More than 200 local news organizations that were previously active on social media primarily on Meta's Facebook are now largely inactive on social media, a new study found.
OTTAWA A grim report has found that news organizations in Canada have lost nearly half of their online engagement in the year since Meta launched its news ban for Canadian users of Facebook and Instagram.
A study, released Tuesday by McGill University and the University of Toronto's Media Ecosystem Observatory, found that Canadian news outlets lost 85 per cent of their engagement - which includes metrics like comments and post shares on both social media platforms. (The remaining 15 per cent can be attributed to posts slipping through the ban and people using VPNs.) But because news businesses have largely been unable to compensate for that loss on other platforms, news organizations have seen a 42.6 per cent drop overall in the public's engagement with their content on social media.
Researchers say that decline amounts to approximately II million fewer views per day on Facebook and Instagram combined, meaning Canadians are also encountering far fewer sources of legitimate news.
"This report paints a pretty bleak picture, I would say," said Aengus Bridgman, the director of the Media Ecosystem Observatory and an assistant professor at the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University.
"As a society that cares about the truth and cares about having a population that's informed to ensure better democratic outcomes and to hold politicians to account, this is extremely bad news."
Outsized effect on small outlets
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