Canadians Still Find News Content on Facebook One Year After Meta Ban, Report Finds

The Facebook logo on a cell phone in Boston on Oct. 14, 2022. (The Canadian Press/AP, Michael Dwyer)

More than one-third of Canadians still consume news on Facebook and Instagram despite news content being blocked on the social media sites in Canada, according to a new report.

Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, blocked Canadian news content in August 2023 following Ottawa’s introduction of the Online News Act. The act required tech companies to pay Canadian media outlets for news content linked on platforms, like Facebook.

Facebook users are no longer able to view news links or content from Canadian news publishers and broadcasters.

Yet the report “Old News, New Reality: A Year of Meta’s News Ban in Canada,” by the Media Ecosystem Observatory, says that 36 percent of Canadian users still report finding news or links to news on Facebook and Instagram.

It says that about 86 percent of Canadians use Facebook or Instagram every month. Of those, 70 percent reported still reading, watching, listening to, or sharing news on Facebook, and 65 percent said the same about Instagram.

“Astonishing figures given that news content is blocked on those platforms,” the authors wrote.

They also noted that only 35 percent of those who use the platforms were aware of the ban.

“We identified a significant number of workarounds to the blocking of news content and links to news websites, meaning that Canadian news organization content continues to be shared on Meta platforms,” the report says.

Some of the workarounds the report identifies include changing a URL and telling users how to fix it, or sharing a link to a news story from a different social media platform, such as X.

Users are also sharing screen grabs of news organization content.

“The volume of screenshots of Canadian news articles tripled in the four months immediately following the ban, generating such a large amount of engagement that, although there are fewer posts containing screenshots than there were posts with news links prior to the ban, engagement with news screenshots matched the previous engagement generated by news links,” report authors wrote.

Drop in Engagement

As a result of the ban, Canadian news outlets have lost 85 percent of engagement on Facebook and Instagram, according to the report.

“This loss has not been compensated by increases on other social media platforms, resulting in an overall decrease of 43 percent in engagement,” the authors wrote.

They noted that there were about 11 million fewer views per day of news content and a total net loss of 8.2 million engagements per month.

“The ban has effectively severed a key connection between the news industry and Canadian public,” it said.

Only 22 percent of Canadians are aware of the news ban on Facebook and Instagram, the report found.

“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 Canadians do not even realize the shift has occurred. They do not appear to be seeking news elsewhere,” the authors wrote.

The ban has disrupted the news industry in Canada, the authors say, particularly for local news outlets that relied heavily on Facebook to promote their content.

“Many did not have social media profiles on any other platform due to the difficulty of establishing an audience on a new platform and the major costs required to create audiovisual content for major platforms like YouTube and TikTok,” the report says.

Of the 770 news outlets that were using the platforms in June 2023, only 555 were still posting on social media in 2024, according to the report. Authors say that nearly a quarter of the outlets, or 215, had “gone dark on social media.”

“Of these, 212 (98 percent) are local news organizations: 30 percent of the 713 Canadian local news outlets who were previously active on social media are no longer able to share their content and build their readership online.”