When Facebook bans the news
This is not the news ban you're looking for.
The other day I wrote about the (uncertain) future of journalism after the death of hyperlinks, because, well, look around.
The following day, Meta promptly obliged the point by rolling out AI features across its services (primarily search functions), which transparently seem intended to keep users parked on Meta’s various properties like they’re hotel-casinos.
From John Herrmann in New York Magazine:
“Like ChatGPT, you can ask it about whatever you want, and it will synthesize a response. In contrast to some other chatbots, and in line with the sorts of results you might get from an AI-powered search engine like Perplexity or Google’s Search Generative Experience, Meta’s AI will often return something akin to search results, presented as a summary with footnoted links sourced from the web. When it works, the intention is pretty clear: Rather than providing something else to do within Facebook or Instagram, these features are about reducing the need to ever leave. Rather than switch out of Instagram to search for something on Google, or to tap around the web for a while, you can just tap Meta’s search bar and get your question answered there.”
That’s funny. A couple years ago Mark Zuckerberg was making noises about the importance of interoperability to preserve the open web. Well, let’s say you own and operate Meta (a $1.2 trillion advertising company), which has to compete with Google (a $1.9 trillion advertising company) and Apple (a $2.6 trillion hardware company that also makes TV shows).
Fortunately, your company, unlike many startups, possess a rare combination of capital and infrastructure that could help your resource-intensive AI models ingest a massive amount data on a premise of fair use. Doesn’t an open web sound pretty good to you? Information, uh, wants to be free.
As I was attending the Labor Notes conference in Chicago this weekend, a journalism colleague sent me a new paper from Canada’s Media Ecosystem Observatory, “When journalism is turned off: Preliminary findings on the effects of Meta’s news ban in Canada.”
Meta banned journalism from its services in Canada in 2023 when the government passed a law in 2023 saying the Meta and Google had to pay for journalism. Google decided to settle up and fork over about $100 million; Meta didn’t. The pre-print studied the impact on Canadian users and news outlets, and some of the findings were interesting:
Our key findings:
- Even six months after the ban, a large number of Canadians (approximately 33%) still say they use Meta’s flagship social media platforms Facebook or Instagram for access to Canadian political and current affairs information.
- The Facebook Pages of national news outlets lost approximately 64% of their Facebook engagement following the end of news availability for Canadian users. Local news outlets lost approximately 85%. Almost half of all local news outlets stopped posting on Facebook entirely in the four months following the ban.
- Engagement with politically relevant pages and groups has remained unchanged since the ban, suggesting politically-oriented users have not reduced their Facebook usage.
- Members of politically-oriented Facebook Groups have circumvented the ban by posting screenshots of Canadian news articles. Although there are fewer screenshots of news post-ban than there were links to news articles pre-ban, the total engagement with news content in these Groups has remained consistent.
Overall, we observe that the end of news availability on Facebook has resulted in a significant decrease in engagement for Canadian news outlets, but has not substantially changed the behavior of Canadian Facebook users.
If you’re Meta’s president of global affairs Nick Clegg or a libertarian, you might be looking at this and thinking: “It seems like news publishers need Meta more than Meta needs news publishers. We banned journalism from our services and our users didn’t even abandon us! It’s time for Justin Trudeau to drop this law, which is based on a fundamentally flawed premise” yadda yadda.
I wrote the preceding paragraph before looking up what Meta actually said in response to this study; let’s see how I did.
A Meta spokesperson said the research confirmed the company's view that people still come "to Facebook and Instagram even without news on the platform."
Canadians can still access "authoritative information from a range of sources" on Facebook and the company's fact-checking process was "committed to stopping the spread of misinformation on our services", the spokesperson said.
Seriously now: What’s amusing to me about the Media Ecosystem Observatory study is the extent to which it found Canadian users were still interacting with Canadian journalism on Meta’s services equally as much, just this time in a more explicitly infringing way:
We further find that Groups focused on Canadian politics enjoy the same frequency of posting and diversity of engagement after the ban as before. While link sharing declines, we document a complementary uptick in the sharing of screenshots of Canadian news in a sample of these political Groups, and confirm by reviewing a number of such posts where users deliberately circumvented the link-sharing ban by posting screenshots. Although the screenshots do not compensate for the total loss of link sharing, the screenshots themselves garner the same total amount of engagement as news links previously had.
Since this a blog, but the purposes of reading comprehension I’ll recap the above in a more shouty way: CANADIANS ARE STILL CONSUMING AND TALKING ABOUT CANADIAN JOURNALISM ON META JUST AS MUCH, EXCEPT THIS TIME WITH LESS RISK OF LEAVING META! IF YOU’RE META THIS IS GREAT SO LONG AS JUSTIN TRUDEAU DOESN’T TRY TO SEND PARATROOPERS TO MENLO PARK!
I’m no lawyer, but maybe this a potential intellectual property or even a regulatory issue, given that Canada just passed a law that Meta is evading.
But in the big picture, for a journalist, this is just a different variation of the post-hyperlink, A.I.-driven business model that Meta and Google are already building toward, one in which the world’s internet users park in one spot, look at ads, and are passively served free content served via algorithm. Canada just got there a little earlier than the rest of us.
If you’re a journalist, in the business of finding facts and putting them in front of as many people as possible, your labor will probably still end up in front of people. If you’re a journalist, it’s the cost of the labor of journalism, not the copyrighted output, that’s the core public policy problem for you here, and it’s component that often gets the least legal, scholarly and political attention when everybody’s throwing down stakes on these types of bills.
Just to repeat myself:
Everybody is going to argue about the copyright implications of all this until they’re blue in the face, with varying levels of sincerity or corruption (and I swear to god, you’ll need to ask the people involved in these arguments who they’re getting money from, and how much).
But I am going to say something that I mean sort of seriously but not literally: I don’t really care about copyright! I don’t really care about paywalls! I’m okay with it if you only ever see my reporting via a chatbot! Copyright and paywalls are simply means to an end, and that end is the pursuit of human knowledge and self-liberation: the end is our freedom. And one of the principles of human freedom that I hold dear to my heart is that nobody should be providing labor to massively profitable corporations for free.
The fundamental media problem of the A.I.-driven future isn’t intellectual property; the fundamental media problem of the A.I.-driven future is work. Journalism as an action, not a product.