Meta's news ban will make Facebook worse
What happens when your platform is exclusively home to unreliable information?
In the middle of last week, I finally entered the not-so-exclusive club of people who can’t view or post news on Instagram or Facebook. It took longer than I suspected it would. But the regular alarm of people posting this image has started to quiet.
We’re in the future now and it’s this message.
Now, how you feel about this message — whether it’s the Online News Act’s fault or Meta’s unjust retaliation — is a matter of interpretation. If you see this as governmental folly, you’ve planted a “NO LINK TAX” bumper sticker to the back of your laptop and are having some very boring conversations at your summer cottage. If you’re the corporate media sector, after decades of consolidation, you’re suddenly very interested in this whole “anti-trust” thing.1
But with the ban in place, we’re beyond arguing over the philosophical core of the law. It’s been passed. Meta doesn’t want to negotiate. Maybe there are tweaks that will satisfy Google, but that’s yet to be seen. We’re now in a post-social reality. It’s time to find out what it looks like.
How does the ban work?
The most obvious feature of the Meta ban is that you can’t see pages devoted to particular news brands on Facebook and Instagram. That includes domestic and international brands, and everything from student newspapers to the Washington Post. Those pages still exist. But you’re just greeted by a friendly message that implies someone else really dropped the ball and Meta would love to help you out, but Zucks’ big boxer hands are tied.
Weirdly enough, it hasn’t kicked in yet on their burgeoning X/Twitter clone Threads. My raw speculation is they are too busy building in basic features like a desktop app and quote-tweeting to implement the ban there. For now, it’s the wild frontier where you can finally see fuckjerry post affirmations beside CTV’s wildfire coverage. God bless.
The ban has one other component which I find somewhat fascinating: it blocks links to news outlets, most of the time. On Facebook, I’ve found the link blocker hard to beat. Meta really, really does not want you to post news on Facebook. On Instagram, however, you can pretty easily get around the ban by using link shorteners — a thing you have not thought about since 2015, if ever.
Back when links were long, we were all worried about how ugly our links were. In that era, bit.ly and tiny.url were regents of a vast empire where the text strings were beautiful and compact. Fat-shaming links was a micro-economy of its own. You could get a job that was mostly copying and pasting links into these services and then posting them on social media. The fallen kings and queens of Bit and Tiny have been waiting for their golden era to return and scream, “I will help you post about the Blue Jays on Instagram!”
Unfortunately, even with this win, Instagram drives barely any direct traffic. Something might trend on Instagram and, in a roundabout way, you might have a ton of visitors curious about a product or a viral image. But most won’t even click the link you post. They’ll go to Google. Most news sites have an Instagram presence for the same reason they might have a billboard above busy roads.2 Occasionally you might look up and be reminded the Vancouver Sun hasn’t collapsed into a sinkhole.
Again the odd one out here is Threads, where the links still work. And with 100 million users, they could theoretically refer some attention to your website. In practice though, Threads doesn’t exist. Engagement there has collapsed 80 per cent since launch.
The news we don’t get
It’s important to remember that while social media drives less traffic than it used to, Meta has an audience bigger than most nation-states. Many people rely on scrolling through their feed and seeing a headline on Instagram or Facebook to stay ambiently aware of what’s going on in the world. And now, for the Meta users living in Canada, that system is gone.
We now have a sense of what that means, thanks to the evacuation of Yellowknife and parts of B.C., following the spread of enormous wildfires. Outlets like Cabin Radio and The Yellowknifer were key in getting information out there about how to leave NWT’s capital city, and what conditions were like. Except of course, they couldn’t post that to Facebook, where it could go viral.
In its place, people are noting the spread of viral misinformation about highway closures, about what’s on fire and what’s safe.
"Right now in an emergency situation, where up-to-date local information is more important than ever, Facebook is putting corporate profits ahead of people's safety, ahead of quality local journalism,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said to CBC News.
However, I want to pause here and question the utility of Facebook in a moment like this. This misinformation would exist regardless. We have seen it with every possible crisis in the last eight years or so. The difference between then and now, in that before you might have seen a news article contradicting it. And then the user would have to decide if Global News was more trustworthy or their uncle.
The way Facebook works is that all information has an equal weight. It all looks professional, regardless of trustworthiness. In 2016, which article did you find more compelling: the one about Hillary Clinton being a rational if disappointing Democratic candidate, or the one where she was sucking the blood out of children? Facebook didn’t care.3
As news leaves Facebook, the platform is only going to have more and more misinformation of that calibre. That is Meta’s design choice. They are a private corporation and free to make it. Meanwhile Meta is actively reducing investment into trust and safety, along with most other social media platforms.
It’s potentially a good thing to separate news from misinformation. If someone knows they’re only going to get reliable information at Cabin Radio’s home page, that’s where they’ll go. They can avoid a middle man that doesn’t care about information quality. And we’re already starting to see a change in behaviour.
Ollie Williams, the editor of Cabin Radio, is the furthest thing from a fan of the Online News Act. But he told CBC News that site has seen more direct traffic in the last few weeks than his site usually gets in a year.
Some people are keen to argue that it’s important to have a presence on Facebook to counteract misinformation. But I don’t think we have proof that has ever worked on a large scale. All it did was put the two facts beside each other and leave the user to decide.
More so, is it the responsibility of news agencies to clean up the mess Facebook itself creates? News outlets don’t prioritize a presence on tech forums where people wrongly speculate about whether 5G helped do surgery on a banana.
So without anything resembling news content — even campus radio stations are getting caught up in the ban — what’s left of Facebook? Also-ran Instagram content? TikTok videos that are months, if not years behind trends? Or maybe you’re seeing what I’m seeing: incomprehensible memes and image macros that seem to be developed by a rogue AI.
Unless Facebook can figure out a way to fill that content void, it’s increasingly going to be more crap like this and not say, how to get out of Yellowknife before it’s too late.
Keep in mind, for most outlets, Facebook was a diminishing portion of traffic that needed to replaced somehow anyway. Articles aren’t reaching people in a timely way. This fact remains true in the parts of the world where Meta hasn’t blocked the news. And even if we stop talking about this as traffic problem and, instead, talk about the challenge of getting important information to people quickly, we still don’t have a clear answer.
Discovery remains the hardest problem in the news business. People knew to buy newspapers in the morning and watch TV news at 6 p.m. And for a long time, they knew to scroll Facebook until they fell asleep. As we go through this transition, we’ll have to find new systems or relearn old ones.
Maybe the future truly is refreshing your favourite website 4-10 times a day. Or maybe people will really get into news apps on their phone. But regardless of the news ban in place today, the future was never going to be Facebook.
Bell and Rogers are interested in anti-trust. What a world.
Gen Z and younger increasingly say they get all their news from social media. That means they don’t read articles. They read headlines, which are unfortunately very hard to make money on.
I don’t want to litigate how much impact this actually has on how people vote or their political attitudes, but the fact that for years misinformation or hard-right news sites were very popular on Facebook remains a bad thing.