Federal Government has announced that they will stop advertising on Meta platforms amid Bill C-18 chaos. The move came in response to Meta’s decision to remove news content for Canadians from its platform. While in talks with the government about the issue, Google has also hinted towards removing news content from its search console and news platforms. In response, Canada’s public broadcaster CBC has also announced that they will be pausing their advertisements on the Meta platform.
Dr. Anabel Quan is a professor at Western University in sociology, information and media studies and she tells more about what Bill C-18 is. She says, “Bill C-18 is about fair compensation. So it’s the idea that for a very long time, social media have been, sharing and using content produced by journalists, and news corporations without really compensating them for their labour, or for the use of that content. So at the heart of Bill C- 18 is the idea that the Government would negotiate a fair deal with the corporations, the news corporations that would provide some kind of exchange, some kind of pay-per-link use, so that there is a fair compensation for the content that is being used.”
According to her, removing news from social media as well as search consoles will have a massive impact on the Canadian audience. She says “The most central impact will be on the ability to access news. This will massively reduce our ability to access news. And I think the problem here is that it won’t affect foreign news, so we can continue to access, let’s say content by the BBC or any of the American outlets. But what will happen is that it will suppress. So there’s the use of algorithms specifically to suppress content that comes from Canada. And because of the use of algorithms as a user, you’re not really aware of Canadian news being suppressed. So you may not even be aware that you are not able to kind of access that kind of content.”
Brenda Lee / CC
Dr. Quan hopes that corporations and the Canadian government can find a middle ground otherwise it can make Canadians’ access to reliable information harder. According to her, whatever the outcome is, it will affect the Canadian news industry for sure.
“I think there’s certainly a concern, on the part of Canadians in terms of their ability to access reliable sources. We have already seen, during a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, that there’s a lot of social media filled with opinion potentially even conspiracy theories. So I do worry about a tilt. What is happening with the balance of reliable sources versus, a lot of this, miss and disinformation? So to me, I think a central piece of this is just how will this affect overall. The kind of information, the kind of sources that Canadians can access is something we certainly need to keep an eye on,” says Dr. Anabel Quan.
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