Some Canadians will soon be restricted from accessing news on Facebook and Instagram, as Meta runs tests in response to Bill C-18
OTTAWA — Some Canadians will soon be restricted from accessing news content on Facebook and Instagram, as parent company Meta begins running tests in response to the Liberal government’s online news bill.
The tests are in response to the Liberal government’s Bill C-18, which is currently in the Senate and could become law by the end of the month. The legislation would force Meta and Google to share revenues with Canadian news publishers by reaching commercial deals (Postmedia, publisher of the National Post, is in favour of the bill.)
Meta’s tests will begin in the coming days and will last for a few weeks. Between one and five per cent of Canadian users will be affected, and those who are affected will be notified. Both the individuals and news outlets will be chosen at random.
In a statement to the National Post, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez said he wouldn’t be swayed by a “threat.”
“When a big tech company, whatever the size is, the amount of money and the powerful lawyers they have, they come here and they tell us, if you don’t do this or that, then I’m pulling the plug – that’s a threat and that is unacceptable,” he said. “I never did anything because I was afraid of a threat, and I will never do it.”
Paul Deegan, president of publishers’ group News Media Canada said Meta’s decision to deny “access to trusted sources of news for some of their users, as wildfires rage across Alberta and Nova Scotia and public safety is at stake, is totally irresponsible and is a smack in the face to Canadians.”
“Meta’s unilateral action is more evidence of the power imbalance that exists between dominant platforms and publishers, which is why parliamentarians need to pass the Online News Act before their summer recess,” Deegan said.
Meta has previously said it will pull news off its platforms if Bill C-18 passes in its current form, and Google, which earlier this year ran tests that blocked news for some Canadians on Google search, has said it’s still deciding whether it will do the same once the bill becomes law.
The bill applies to Big Tech companies — Meta and Google, and potentially others — that “make news available.” That covers content publishers and users share on Facebook, or that Google indexes in its search results, for example. Removing news content from appearing on their platforms would mean the companies are no longer making news available, exempting them from the bill.
The premise of the legislation is that because the Big Tech companies benefit by having news content on their platforms, they should share revenues with news publishers—especially given Google and Meta earn 80 per cent of digital ad revenue in Canada. But the companies argue the value actually flows the other way, and that they drive traffic to the publishers’ websites.
Earlier this week, Brian Myles, director of Le Devoir, told the Senate committee studying the bill his newspaper gets 40 per cent of its traffic from Google search and nearly 30 per cent from social media.
“If Google and Facebook decide they will shut down news content on their own platforms, we will suffer a lot. Direct traffic is less than 20 per cent,” Myles said. “The days when a reader would open the newspaper from page one to the last page are gone. People discover content (through) the means of social platforms and search, and this threat is real.”
But the Globe also has other agreements with Google and Facebook in which “we pay quite a lot of money” to the companies “to deliver eyeballs. We depend on audience,” Crawley said.
If Bill C-18 passes, it would make Canada the second country in the world to have such legislation in place. The first was Australia, where Google also ran tests blocking news and Facebook temporarily pulled news off its platform in response to the bill.
Some observers have said the reason the two companies are fighting in Canada is because they’re concerned about the international precedent it could set, given other countries including United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Brazil are working on similar legislation.
Curran denied that claim, saying Bill C-18 is drafted differently than legislation in countries. “It’s much broader in scope.”
“We are focused on the impacts in Canada … we’ve said it over and over again, that if we are forced to compensate publishers in Canada for content that they share voluntarily to our platforms, that’s not something we can work with.”
