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 a surge in clicks for his Canada Proud Facebook page.
"Our numbers are growing and we're reaching more and more people every day," said Ballingall, who publishes up to 10 posts a day and has some 540,000 followers.
Canada has become ground zero for Facebook's battle with governments that have enacted or are considering laws that force Internet giants, primarily the social media platform's owner Meta and Alphabet's Google, to pay media companies for links to news published on their platforms.
Facebook has blocked news sharing in Canada rather than pay, saying news holds no economic value to its business.
It is seen as likely to take a similar step in Australia should Canberra try to enforce its 2021 content licensing law after Facebook said it would not extend the deals it has with news publishers there.
Facebook briefly blocked news in Australia ahead of the law.
The blocking of news links has led to profound and disturbing changes in the way Canadian Facebook users engage with information about politics, two unpublished studies shared with Reuters found.
"The news being talked about in political groups is being replaced by memes," said Taylor Owen, founding director of McGill University's Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, who worked on one of the studies. "The ambient presence of journalism and true information in our feeds, the signals of reliability that were there, that's gone."
The lack of news on the platform and increased user engagement with opinion and non-verified content have the potential to undermine political discourse, particularly in election years, the studies' researchers say.
Canada and Australia 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.
In practice, Meta's decision means that when someone makes a post with a link to a news article, Canadians will see a box with the message: "In response to Canadian government legislation, news content can't be shared."
Where once news posts on Facebook garnered between five million and eight million views from Canadians per day, that has disappeared, said the Media Ecosystem Observatory, a McGill University and University of Toronto project.
The research analysed some 40,000 posts and compared user activity before and after the blocking of news links on the pages of some 1,000 news publishers, 185 political influencers and 600 political groups.
A separate NewsGuard study conducted for Reuters found that likes, comments and shares of what it categorised as "unreliable" sources climbed to 6.9 per cent in Canada in the 90 days after the ban, compared with 2.2 per cent in the 90 days before.
"This is especially troubling," said Gordon Crovitz, co-chief executive of New York-based NewsGuard, a fact-checking company that scores websites for accuracy.
Crovitz said the change has come at a time when "we see a sharp uptick in the number of AI-generated news sites publishing false claims and growing numbers of faked audio, images and videos, including from hostile governments ... intended to influence elections".
Facebook remains the most popular social media platform for current affairs 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 de-prioritising politics in user feeds.
The writer is from Reuters
