 per barrel and the October natural gas contract was down five cents at US$2.31 per mmBTU.
The December gold contract was up US$30.10 at US$2,610.70 an ounce and the December copper contract was up four cents US$4.24 a pound.
— With files from The Associated Press
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 13, 2024.
