Old News, New Reality: A Year of Meta's News Ban in Canada

Executive Summary

As Canada marks one year since Meta's unprecedented decision to block news access on Facebook and Instagram for Canadian users, the Media Ecosystem Observatory offers a data-driven examination of the ban's impact on Canadians and Canadian news media. Using survey and social media data, the analysis evaluates the extent to which the ban has shaped the character of online news in Canada and changed the behaviour of news producers and consumers.

Canadian news outlets have lost 85% of their engagement on Facebook and Instagram, a loss not compensated by increases on other social media platforms, resulting in an overall decrease of 43% in engagement. The ban has reshaped the media landscape in Canada, with 212 (approximately 30%) of local news outlets previously active on social media now inactive. Only 22% of Canadians know that news is banned on Facebook and Instagram, and even among users of the platforms and those who say they get news from them, a majority do not know about the ban. Despite the ban, news organization content is still available on Meta platforms through work-around strategies like screengrabs, with 36% of Canadian users reporting encountering news or links to news on Facebook or Instagram — arguably making Meta subject to the requirements of the Online News Act.

Overall, Canadians are simply seeing less news online, an estimated reduction of 11 million views per day across Instagram and Facebook, due to the ban. Canadians continue to learn about politics and current events through Facebook and Instagram, but through a more biased and less factual lens than before, and many do not even realize the shift has occurred; they do not appear to be seeking news elsewhere.