National News posted Sep 6, 2025 @ 07:00am by Iain Burns

Despite Carney's comments, there's little hope of news returning to Facebook

It’s now been more than two years since news stories were blocked from Facebook and Instagram.

Meta’s August 2023 decision, which came in reaction to the Liberals’ Online News Act (Bill C-18), led to a dramatic decline in readership and, ultimately, revenues for Canada’s news outlets. Some were even pushed into collapse.

To mark the anniversary of this profoundly consequential event, NowMedia has spoken with several experts whose knowledge of the Canadian media landscape is unrivalled.

We also asked – repeatedly, beginning in June – to speak with the Liberal minister in charge of the Online News Act, Steven Guilbeault, but his media assistant, after suggesting an interview in August, has stopped responding to NowMedia’s enquiries.

Meta, meanwhile, has also refused to make a statement, or provide an employee for interview, a continuation of the company's approach to media questions since banning news two years ago.

Carney gives his opinion

There’s been an unusual amount of interest in the Online News Act in recent weeks, only some of it courtesy of NowMedia’s pestering.

On Aug. 5, NowMedia reporter Steve MacNaull asked Prime Minister Mark Carney, who was visiting West Kelowna, whether he’d considered an alternative to his predecessor’s law, or simply getting rid of it entirely.

Carney answered the question by heaping praise upon the CBC – an organization funded primarily by taxpayers, and so not much affected by C-18 – before emphasizing the “importance of ensuring that [local news] is disseminated as widely and quickly as possible.”

Mark Carney, asked by @KelownaNow whether the Liberals would help get news back on Facebook, highlights his government's funding of CBC.

'One of the roles of CBC ... is to provide unbiased, immediate, local information.'

He also said he's a 'big believer' in local news. pic.twitter.com/09gFgCLRdy
— KelownaNow (@KelownaNow) August 5, 2025

He said he would “look for all avenues to do that,” but was unwilling to match the clear language of his government colleague, Kelowna MP Stephen Fuhr, who has called for the law to be scrapped.

Despite some headlines to the contrary, renowned law professor Michael Geist, who teaches at the University of Ottawa, said he doesn’t think Carney “came anywhere near … suggesting change is on the way” with the Online News Act.

“I didn't read the comments as a ringing endorsement,” he said, contrasting the prime minister’s comments with those of Justin Trudeau, which were also made in response to NowMedia’s questioning.

“[But] I think [Carney] responded to something that he didn't really necessarily expect to get asked,” Geist explained, adding that he doesn’t reckon Carney is “necessarily wedded” to the legislation.

Pressure from the US?

Less than a fortnight after NowMedia asked Carney about the Online News Act, news broke that the US State Department had named the law in its 2024 human rights report on Canada.

The US’s foreign ministry said the Online News Act had led to “substantial censorship of news content including local news content.”

The report also blasted Canada’s media as “substantially dependent on government sources of funding,” adding: “Government intervention in the media market favored means of communication that did not diverge from government-suggested bounds of political speech, and government policy and practices often disadvantaged independent media.”

But what does this extraordinary intervention in Canada’s affairs by the US actually mean for the Online News Act?

“[Canada’s] government is probably willing to move on from [the Online News Act] if it was sufficiently pressured to do so,” Geist told NowMedia when asked about the significance of the State Department’s report.

<who> Photo credit: The White House </who> Secretary of State Marco Rubio with President Donald Trump.

“I guess I'm not totally convinced that is the case, that in the hierarchy of what the US administration would be concerned about, that C-18 would be at the top of the list.” Instead, he said, Bill C-11 – the Online Streaming Act – is likely to be more of a priority.

Despite that, Geist added, “it's more of a possibility now that it was let's say six months ago or a year ago,” pointing to Carney’s willingness to move away from Trudeau’s digital policies, including the digital services tax that so infuriated the Americans.

That said, it’s “pretty tough to figure out what exactly is happening within that Trump administration,” Geist explained.

Nonetheless, the ideas of “censorship and freedom of expression and tech regulation” evidently “resonate” with The White House. “It's much more European-focused, where obviously they've been much more aggressive about some of the regulation they put forward,” Geist said.

“Could that spill over to Canada? I think it certainly could.”

Online News Act still has plenty of defenders

Though it has wrought devastation throughout Canada’s media sector – research from the Media Ecosystem Observatory released in 2024 found that outlets had suffered an overall decrease of 43 per cent in total engagement, with Canadians now seeing far less news as a consequence – it still has its defenders.

That includes consistently favourable reports from some of Canada’s largest media outlets.

The natural question is: Why?

“You've got the large players that kind of made the deal with the devil, so to speak, to get this legislation,” Geist explained. “They wanted it and they got it. And whether it helped them or hurt them, at the end of the day, my sense is that for some, it was probably a bit of a wash.”

He added: “But at this stage, having sunk so much effort into it, they aren’t about to give it up now … I think it was a mistake [but] I think it's going to kind of continue to be there in the background.”

The news ban and the damage done

The Media Ecosystem Observatory, which is a collaboration between academics from the University of Toronto and McGill University, released the 2024 study to mark the one-year anniversary of the prohibition of news on Meta platforms.

It hasn’t released a new study to mark the two-year anniversary, but it did release an update on the lay of the land earlier this year.

MEO found that “centre-aligned outlets” such as CBC, CTV and Global News suffered a “steep decrease in engagement” on Facebook and Instagram, choosing instead to “pivot towards TikTok.” By doing so they “largely maintained” their overall engagement.

Right-aligned publications (in MEO’s view, that includes Rebel News, the Toronto Sun and True North) chose instead to head to YouTube, according to the study, but were “unable to fully offset the loss of engagement” from Meta’s news ban.

The primary victims of the ban, however, were “small local news outlets.” MEO’s research found they were “affected disproportionately” by the loss of Meta platforms.

<who> MEO </who> The decline in engagement on Meta platforms since the news ban.

“Regardless of political alignment, major news outlets fared better than the rest,” the study found.

Aengus Bridgman, the director of the MEO and an assistant professor at McGill, told NowMedia that “the online environment is now fairly hostile to news content.”

He said his team’s research has previously revealed “the collapse of news media on the socially connected internet,” adding: “That absolutely continues to be true.”

But despite that, Bridgman said, most people aren’t even aware that news has been banned from Facebook and Instagram.

“Even people who use Facebook for news don't really know that news is banned,” he said.

That’s because instead of traditional journalism being posted on Meta platforms, Canadians are increasingly seeing what Bridgman calls “an infographic of news.”

“It'll just be like a headline and a couple bullet points,” he said. “There's no creation of original content: it's just recycling the actual news.”

Damage to democracy

Bridgman said the MEO’s fundamental priority is to “shed light on how the information environment does or does not serve democracy.”

In its 2024 study, the group said that the “current trajectory” of Canada’s “information ecosystem” was vulnerable to decisions made by the likes of Meta.

It warned that Canada “must proactively address these challenges … especially as critical federal elections approach.”

Alas, news remained banned from Meta platforms during the election, though that didn’t stop political parties shelling out millions of dollars to advertise on them (Bridgman noted that there has been “no solidarity whatsoever” shown to media outlets by Canadian institutions.)

Bridgman said that, though it’s “very hard to quantify the impact [the news ban] had on the election,” he was astonished to see promoted content on Facebook that featured fake news and imitation websites.

“You had this very bizarre situation on the platform that is the one that Canadians say they use the most for news and to get information about the world … on that platform you were being shown – Facebook or Meta was profiting from – news articles that were a hundred per cent AI-generated with AI-generated images,” he said.

<who> Photo credit: NowMedia </who> The Online News Act, introduced during Justin Trudeau's time as prime minister, prompted Meta to block news in Canada.

“It was quite dystopian during the election: this contradiction where, No, you can't see CBC, but if you want to pay us to promote a fake CBC, yes, we'll take your money and we'll happily promote it.”

What does Bridgman see happening to the Online News Act and Meta’s ban on news in Canada?

There are “a few possibilities,” he said.

“One is the CRTC makes a decision that Meta is still subject to [the Online News Act]. That could potentially occur still,” he said, echoing a warning made by the former heritage minister more than a year ago.

Another is that artificial intelligence continues to revolutionize search to such an extent that it undermines the $100 million deal Google made with Ottawa to effectively pay for hosting links to news content. That’s because, according to Bridgman, Google and other tech firms could simply provide an AI “summary” of news articles, meaning news sites “will get no click-through.”

That’s “a really big open question” for the future of the internet, he said.

Either way, he concluded: “I don't see Meta anytime soon deciding to lift this ban. I just can't see that occurring in the near future out of some commitment to democracy or some interest in the wellbeing of Canadian journalism.”

What it all means, and what comes next

Another organization concerned about the Online News Act is OpenMedia, a non-profit that strives for “an affordable, surveillance-free and democratic Internet.”

Matt Hatfield, the group’s executive director, said he thinks C-18 “misread” the media landscape and ultimately led to the Meta ban, which took “an absolute axe to the audience” many outlets relied upon.

The media in Canada today is “very weak,” he emphasized.

To the prime minister, the solution appears to be the CBC. He has praised the state broadcaster as “one of Canada’s most important institutions” and pledged to give it an extra $150 million.

But not everyone’s convinced.

“Certainly, many people would feel that CBC shouldn't be the only solution to local news, that we need a diversity of viewpoints in local communities,” he told NowMedia.

“We cannot be a one-outlet country," he added.

But despite “relatively few people” being particularly pleased with the Online News Act – even those that “fought” for it – Hatfield said he doesn’t think Ottawa “knows what to do, frankly.”

“I think, ‘Give more money to the CBC’ is a very easy button for the government to push,” he said.

Doling out cash to various outlets from both taxpayers and Google, meanwhile, has been “corrosive of the trust in journalism,” Hatfield stressed.

Hatfield also has deep questions about the future of news and how that affects the health of Canada’s democracy.

The present era, he said, “is not a great time for freedom of expression,” and that’s apparent “in multiple democracies.”

He added: “I do think more and more people are getting some of their news from discussions with LLM [e.g. ChatGPT] agents rather than going to a new website or doing a Google search.”

“They're just asking a bot to go out and do a search for them, and I think the government needs to not just undo some of the damage that they'd done previously, they need to think about what the viable revenue model is going to be for news.”

A “huge concern” of his is that whoever gets “top billing in feeding the AI agents is going to have a huge impact on what people know, even more so than mainstream media do currently.”

Canadians, he said, “really have to do some soul searching and figure out what's right for us.”

“Is it important to us to have a Canadian journalist doing real journalism in every major Canadian community or every community beyond a certain size? I would argue it is; we need at least one, if not a couple,” he explained.

Eventually, Hatfield said, inaction will stop being an option for the federal government.

“If we find ourselves in a world in Canada where just more and more local outlets continue to close, I mean, surely at some point, the government will feel some level of pressure from the public to do something to halt it,” he said.

He added: “The Trudeau government certainly discovered, and this government will find as well, that good wishes and good press releases don't determine reality. Reality continues to do the things that it will do.”

Echoing many of the points made by the MEO, Hatfield was also keen to stress the importance of a free media to a robust democracy.

“In recent years we've been focusing more on what makes democracy work,” he said. “And democracy doesn't work without a diversity of press.

“If there aren’t people holding every party to account, calling them on their BS and pointing out their lies … we end up in a system where it's just whoever's take you want to believe rather than the truth.”

To read more articles by, and about, NowMedia on this subject, see below: