from Hacker News

A year of Meta's news ban in Canada

by ikesau on 8/2/24, 7:23 PM with 134 comments

• by seryoiupfurds on 8/2/24, 8:29 PM

  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?

• by wkat4242 on 8/2/24, 8:39 PM

  > 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.

• by kredd on 8/2/24, 8:13 PM

  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.

• by nightshift1 on 8/2/24, 9:26 PM

  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 ?

• by ipaddr on 8/2/24, 9:32 PM

  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.

• by ch33zer on 8/2/24, 8:07 PM

  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.

• by cperciva on 8/2/24, 9:01 PM

  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.

• by SoftTalker on 8/2/24, 9:09 PM

  "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.

• by zmmmmm on 8/2/24, 10:24 PM

  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.

• by vlovich123 on 8/2/24, 9:51 PM

  > 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.

• by apatry on 8/2/24, 8:08 PM

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

• by pingou on 8/2/24, 9:38 PM

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

• by tedunangst on 8/2/24, 8:41 PM

  > 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?

• by ChrisArchitect on 8/2/24, 8:50 PM

  Related:

  Canadian journalism is suffering – but Meta isn't budging

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41131615

• by bfung on 8/2/24, 8:13 PM

  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?

• by racl101 on 8/2/24, 8:43 PM

  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.

• by PaulHoule on 8/2/24, 8:18 PM

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

• by TheRealPomax on 8/2/24, 9:03 PM

  > 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?

• by nailer on 8/2/24, 10:05 PM

  > 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?

• by mewse-hn on 8/2/24, 9:03 PM

  > 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]

• by bitshiftfaced on 8/2/24, 8:41 PM

  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.

• by jrgaston on 8/2/24, 9:09 PM

  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.

• by z5h on 8/2/24, 8:50 PM

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

• by al2o3cr on 8/2/24, 9:42 PM

  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

• by hackerbeat on 8/3/24, 9:11 AM

  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-o...