Media Ecosystem Observatory issues report on the first year of Meta’s news ban in Canada

Yesterday, on the first anniversary of Meta blocking users in Canada “from viewing, accessing, and sharing news article links on its platforms” in response to the passage of Bill C-18, the Media Ecosystem Observatory (MEO) published “the first data-informed analysis on what happened in Canada after Meta banned access to news on its platforms for Canadians.” That Information Ecosystem Brief, Old News, New Reality: A Year of Meta’s News Ban in Canada (PDF), looks at what happened when Meta banned news for Canadian users, specifically with respect to Canadian news organizations and “the five major social media platforms used in Canada for news: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and X/Twitter.” (I found out about the report via a post on the Librarianship.ca site via @LibrarianshipCA@mstdn.ca on Mastodon.)

Among the alarming key takeaways from the report:

Almost half of news media engagement has disappeared – Canadian news outlets have lost 85% of their engagement on Facebook and Instagram. This loss has not been compensated by increases on other social media platforms, resulting in an overall decrease of 43% in engagement.

And:

Less news is being consumed by Canadians – Overall, Canadians are simply seeing less news online an estimated reduction of 11 million views per day across Instagram and Facebook – due to the ban. Canadians continue to learn about politics and current events through Facebook and Instagram, but through a more biased and less factual lens than before and many Canadians do not even realize the shift has occurred. They do not appear to be seeking news elsewhere.

The lack of awareness is explicitly tied to the decreased news consumption:

Moreover, … only half of those who use the platform for news are even aware that content from news organizations has been banned (more generally, only 35% of platform users and 22% of all Canadians know about the ban). A super-majority of Canadians as well as a majority of Meta-platform users in Canada, and even those who self-report using the platform for news, simply do not know a news ban is in effect.

Given this lack of awareness, it is not surprising that Canadians have not changed their behavior to substitute for the loss of news content on Facebook and Instagram. Using an analysis of social media engagement with Canadian news organizations and politicians across platforms over time, we tested to see if Canadians were engaging with alternative sources of news on Facebook and Instagram (e.g. Canadian politicians) or Canadian news content on other platforms (e.g. TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube). We found no evidence of any substitution: Canadian Facebook and Instagram users continued to engage with the platforms as they usually had, and the accounts of Canadian politicians and news organizations on other platforms saw similar levels of engagement as before the ban. Canadians are simply consuming less information directly from news organizations that produce original reporting.

This is specific to Canada and that country’s business, legal, and news landscapes, but at the same time it is a compelling real-time experimental what-if or what could-be elsewhere. It also an opportunity for comparison with the phenomena of “news deserts” and “the local news crisis” which has “precipitated a general disengagement from local democratic life” in the United States—and to which laws like Canada’s Bill C-18 are sometimes proposed as solutions.

Read the full report:

Media Ecosystem Observatory. Old News, New Reality: A Year of Meta’s News Ban in Canada. Montreal: Media Ecosystem Observatory, August 2024. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6450265301129e5dbabfe8a2/t/66abc129a067dd5093067dfd/1722532138528/Meta+News+Ban+Report.2.pdf (PDF).

There’s a summary of and link to the report on the media​ecosystem​observatory​.com site.