Canadians have been engaging less with news on Facebook since Meta’s decision to block journalistic content on some of its platforms. However, this trend was already underway before this measure was taken, and can also be observed internationally.
This is one of the highlights of the latest Canadian edition of the Digital News Report. This annual survey is carried out by an international team of researchers and involves data from more than 95,000 news consumers in 47 countries.
Overall decline
Despite Meta’s actions, nearly three out of four Canadians (73 per cent) said they check the news every day. This number has not decreased since Meta took action. However, fewer people said they used Facebook to follow, share or comment on the news in the week before the survey — 25 per cent compared to 29 per cent in 2023.
In fact, for the first time since Canada was included in the survey in 2016, YouTube was more widely used than Facebook for news, with 29 per cent of Canadians using it — up four percentage points since 2023.
However, Facebook’s downward trend was already well underway, and can also be observed in countries where journalistic content remains accessible on the platform.
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According to the Digital News Report, the use of Facebook for news has dropped 16 percentage points since 2016 (from 42 per cent in 2016 to 26 per cent in 2024) in an aggregate of 12 international markets used for tracking purposes. These markets are the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Denmark, Finland, Australia, Brazil and Japan.
In Canada, the decline was slightly greater at 21 percentage points, from 46 per cent in 2016 to 25 per cent in 2024.
Adults aged 18 to 34 have been leaving Facebook in general. Less than half (46 per cent) said they used it for any reason in the week preceding the survey, compared to 65 per cent of those aged 35 and over. In 2016, 77 per cent of 18 to 34 year-olds had used Facebook, and 67 per cent of those aged 35 and over had.
Trustworthy news
Despite Meta’s restrictions on journalistic content, many Canadian Facebook and Instagram users said they found it easy to distinguish trustworthy from untrustworthy news (48 per cent of Facebook users and 44 per cent of Instagram users). Canadians who use Google Search (60 per cent) and YouTube (51 per cent) were more likely to find it easy to make this distinction.
Conversely, TikTok is the platform where users find it most difficult to distinguish trustworthy news from untrustworthy news. While 40 per cent of Canadian users found it easy, one in three (33 per cent) found it difficult.
International results also found that a greater proportion of users struggled to identify trustworthy news on TikTok.
AI distrust
The survey also identified a certain distrust of artificial intelligence (AI) among Canadians, in line with other international trends. Over half of Canadians (52 per cent) said they were uncomfortable with the idea of news being produced primarily by AI with some human oversight.
Only a small proportion welcomed the practice (17 per cent). But when the role of AI in news production was reduced to simply assisting a human journalist, opinion was more positive: 39 per cent of Canadians were comfortable with the idea, and only 27 per cent expressed discomfort.
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Those who considered themselves informed about AI were more likely to be comfortable with the idea of it being used in news production.
In terms of specific topics, the production of news primarily by artificial intelligence created more unease about political issues than for lighter topics, such as sports or entertainment — a trend that can be observed in most countries.
Paid news consumption
Lastly, after experiencing a year-over-year decline for the first time since we began collecting Canadian data, the number of Canadians paying for online news or accessing paid news services has risen back to its 2022 level. Fifteen per cent of Canadian respondents said they had done one or the other in the past year.
Colette Brin's work is funded in part by the Québec government's Ministry of Culture and Communications and Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture. The Canadian edition of the Digital News Report is funded by Canadian Heritage through News Media Canada. Prof. Brin is Director of Centre d'études sur les médias, an independent non-profit research unit hosted at Université Laval in partnership with Université de Montréal and Université du Québec à Montréal. She is also Chairperson of the Independent Advisory Board on Eligibility for Journalism Tax Measures in collaboration with the Canada Revenue Agency.
Sébastien Charlton is coordinator of the Centre d'études sur les médias (CEM), Canadian partner of the study. The CEM is an independent non-profit research unit hosted at Université Laval in partnership with Université de Montréal and Université du Québec à Montréal, which is funded in part by the Québec government's Ministry of Culture and Communications. The Canadian edition of the Digital News Report was also partly funded by Canadian Heritage.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
