Michael Geist
The government escalated the battle over Bill C-18 yesterday, announcing that it was suspending advertising on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram platforms due the company’s decision to comply with the bill by blocking news sharing and its reluctance to engage in further negotiations on the issue. While the ad ban applies to federal government advertising, Liberal party officials confirmed they plan to continue political advertising on the social networks, suggesting that principled opposition ends when there might be a political cost involved. At issue is roughly $11 million in annual advertising by the federal government, a sum that pales in comparison to the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s estimate of at least $100 million in payments in Canada for news links from Meta alone.
In addition to raising the economic cost to Meta for stopping news sharing, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau increased the rhetoric, describing Canada as having been “attacked” by Meta and likening the government’s fight over the bill to defending democracy in Ukraine or during the Second World War [at 13:30]:
Facebook decided that Canada was a small country, small enough that they could reject our asks. They made the wrong choice by deciding to attack Canada. We want to defend democracy. This is what we’re doing across the world, such as supporting Ukraine. This is what we did during the Second World War. This is what we’re doing every single day in the United Nations.
There are strongly held views on both sides of the Bill C-18 debate, but the suggestion that stopping sharing news links on a social network is in any way comparable to World War 2 is embarrassingly hyperbolic and gives the sense of a government that has lost perspective on the issue. Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez has repeatedly described the manner of compliance with Bill C-18 as a business choice for the Internet companies, yet the Prime Minister now calls that choice an attack on the country.
If it were truly comparable to a world war, then surely the Liberal Party (joined by the NDP) would not continue to advertise on the platform. Yet since the 2021 election call, the party alone has run approximately 11,000 ads on Facebook and Instagram. That is separate from individual MPs, who have also run hundreds of ads. The Meta Ad Library provides ample evidence of how reliant the party has been on social media. For example, since the start of the year, Anna Gainey ran over 500 ads as part of her by-election campaign in Quebec. David Hilderley, who was a candidate in the Oxford by-election, ran approximately 180 ads on Facebook during the same timeframe.
Ultimately, if this is the government’s Plan B to the unfolding mess that is Bill C-18, it is unlikely to make much difference. Government advertising is supposed to be about department communication not subsidy and the suspension may make it harder to reach younger demographics on issues such as summer co-op programs or Canadian Armed Forces recruitment. Regardless, the ad boycott does not alter the foundation of the legislation of mandated payments for links with uncapped liability. Moreover, the costs extend beyond just Canada, as the companies are surely looking to the global market and the potential for billions in liability for linking if others adopt the Bill C-18 approach as their model. Viewed with that prism, a federal government ban that does not even include the governing political party pales in comparison to the risks of the dangerous Bill C-18 precedent.
As I have said for weeks, everyone loses with Bill C-18 and that includes Meta. But it is readily apparent that the Canadian media sector will take the biggest hit with lost links, cancelled deals, and a bill that may not generate any new revenues. The recent experience of the CBC’s Brodie Fenlon provides a vivid illustration of the harm to Canadian media outlets that awaits under Bill C-18. In fact, even if Google finds a compromise position – the government is clearly holding out hope it can strike a deal – the lost revenues from even one platform means this legislation may prove to be a net-negative for the media sector. That suggests that it will soon be time for Plan C, starting with a de-escalation of Prime Minister’s absurd rhetoric of a country under attack.
Editorial: Access to local news in Canada will be hurt
2 days ago
Weyburn Review editor Greg Nikkel hopes that access to the free press in Canada will still be possible with Bill C-18 coming into effect.The Weyburn Review, like all community papers, will soon see all access to news removed from Google and Meta (Facebook and Instagram), in reaction to Bill C-18 by the federal government.
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This is a major blow for every news outlet, as once again the federal government is enacting legislation that benefits no one, and instead will severely impact the news industry, and will severely curtail the ability of the public to see the news stories about their community.
What is the reason for this major development? This is due to the federal government passing Bill C-18, known as ”The Online News Act.”
Through this act, which has not yet come into effect but will within the next six months, Google and Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), will be required to pay news organizations for showing links to articles and photos.
The result is, both of those companies have announced that they will be removing all news content in Canada once this bill comes into effect.
This means that the news stories and photos you can currently look for and read on Facebook or through Google searches will no longer be available to you, the reader.
Google calls this payment a “link tax,” and they refuse to pay it, as will Meta. Their solution is to then deprive all Canadians of the access to current affairs, people stories, photos of news events and happenings in their community and in the world.
The ironic thing with the act is, the government explains that this legislation is in respect of online communications that provide news to the residents of Canada. The result of their bill is to effectively kill access to news in Canada, and they indicate no willingness to respond to the concerns of Google and Meta, not to mention the two companies are abandoning Canadians in response.
The Weyburn Review and This Week will continue to post news and photos from the community on our website, and as readers, you are encouraged to check that out and bookmark the site, as well as following us on Twitter.
The news continues to happen, and we will continue to report on the unfolding of our ongoing history, the accomplishments of residents, and the important events and occurrences for residents and businesses of the community.
In the meantime, people can communicate with the government, and with the two companies, to resolve this major disagreement. No one wins with this situation, and the ones who hold the means to walk back the bill is the governing party of Canada.
Both sides need to know this is hurting Canadians, and hurting the very basic right to a free press, which should never happen in a democratic country.
With the news that Trudeau’s government is ceasing all advertising on Facebook and Instagram, it appears that social media will soon be wistful for happier times, Susan Delacourt writes.
By Susan Delacourt
Thu., July 6, 2023
Several years ago, legendary Washington Post editor Marty Baron came to Ottawa to speak at Carleton University about the future of journalism.
At a dinner later, Baron was talking about how he had little patience with journalists who kept lamenting how the old days were better. One of the guests, with his own illustrious career in print and TV journalism, replied: “Well they were pretty (expletive deleted) good.”
Journalists do love to tell stories about the good old days — guilty as charged. And yes, they were pretty good.
Now, with the news that Justin Trudeau’s government is ceasing all advertising on Facebook and Instagram, it appears that social media will soon be wistful for happier times. In just under a decade, the political class was whipped into a whirlwind, click-happy romance with the internet tech giants, only to denounce them this week as rich, greedy bullies.
The prime minister himself had fighting words for Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, when he spoke to reporters in Quebec on Wednesday, especially when he spoke in French.
“They made a bad choice in attacking Canada,” Trudeau told reporters. “Canadians will not allow themselves to be intimidated or bullied by American billionaires who simply want to undermine our democracy.” Moreover, he added: “Canada will not be alone. I know that countries around the world are looking at what we’re doing here, and they will refuse to accept that kind of blackmail and those threats.”
Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez cast the escalating tension with the tech giants as a battle against “superpowers,” and he didn’t mean it in a complimentary way. “They’re huge, they’re rich, powerful (with) lots of big lawyers. They can be intimidating,” Rodriguez said at his news conference announcing the ad ban. “But are we going to let ourselves be intimidated?”
Of course, as with many divorcing couples, the relationship between politics and social media won’t be totally severed — their paths will still cross; they may even need each other. But all one needs to do is look back over the past couple of decades of annual government advertising reports to see just how much that relationship blossomed in the internet era, and how much pulling back the government is going to be doing.
It was only six years ago, in the 2016-17 report, that the government reported for the first time that digital advertising had surpassed TV in the proportion of state money spent on ad campaigns. For decades, TV had dominated the ad spending — mainly at the expense of newspapers like this one — but at the same time Trudeau’s Liberals settled into their first year in power, digital advertising became king, racking up 54.7 per cent of all ad spending, and within that, social media represented 23 per cent.
Two years later, the annual ad report breaks down that spending even further, showing how much money went to the individual tech platforms, with flattering explanations for why the government was all into social media such as Facebook — not so much Twitter.
“Social media, such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, represents the largest part of digital advertising placements this year,” the 2018-19 report states. “As of the fourth quarter of 2016, Facebook had a 75 per cent reach among Canadian internet users, equal to YouTube’s reach, and twice as high as that of Twitter’s. Further, Facebook allows for niche-targeting and it generally has high engagement rates. Twitter, on the other hand, is used more for ‘breaking news’ and has more limited targeting options.”
How big and how large was this leap into the world of advertising through social media? Well, back in 2006, when Stephen Harper’s Conservatives came to power, only six per cent of ad spending fell into what was then called the “web” category. By 2013, the “internet” ads claimed 20 per cent of all government ad spending, compared to just 10 per cent for weekly newspapers and a startlingly tiny 1.7 per cent for daily newspapers. (Yes, we were aware that Harper’s Conservatives weren’t all that into us, the daily print people.)
The most recent report, from 2021-22, shows a bit of a revival for so-called “traditional” media advertising, with 47 of the ad budget spent on TV, print and radio. In 2020-21, in fact, traditional media claimed a slightly larger share of all advertising, with 52 per cent over digital’s 47 per cent, but that is probably a result of all the public-health ads going to old-fashioned outlets in the COVID pandemic.
The point here is that Facebook and Instagram aren’t going to be bankrupted by the government’s ad ban — estimated to keep $10 million a year out of Meta’s hands — while the government has grown not only to love social media, but to need it too.
No question, though, social media is not the darling it once was, thanks to the disruptive Donald Trump and more recently, new Twitter owner Elon Musk. Now we have the threats from Meta and Google to limit their platforms to Canadian news, or cut them off altogether. As Liberals, New Democrats and the Bloc Québécois were saying on Wednesday, now it’s about democracy and the future of journalism.
Last week, as this battle was escalating, I wondered whether citizens would side with the tech giants or the governments trying to rein them in. Neither is particularly popular with the public.
Trudeau’s latest language indicates he’s betting on antipathy to tech giants to keep him standing firm. But somewhere, maybe around the ping pong tables or beanbag chairs or other cool perks of those tech-giant offices, there may well be a glum gathering of people nostalgic for the good old days when everyone loved and needed them. Welcome to what it’s like to be a journalist.
Susan Delacourt is an Ottawa-based columnist covering national politics for the Star. Reach her via email: sdelacourt@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt
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