When Youth Don’t See the News
2024 Student Winner – Dana Cramer
The inability of young people to access vital information due to social media giants’ blocking Canadian news from their platforms has severe consequences for democracy and community safety.
In June 2023, while the Liberal government pushed Bill C-18, the Online News Act, through Parliament, Meta—Facebook’s parent company—made the contentious decision to pull Canadian news from its platforms and began experimenting with how that could be achieved. This move meant that Canadians would be unable to read Canadian news on Facebook and Instagram, plus a new channel, Threads, that would soon be released by the company as a challenger to Twitter/X. Slowly but surely, Meta began to test the blocking of viewing access to Canadian news organizations’ account pages on its platforms in Canada.
I remember when I first saw an image of a blocked Canadian news outlet, which was, ironically, circulated over social media. Meta told Canadians that they would no longer be able to see or post news on any of its platforms to avoid the provisions of the Online News Act, which received royal assent on June 22, 2023. Meta maintained that news was not key to its business model, so rather than negotiate compensation for news businesses for use of their content, it decided to just block news altogether.
A Brief Explanation of the Online News Act
Owing to the mass proliferation of social media platforms over the past decade, news outlets—specifically print news outlets—have struggled to keep pace in the competition for advertising revenues. Historically, newspapers’ primary business model was centred around advertising, with the news that was provided for readers acting as a “free lunch” in return for their occasional glance at the ads. With the rise of the data economy created by the internet and social media, advertisers shifted their marketing funds to online platforms, which could segment audiences to certain characteristics and demographic factors, allowing for a much more targeted message to induce potential customers. As advertisers moved away from print, newspaper owners looked for ways to financially stay afloat, which included laying off journalists and shuttering publications—specifically local and rural newspapers.
As a means to remedy these losses, the Liberal government put forward Bill C-18: the Online News Act. The purpose of the Act was to force extremely large digital companies—namely Google and Meta—to enter into good-faith bargaining for the remuneration of news links across their platforms and websites. If a news intermediary and either Google or Meta found themselves unable to come to a suitable remuneration agreement, the Act provided the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), Canada’s communications regulator, with powers to ensure that mediation and arbitration would occur in good faith, and an agreement could be made in a timely fashion.
Canada is not alone in searching for mechanisms to keep newspapers’ business models afloat in the 21st century’s digital economy. The “news crisis” has been felt around the world, with countries experimenting with remedies that have included news funds and, in 2021, Australia becoming the first country to implement a News Media Bargaining Code. Canada modelled the Online News Act after the Australian example, following Australia’s success in negotiating remuneration with Meta and Google—key beneficiaries of the data economy—amounting to a financial relief of over AU$200 million to the Australian news sector.
When Canada worked to become the second country to have news remuneration legislation, Meta and Google voiced their displeasure. Google negotiated with the federal government for an end-of-2023 agreement of $100 million annually, indexed to inflation, to be paid to news organizations, which was a far cry from the originally projected $234 million per year which the Online News Act was meant to supercharge into Canada’s news sector. Meta’s decision not to participate in news remuneration fragmented the internet in Canada (in its analysis of Canada’s Online News Act, the Internet Society referred to it as “splintering” the internet). This resulted in a consortium of Canadian news organizations filing an application with the Competition Bureau, arguing that Meta’s market power in social media made this an anti-competitive act, and that the American corporation ought to restore Canadian news to its platforms.
The Online News Act has a political argument which can be summarized as: Should media policy be used as a form of taxation policy? Wherever someone stands on this argument, one realization is clear: the audacity of Meta to fragment the internet in Canada as a means of evading Canada’s sovereign right to enact laws demonstrates the power that large technology companies have over the flow of information – power that can shift the political and democratic landscape.
The Impact on Youth’s Media Exposure
News exposure is linked to democratic participation. When citizens have access to local newspapers, they are more likely to vote in local elections and less likely to centre their political views solely on national party issues, focusing instead on the tenacity of their representatives at hand and the issues faced by their communities. News consumption differs across demographic factors, most acutely by age. Where older people tend to consult news sources directly, through newspaper subscriptions and traditional television viewing, younger generations—namely millennials and GenZ—are more likely to consume news through social media platforms. The most popular social media platforms are Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter/X and Pinterest, with Facebook and Instagram holding 73.4 and 57 per cent respectively, of Canadians subscribing to social media. Young people’s news consumption habits, therefore, become the battlegrounds of any splintering of the internet in Canada. And as the largest voting bloc, young Canadians between 18 and 34 have the potential to be the least informed about Canadian policy issues. Given that young Canadians are less likely to vote in elections for all levels of government, the reduction in news consumption can lead to election outcomes impacted by voters who are not fully informed, and politicians getting elected who might not make a concerted effort at representing the issues and values relevant to the largest segment of the Canadian population.
In addition to having less awareness of broader news stories in our country, youth are also beset with a second challenge resulting from Meta blocking Canadian news. As an article by Arfa Rana at CBC identified, Canadian campus newspapers were also blocked, thereby not allowing youth to engage with one another and circulate information directly related to their campus experience.
This article hit a personal note with me. In 2018, my undergraduate campus newspaper—The Gauntlet at the University of Calgary—broke a news story surrounding a student originally from Kamloops, British Columbia, who had been convicted in court for sexual interference, which is sexual assault of a minor. The story quickly received wide readership among students on my campus for one of its most frustrating parts: the student convicted of sexual interference would not have to serve his jail sentence until the summer, as the judge “wanted to accommodate [his] busy hockey and university schedule.” This was the evening of the Golden Globes, when Oprah Winfrey accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award and gave her powerful “Time’s Up” speech, with its call to action for feminist activists to “become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say the words ‘Me too’ again.” My friends and I were captivated by this moment, which felt like a profound shift in how the newfound fourth-wave women’s movement was expanding following 2017’s #MeToo movement and the first Women’s March after the Trump inauguration. After the awards show, we saw The Gauntlet article circulating on Facebook.
I had recently written an opinion piece for The Gauntlet expressing that perpetrators of sexual violence ought not to be described as “sexual predators,” because that equates women with prey and these vile and egregious acts with a hunting sport. This op-ed was published alongside the Kamloops sexual interference story, and both were widely circulated around Facebook and Instagram by my peers. Women at the University of Calgary demanded that the convicted student be expelled in order to ensure our campus community’s safety, and my friends and I soon found ourselves at the centre of a feminist movement at our university, as the story went viral with national and international coverage. Women at the university also demanded that its Code of Non-Academic Misconduct be changed and that more universities, workplaces and professional associations recognize sexual interference, in addition to sexual assault, within legal documents to bar the perpetrators of sexual violence from common spaces. I was filmed by Global News saying, “This is a movement. Time’s Up…the #MeToo movement, and the Women’s March a year ago. This is a movement that is carrying force.”
None of this would have come to fruition, however, without Canadian news being accessible and viewable on social media platforms.
When my friends and I began our Time’s Up call to action, we were met with a rain of aggressive Facebook messages containing rape and death threats. But in contrast to these droplets, a great lake of Canadian women and girls also reached out to us over this platform, identifying how The Gauntlet’s reporting, my op-ed and our feminist activism gave them hope. They described their own stories of sexual violence to me through private messages which fuelled my dedication to ensuring young women would be safe from the men who would hurt them. If judges like the one in Kamloops would not keep Canadian girls and women safe, my friends and I would use the media to ensure we would have the same rights to freedom and safety that every Canadian deserves and ought to expect.
News blocking is more than an economic issue for corporations and countries to contest through splintering the internet. The inability to access news has real consequences for groups whose stories must be told to ensure our democratic rights to protest, to free speech, and to vote for politicians who make platforms centred around keeping us safe. When youth consume news through social media, they are funnelled away from wider political discourse where their access is limited or fragmented. It is, therefore, imperative that news is available to youth to ensure our generation can make the local changes we need to reflect the world we want to live in.
Note: After this essay was written, Meta announced it would not renew the existing news deals with Australia, which are set to expire in 2024.