Meta’s Temper Tantrum Is Partisan Politicking

So, if you use Facebook and reside in Canada, by now you’ve noticed that anything resembling news articles are being blocked.  At first, you might look at it and say “oh, that’s just Meta having a temper tantrum over Bill C-18”.  

You wouldn’t be wrong. It is a corporate temper tantrum, and it’s one that makes no sense superficially. 

Let me draw out the picture a bit.  Facebook and Google soak up over 80% of the advertising revenues available in the Canadian market.  For advertisers, their platforms provide the ability to target prospective customers with shocking levels of accuracy.  Of course that means they have sucked up the advertising dollars that had been the bread and butter of local media.  As an advertiser, why would I buy an ad on the local newspaper’s pages, when I can target my audience by a combination of keywords and geographic information that means I’m going to reach exactly the people who I perceive to be my ideal customers?  A page on the local broadsheet hits the geographic (sort of), but let’s say I’m an auto shop and my ad lands beside the editorials - is that where my customers are looking in the newspaper?  I have no idea.  Platforms like Google and Facebook allow me to associate my brand with keywords that turn up on the sites and articles that I know my customers read. 

It really isn’t a surprise that as the internet has evolved and these platforms developed that they came to soak up so much of the advertising revenue. The advertising strategies that worked when I grew up simply became irrelevant.  The days of “mass market advertising” died as people became increasingly able to access information in a much more focused way, and could actively ignore the ads they did see, either by skipping past them on their PVR, or with ad blockers in their web browsers.  

From the 1990s onward, news media in particular has struggled not only to understand the emerging internet market, but to respond to it.  At first, they basically approached it either as a “marketing gateway” to gather subscribers to the print publications (that failed miserably), or they tried to use it as an add-on for advertisers.  But your local newspaper, even in a large centre, simply doesn’t have the resources that a Google or Meta has to throw at creating a targeting platform.  They lost that war in a big way.  Where news media had been central to the advertising game, over a 20 year period they became marginal players, fighting over the 20% of the market that the behemoths weren’t soaking up. 

What do you call a market where there’s only one or two players who control the vast majority of the revenue?  A monopoly.  It’s not a “free market” at that point, it’s functionally a monopoly where the biggest players can conspire to make it almost impossible for any kind of competition to emerge.  Look at Canada’s cell phone industry for an example. Yes, you can buy services from a dozen different providers, but the blunt reality is that Rogers, Bell and Telus own most of those, and ultimately control most of both the infrastructure and subscribers as a result … and Canada pays some of the highest cell phone rates in the world. It’s nuts. 

So, what’s the point of Bill C-18?  Bill C-18 creates an obligation on the part of companies like Meta and Google to direct a percentage of their revenues from advertising to Canadian journalists.  While this might on the surface look like the government intervening in the free market unreasonably, there’s a bigger issue at stake here.  Democracy itself.  

News is the so-called “fourth estate” of democracy.  In order for democracy to be functional, the people need access to objective news sources that actually do the heavy lifting of investigating the goings-on in our governments, communicating a reasonable picture of the world we live in - locally, nationally, and internationally.  That is not cheap business, and traditionally, news media have made money on selling advertising and subscriptions (although subscriptions alone seldom made a publication viable from a business perspective).  Without an active, engaged, and effective news media, democracy is vulnerable to attacks using propaganda and disinformation. 

Guarantees of a free news media in the constitution do not mean a whole lot if there’s no effective news media out there.  What has happened in Canada is that objective journalism has largely retreated to a couple of wire services who then get republished by most newsrooms.  Investigative work has all but disappeared from the landscape, meaning that deep dives into topics of interest are rare, and most editorial content has become little more than partisan talking points.  

Yes, we have a small body of “up and coming” media like The Tyee, but they can only do so much. PostMedia has turned itself into a blatantly partisan operation, decades of starvation by the government have neutered CBC’s ability to do serious journalism as well, and the political right wing has spawned its own collection of wannabe contenders for the Fox News crown in Canada in the form of True North, The Rebel, Western Standard, and others. 

C-18 is intended to address the funding issue in part by in essence regulating the use of news articles to draw in eyeballs by Meta, Google and other internet companies, and saying “you use it, you need to compensate for it”.  In many ways this is little more than fundamentally regulating a portion of the “free market” which has gotten completely out of balance in an effort to shore up the existing structures so that we can facilitate rebuilding a functional news media landscape. 

To be clear, Meta’s business model on its social media platforms is fundamentally parasitic in the first place.  The reason that they can provide highly targeted advertising options is literally because they grab every bit of data they can from their users.  In other words, while you’re posting pictures of your vacation, night out on the town, or whatever, there’s a ton of data in those posts that they can extract and use to determine what target demographics you fit into.  It’s all statistics, but regardless of that it means that they are literally sucking back every piece of information that they can to provide your data as a product package to their advertisers. 

Facebook’s argument that they don’t “profit from news” is arguably false.  A big part of their algorithm is in fact driven by the various articles that people repost and comment on - it’s hard for it not to be.  People naturally see articles and decide “oh, hey, my friends are affected by this”, or “would be interested in it” - it’s natural human behaviour.  Along comes Facebook’s scraping algorithms, and presto all of the data ranging from keywords in the story to where you were when you posted it is picked up.  Of course they’re profiting from news media - all while not compensating them for their work. 

Their second argument is the old “but think of the exposure” canard that every artist has heard whenever some “enterprising” person wants to use their artwork without compensating them for it.  It’s almost criminal that they do this, and nobody should accept “exposure” as compensation for their work.

While a big chunk of my ire here is aimed at Meta, let’s not ignore Google.  Google came along and created its own news aggregator and called it Google News.  What is Google News?  Little more than an aggregator that republishes articles from other sources and uses its own algorithms to determine what you might be interested in.  Again, like Meta, it’s all about eyeballs, and measuring who reacts to what. They still make money off it by using that data to drive their advertising targeting algorithms. 

However, there’s a partisan political dimension to this dust-up.  Right smack in the middle of all of this is Rachel Curran - head of Facebook Canada’s Public Policy group.  Unsurprisingly, Ms. Curran just happens to have long links to the CPC, having been a policy advisor to Steven Harper (yeah - remember that guy?).  There’s no way that Meta’s hard line stance here isn’t being driven by partisan thinking.

C-18 is hardly a perfect solution to the problem we face.  We still need to learn how to deal with a media landscape dominated by partisan political interests and propaganda machines masquerading as news.  The only thing it really does is demand that republishing content from others should be done with compensation.  Indirect benefit is still benefit no matter how Meta and Google try to spin it. 

PS:  Meta's losing it's shit over C-18 ... but somehow isn't having a huge problem with the EU's Digital Services Act?  If that doesn't tell you something about the weight that Rachel Curran has both within Facebook Canada _AND_ the CPC, I don't know what will.