Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will be kicking himself that he didn’t hold off a couple of weeks in announcing his split with wife Sophie Grégoire Trudeau.
The separating couple took to Instagram last week to let Canadians know that after “many meaningful and difficult conversations”, they had decided to go their separate ways. That’s a standard move to try and “control the narrative”, as public relations professionals put it.
But the Trudeaus had no control over the tabloid news stories about their failed marriage, which were relentlessly shared, liked and commented on across social media platforms. Soon however, the Canadian versions of Facebook and Instagram won’t have any news stories to feed the gossip mill.
Facebook’s owner Meta has begun blocking access to news links on both websites in Canada, in protest at a new law that forces digital platforms to strike commercial deals with Canadian publishers and pay them for their content.
The aim of the Online News Act is to help media companies claw back some of the revenue lost to Meta and Google, the giants of digital advertising around the world. Media outlets post links on social networks help drive traffic to their websites but they also help keep social media users spending time on the large platforms – where they are exposed to yet more adverts.
Aussie stand-off
Meta has opted to pull the plug on news content rather than negotiate deals with publishers, in a move that mirrors its actions in Australia in 2021. Back then, news stories from the likes of the 9News, Sydney Morning Herald, and The Australian were automatically blocked on Facebook, which refused to follow a similar regulation that had been introduced.
The ban was lifted after a few days, but came at a bad time for the Australian government, which in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, was leaning heavily on social media platforms to disseminate news stories containing important public health information.
That might explain the willingness of the government to grant some concessions which lured Facebook back to the negotiating table.
New Zealand hasn’t seen such brinksmanship – yet. Several of our news organisations – Stuff, The Spinoff, NZME Newsroom, TVNZ and RNZ – have signed confidential deals with Google, which include being paid to feature on Google News Showcase, Google’s news platform. The amount of cash involved is likely a tiny fraction of Google’s ad revenue generated in New Zealand.
But Meta hasn’t replicated those deals with publishers and that’s a sore point for our own government, which is pushing ahead with its own legislation to require the likes of Meta to do a deal or have terms forced upon them.
“It’s not fair that the big digital platforms like Google and Meta get to host and share local news for free. It costs to produce the news and it’s only fair they pay,” Broadcasting Minister Willie Jackson said late last year, when the legislation was first floated.
Many New Zealand news outlets were “struggling to remain financially viable as more advertising moves online”, he said. That situation has only been exacerbated by the winding down of the $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund, which along with Covid-related ad government spending offered a much-needed lifeline to publishers during the pandemic.
It’s clear that Jackson sees Big Tech cash easing the pressure on the media going forward, rather than more government funding of news content.
But Meta, which is also distributing links to news content via its new social platform Threads, is likely to play hardball. It has long maintained that news content makes up just a tiny fraction of traffic on its websites, so isn’t of much value to it. Last year, Meta said it would stop paying US publishers an estimated US$105 million a year in payments to feature their content under its news tab. So it could be that any legislation introduced here will get the Canadian treatment from Meta.
Ditching Facebook
The Herald and other publishers made a big mistake 25 years ago in the transition into online publishing. They gave their content away freely online, while Facebook and Google used their clever algorithms to run rings around them in the digital advertising space. Now they have an opportunity to try to rebalance the power dynamic, and maybe even take some of the toxicity out of social media in the process.
Publishers will need to innovate to replicate some of the content discovery tools the social media giants are so good at delivering. I see a renaissance for RSS readers and news aggregators that simply point you to the publisher’s website without trying to lock you into their attention economy.
A diminishing role for social media in distributing content is actually an opportunity to rebuild the sustainability of the organisations the public relies on to generate accurate news. After years of scrolling the bottomless newsfeed, that will take some getting used to.
