By Byron Kaye
(Reuters) – Since Meta blocked links to news in Canada last August to avoid paying fees to media companies, right-wing meme producer Jeff Ballingall says he has seen an increase in clicks to his Canada Proud facebook page ( NASDAQ :).
“Our numbers are growing and we reach more and more people every day,” said Ballingall, who posts up to 10 posts a day and has about 540,000 followers.
“The media is going to become more tribal and more specialized,” he added. “This only turns it on even more.”
Canada has become ground zero in facebook's battle with governments that have enacted or are considering laws that force Internet giants – primarily the owner of social media platform Meta and Alphabet's (NASDAQ:) Google – to pay media companies for links to news published on their platforms.
facebook has blocked news sharing in Canada instead of paying, saying the news has no economic value for its business.
A similar step is seen likely in Australia if Canberra tries to enforce its 2021 content licensing law after facebook said it would not expand deals it has with news publishers there. facebook briefly blocked news in Australia before the law.
Blocking news links has led to profound and disturbing changes in the way Canadian facebook users interact with political information, two unpublished studies shared with Reuters found.
“The news that is being talked about in political groups is being replaced by memes,” said Taylor Owen, founding director of the Center for Media, technology and Democracy at McGill University, who worked on one of the studies.
“The ambient presence of journalism and true information in our broadcasts, the signs of trustworthiness that were there, are no longer there.”
The lack of news on the platform and increased user interaction with unverified opinions and content has the potential to undermine political discourse, particularly in election years, the studies' researchers say. Both Canada and Australia will go to the polls in 2025.
Other jurisdictions, including California and Britain, are also considering legislation to force internet giants to pay for news content. Indonesia introduced a similar law this year.
BLOCKED
In practice, Meta's decision means that when someone posts with a link to a news article, Canadians will see a box with the message: “In response to Canadian government legislation, news content is not can share.”
Where news posts on facebook once garnered between 5 and 8 million views from Canadians a day, that has disappeared, according to the Media Ecosystem Observatory, a project of McGill University and the University of Toronto.
While engagement with politically influential accounts, such as partisan commentators, academics and media professionals, remained unchanged, reactions to image-based posts in Canadian political facebook groups tripled to match previous engagement with news posts, the study also found.
The research analyzed about 40,000 posts and compared user activity before and after blocking news links on the pages of about 1,000 news publishers, 185 political influencers and 600 political groups.
A Meta spokesperson said the research confirmed the company's view that people still visit “facebook and instagram even without news about the platform.”
Canadians can still access “authoritative information from a variety of sources” on facebook and the company's fact-checking process was “committed to stopping the spread of misinformation on our services,” the spokesperson said.
A separate NewsGuard study conducted for Reuters found that likes, comments and shares from what it categorized as “unreliable” sources increased to 6.9% in Canada in the 90 days after the ban, compared to the 2.2% in the previous 90 days.
“This is especially concerning,” said Gordon Crovitz, co-CEO of New York-based NewsGuard, a fact-checking company that rates the accuracy of websites.
Crovitz noted that the change came at a time when “we are seeing a sharp increase in the number of ai-generated news sites publishing false claims and a growing number of falsified audio, images and videos, including from hostile governments. “aimed at influencing elections.” “.
Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge, in an emailed statement to Reuters, called Meta's news blocking an “unfortunate and reckless choice” that had allowed “misinformation to spread on its platform.” …during information need situations such as wildfires, emergencies, local elections and other critical times.”
When asked about the studies, Australian Deputy Treasurer Stephen Jones said by email: “Access to quality, trusted content is important to Australians, and it is in Meta's best interest to support this content on its platforms.”
Jones, who will decide whether to hire an arbitrator to establish facebook's media licensing agreements, said the government had made its position clear to Meta that Australian news media companies should be “fairly remunerated for news content.” used on digital platforms”.
Meta declined to comment on future business decisions in Australia but said it would continue to engage with the government.
facebook remains the most popular social media platform for topical content, studies show, even though it has been declining as a news source for years amid an exodus of younger users to rivals and Meta's strategy. of deprioritizing politics in users' feeds.
In Canada, where four-fifths of the population is on facebook, 51% got news on the platform in 2023, the Media Ecosystem Observatory said.
<img src="https://technicalterrence.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Analysis-When-Facebook-blocks-news-studies-show-the-political-risks.jpg" title="© Reuters. A warning that users in Canada cannot see news on facebook, a response from Meta to a new law requiring large internet companies to pay Canadian news publishers for their content, appears in a screenshot taken in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, on April 5. , 2024. Social media website/Brochure via REUTERS ” alt=”© Reuters. A warning that users in Canada cannot see news on facebook, a response from Meta to a new law requiring large internet companies to pay Canadian news publishers for their content, appears in a screenshot taken in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, on April 5. , 2024. Social media website/Brochure via REUTERS ” rel=”external-image”/>
Two-thirds of Australians are on facebook and 32% used the platform to get news last year, the University of Canberra said.
Unlike facebook, Google has not indicated any changes to its agreements with news publishers in Australia and reached an agreement with the Canadian government to make payments to a fund that will support media outlets.
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