Meta News Ban Intensifying Canadians’ Legacy Media Break

AFP/APP

Montreal: As Canada heads into an election this month, voters looking for campaign news on Facebook or Instagram will find material filtered through online creators and influencers and no links to articles from major media outlets.

For more than a year, social media giant Meta has cut access to news websites on its sites, rebuffing Canada’s government over a law called the Online News Act and its requirement that platforms compensate journalism outlets for their content.

Because of the quirks of how this blockage is applied, users can still find news content on Meta-owned platforms in screenshots, memes and videos, but sometimes lacking the context of traditional reporting.

“It’s just not necessarily coming from those highest quality sources,” said Angus Lockhart of the Dais public policy think tank at Toronto Metropolitan University.

With more people getting information from platforms, the ban appears to further undermine the role of traditional journalism in an election cycle.

Aengus Bridgman, director of the Canadian Media Ecosystem Observatory, found users’ engagement with content from news media was never strikingly high but said now, many lack even a peripheral exposure to outlets’ coverage of current events.

He said these shifts in consumption will lead to “less and less broad understanding of politics and more and more hyper-focused issue orientations.”

Other countries have seen similar declines in legacy media, but Chris Arsenault, chair of the journalism and communications program at the University of Western Ontario, said the ban is exacerbating the process in Canada.

“It’s leading candidates themselves and often citizen journalists or influencers to spread their messages to voters directly on social media platforms,” he said.