Facebook turned off the news in Canada. What happened next?
As owner, editor and sole reporter of Ku’ku’kwes News, Maureen Googoo starts the day by publishing her latest scoops about Canada’s indigenous communities. Tracking the number of people that flocked to read those stories used to be a pleasure. Nowadays, Ms Googoo says, she dreads it.
Until last summer her website got about 12,000 monthly visits. Now it gets perhaps a quarter of that. This is not what Canada’s government envisaged when it passed the Online News Act last June.
The law promised “fairness in the Canadian digital-news marketplace". The idea, inspired by a similar law in Australia, was to force Google and Meta, the kings of search and social media, to pay news outlets when their articles appear in search results and social feeds. Publishers and broadcasters have long complained that the tech firms have gobbled up their advertising market.
The act was meant to claw some of that money back. In November, Google agreed to pay C$100m ($74m) a year into a government-run fund for Canadian newsrooms. But Meta declined.
News makes up less than 3% of the Facebook feed globally, the firm said, and is of little value to it. Publishers benefit when their stories are shared, it added, which is why most post their own content themselves. Instead of paying, Meta said it would block news links from its apps.
Since August, users of Facebook and Instagram in Canada have been unable to view or share links to any news site, from Ku’ku’kwes News to Economist.com. Nine months later, the number of people using Facebook and Instagram in Canada hasn’t budged. The apps are being downloaded as much as ever, according to Sensor Tower, a market-intelligence firm.
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