If you’re in Canada and have recently tried to share one of our articles on Facebook or check us out on Instagram, you’ve probably run into a small problem: you can’t.
The Online News Act (also known as Bill C-18), signed into law in June, is designed to force tech giants to pay for the journalism distributed on their platforms. The premise is that news outlets in Canada have lost significant ad revenue to these internet companies and deserve to be compensated. The companies don’t quite see it that way, saying the traffic referral they provide has been a boon to the journalism industry. To comply with the legislation, Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, has started blocking news content from social feeds in Canada. Had Google followed suit, it would have removed links to Canadian news sites from domestic search results. With the law set to go into effect by December, the possibility of a world where millions of Canadians would struggle to access reporting online—whether it was about a historic election in Manitoba, a storm flattening homes on the East Coast, or Taylor Swift’s new beau—became, for a period, real.
