The parent company of Facebook and Instagram has announced that Canadians will no longer be able to access news on the social media platforms if the Online News Act is passed in its current form.
Meta spokesperson Lisa Laventure shared the decision via email, stating that the bill’s provisions would put the company in an untenable position.
The proposed law known as Bill C-18 would require digital giants like Meta and Google to negotiate deals that would compensate Canadian media companies, including CBC, for linking to or repurposing their content online.
While large Canadian media companies and the federal government support the bill, tech giants such as Meta and Google have long fought against it.
Facebook has been floating the potential to block news access in Canada for many months, as Bill C-18 made its way through Parliament.
Marc Dinsdale, Meta Canada’s head of media partnerships, argued in an October 2022 statement that the proposed legislation presumes the company unfairly benefits from its relationship with publishers, when in fact the reverse is true.
In response, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez said in a statement that Facebook’s tactics will not work and called the company out for resorting to threats.
He referred to Facebook’s move to block access to news in Australia after a similar law was discussed in 2021, where the tech company quickly backtracked after the Australian government made changes to an arbitration mechanism in the bill.
However, Facebook has since threatened to block news access in other countries such as the United States.
Facebook has claimed that news content is not a draw for its users and is not a significant source of revenue for the company. Posts with links to news articles make up less than three per cent of what people see in their Facebook feed, and Canadians tell the company they want to see less news and political content on its platforms.
Yet, Rodriguez and publishers have argued that tech companies are snatching advertising revenues away from media companies.
A 2018 report from the Canadian Media Concentration Project revealed that Google had taken half of the country’s internet advertising market share that year, with Facebook trailing at 27.3 per cent, and Bell, Torstar, Twitter, and Postmedia sitting at under two per cent each.
This equates to $3.8 billion in advertising revenue for Google, up from $2.8 billion in 2016. Facebook made $2.1 billion in advertising in 2018, while Bell made $146 million, Torstar earned $120 million, Twitter got $117.5 million, and Postmedia made $116.4 million.
During a House of Commons heritage committee meeting on the bill, Sabrina Geremia, the head of Google Canada, argued that the proposed legislation would “radically change” the framework her company uses to host free news links.
“The bill is a moving target, with key questions left unanswered,” she said. “We don’t know if we will be able to continue to link to news as we do today, so we are testing potential changes to the way we currently freely link to news under that framework.”
Rodriguez has insisted that Canadians “won’t be intimidated” by Meta’s tactics and that the government is open to working with Facebook.
He called out Facebook for delaying, obstructing, refusing to answer questions, and threatening Canadians. Google recently began a five-week test that limited access to news for some Canadian users, set to end on March 16.
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