PHOTO OF MELBOURNE’S STATE LIBRARY VICTORIA AS SEEN THROUGH A SMARTPHONE CAMERA BY NICK JONES.
If Meta bans news in Australia, what will happen? Canada’s experience is telling
Article by DMRC Chief Investigator, Prof. Axel Bruns
In countries that have demanded Facebook pay local news publishers, the tech giant has responded with threats — and sometimes action. Will a Canada-style ban become the international norm?

At an Australian parliamentary hearing last month, Meta once again suggested it could ban links to news on Facebook and Instagram in Australia. This would repeat the ban it enacted for more than a week in February 2021. That ban was in response to the introduction of the News Media Bargaining Code, an Australian law designed to force digital platforms to pass on some of their advertising earnings to news publishers.
A similar law — based on this code — was passed in Canada last year. As a result, in Canada news has been blocked from Meta platforms since August 2023.
This has produced strongly negative results for Canadian news outlets. Not only has the Canadian law failed to produce revenue flows from Meta to news producers, it severely reduced the incoming user traffic to their websites from Meta’s social media platforms.
What happened after the news ban in Canada?
The ongoing news ban in Canada has had several key effects. First, the removal of direct links to news articles meant a collapse in user visits to news sites. Those who once occasionally clicked on a news link in their feed can no longer do so.
This has especially affected regional and local news sites, for whom Facebook is often a key source of audience traffic. At a time when regional and rural areas of both Canada and Australia are already in danger of turning into “news deserts“, this is particularly concerning.
News outlets and audiences have worked around the bans to some extent. They’ve found circumvention techniques, such as posting article content without links, or article screenshots.
But such tricks can never fully replace the audience attention that has been lost. They also don’t help news outlets generate revenue for their content (as website traffic does through ads).
Instead, the main replacement for news coverage on Facebook has been political discussion that doesn’t directly reference or link to the news it draws on. This disconnection also opens the door for the circulation of well-meaning misinformation or deliberate disinformation.
Ultimately, the users of Meta’s platforms who suffer the most are those who are least interested in the news and who believe “news will find them“.
Highly invested news consumers will always find the news somewhere else. Those who see news only when people in their networks share articles will miss out, and may not even notice what they’re missing.
Read the full article on NiemanLab.org here.

 
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