What Meta’s and Google’s news blocking means for indie media, and for you

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Jordan Heath Rawlings Sometimes it’s really good to be a podcast and sometimes it’s really bad to be a digital print publication. It said it would, and now it’s pulling the trigger meta parent company to Facebook and Instagram has begun blocking news content to Canadians. A process it says, will take weeks, Whatever side you take politically in the debate over Bill C 18, you should be able to admit that Canadians having no access to news on two of the biggest digital platforms in the world is not ideal. This is a bad situation for everyone from the country’s biggest media brands to the government, to the average Canadian wanting to know what’s going on, but it’s not equally bad for everyone. For instance, I know because I see our numbers that almost none of you come to us through Google or Meta You listen to us as, you know, wherever you get your podcasts, and that’s not gonna change. But imagine being a small digital publication, maybe one that’s just starting out, and maybe you have a great niche, be it topical or local or political. How do you find your readers or subscribers, or let’s take the other side of the coin and imagine being an older, less digitally savvy Canadian who doesn’t know the ins in the outs of the web, but who does need information on, say, extreme weather or where to vote in the election, or something that might not rise to the level of true emergency, but really matters to them or their family or their neighbourhood. Where do you go for that? And if you can’t find that information from reliable sources on Facebook or Instagram or Google, what do you find in its place? I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is . Sarah Krichel is the social media manager for the Tyee, which is an independent publication based on the West Coast. Hello, Sarah.

Sarah Krichel Hi Jordan. How are you?

Jordan Heath Rawlings I’m doing great. Thanks for joining us today.

Sarah Krichel Thank you.

Jordan Heath Rawlings When we talk about what’s going on tell me a little bit about, you know, what it’s like trying to keep up with how quickly things seem to be shifting in the social media world here. I mean, you can go back to when Elon Musk purchased Twitter and now brands have to decide what to do on that platform at the same time. There’s now Threads and Blue Sky and Mastodon, I’m sure I’m forgetting, like six more. And you’re also dealing with meta and Google and what they’re threatening to do. Like how confusing is it now on a day-to-day basis?

Sarah Krichel There’s a, there’s a lot of ways you can go about these things. You know, you can jump on a new platform when it comes up and when you see that it’s popular like Threads or Mastodon kind of had their moment in the sun and we, we tried those things to various degrees, but it is a lot of decision making and, and triaging and prioritising what we’re gonna pour our resources into. Because as a reader supported publication, we only have so much of those to pull out of and I’m just one person. So for example, with social media platforms, you know, Mastodon was, is a good example of one that kind of, like I said, had its moment in the sun mm-hmm. , and we kind of took a moment to think about, you know, whether this is an endeavour worth taking on, whether it’s a worth the extra resources to not only throw some posts up onto our profile once it’s built, because ultimately that just takes a few seconds, right. We’re using a lot of similar copy. There are tweaks that need to be done, but overall the resources to try a new social platform aren’t too, too overwhelming. I, I kind of, I’m a pro at this point, sure. But we did want to kind of make sure there’s a long-term strategy there of ensuring that, okay, are we building an audience? Are they engaging, are we actually getting traffic from these platforms? That sort of thing. So it isn’t just a one and done, it’s kind of a longer term commitment to see if there’s an audience and a relationship worth building there. So yeah, to answer your question, it we definitely take a slower approach to this fast moving social media landscape.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Let’s talk about the places where you do have substantial audiences and, you know, you’ve built a relationship and that relationship is changing. We’ve covered C 18 on the show before, but maybe just quickly if you could kind of give us a, a quick overview of, of what the bill is and, you know, what’s the intent behind it?

Sarah Krichel Yeah, so Bill C-18 basically seeks to have major tech companies strike private deals with news outlets, Canadian news outlets in order to kind of help the journalism industry. And the Canadian government has had a long history of supporting the journalism industry through various initiatives and policies that have been, you know, successful in supporting journalists jobs, you know, every newsroom that has even one more reporter or editor that makes a colossal difference to the stories that get told and to the perspectives that are included in the newsrooms. So, you know, the underlying idea here is great, but the bill itself was lobbied for by News Media Canada, which is a coalition of publications like Tor Star Post Media the Globe & Mail among others and the Tyee and other, other smaller independent outlets are not part of this coalition. So the bill itself kind of included ideas and, and policies that would prop up those bigger outlets and that wouldn’t, that would leave space to exclude smaller independent outlets. So that was kind of one of the issues with the bill start with. And then after that, independent media such as the Tyee among many others that are part of this coalition called Independent Online News publishers of Canada, were kind of campaigning for these amendments to the bill so that it would be more transparent, it would have a more kind of equal distribution of wealth to these outlets. They also wanted to make sure there was like proper support for journalists and for freelancers. They wanted to make sure that startups were included, because famously, if you start a news magazine, you’re not gonna be up and running and flowing for at least a little while. Right. It might take a couple of years to get there. So yeah, we kind of campaigned for these amendments, but ultimately it, the, the Amendments didn’t see the light of day, unfortunately,

Jordan Heath Rawlings But the bill passed and then what happened?

Sarah Krichel That’s right. The bill passed on June 22nd and after that, I mean, it, it kind of wasn’t a surprise if you were paying attention. A lot of publications who’ve been reporting on Bill C-18 team for a long time, the small outlets that knew they would be affected by this, they knew that Meta Facebook and Instagram’s parent company and Google were threatening to pull Canadian news altogether from these platforms, should the bill go through. And it did. And they weren’t exactly bluffing . Google was actually testing out banning Canadian news on its platform back in like February. It was kind of like a shorter test, but they said that they do intend to block news once the bill goes into effect at the end of the year, whereas Meta has been going ahead with its test of blocking Canadian news for up to 5% of its users that included the Tyee. So, you know, one Tuesday morning I woke up to check out our Instagram, check out our various social media feeds, and suddenly half of our posts had disappeared. I was refreshing and refreshing, not sure what was going on, and suddenly all of them were gone and it said that infamous screenshot, now people in Canada can’t see your content. So I knew that this was now going to be a potentially long-term impact on, on, on my job, on my day-to-day and on Canadian media in general. So just this week meta announced that they are rolling out this permanent official ban for both Canadian news outlets and Canadian users. So your individual personal feeds, you will no longer see Canadian news and Canadian news outlets won’t be able to post either. So anybody who kind of was able to slip through the crevices and see some news still that that’s, I don’t think that’s gonna happen anymore. And that rollout is expected to happen in the next few weeks. So that’s where we’re at right now.

Jordan Heath Rawlings For a publication like yourself, I know a lot of people, especially younger people who aren’t quite familiar with it, will sort of dismiss Facebook, but how important are Facebook and Instagram to you guys finding readers and getting your content to people who you’re hoping, I guess, will eventually subscribe and support you?

Sarah Krichel Yeah, that’s a great question. Well, Meta and Google for the Tyee the way our, our kind of business model, the way our strategy works is that meta Google help with something called discoverability. So we have existed for 20 years now. We’re coming up on our 20th anniversary, which is amazing and really fun. But because we’ve had that kind of longer term success as a digital only magazine, as a news magazine, we’ve kind of built this loyal readership. And so Meta and Google have served mostly as, like I said, discoverability tools or even there’s, there’s definitely a pool of people who regularly like to read the Tai from social media platforms. I, I would say I’m one of those people in terms of the other publications that I read, and I think a lot of young people are, but because we have that loyal readership and that reader supported base, we’re gonna be okay. Our concern is definitely for the smaller outlets, anybody who wants to start up their own Canadian news media outlet, and what is the discoverability strategy there? That playbook has been completely thrown out the window. The other kind of question I have is, is this larger question like I was talking about earlier, about meeting readers where they’re at, respecting the way that readers, especially young people, consume the news today, communicate with each other today, make life decisions. Today they do a lot of this through social media, so I was always kind of an advocate of saying, you know, sure, maybe users on Instagram don’t necessarily leave the app once they read, you know, this beautiful photojournalism post we put together with a long caption explaining the story so you get all the information you could possibly need. Maybe that’s not always translating into traffic that we would love to have, but I’ve always been a proponent of let’s just meet them where they’re at. Let’s deliver what the people want and in the ways that they consume the news, the same question is applied to TikTok, right? TikTok is a very questionable app for many reasons, and I think most, most people know that. But you know, that’s where the mainstream conversation is right now for a lot of young people. That’s how, you know, a story has gotten big. If you see it on your for you page on TikTok news content itself is already pretty, you know, slim on TikTok. So if you’re seeing a news story there, that’s when you know it’s part of the bigger conversation. So it is highlighting a bigger question of where we’re building this relationship with our audience as well as who is it that we’ve been relying on this whole time to have that very valuable relationship. And the answer is that we’ve been relying on Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and et cetera.

Jordan Heath Rawlings What can you do and what can’t you do to communicate with your audience on these platforms? Now, is the Taiz account, you know, on, on meta platforms just totally shut down? I know you can’t post links or share news, but could you say encourage your readers to visit the website and get it directly, or subscribe to your newsletter? Or even just tell them, you know, Hey, we’re not on here anymore. Bye, see ya. Like, what, what limits do you have?

Sarah Krichel Yeah, the latter is definitely what happened to us. like I mentioned on, on that, you know, fateful Tuesday when I no longer had access, I had managed to post one final action call to, to bookmark our homepage, to subscribe to our newsletter, to follow us on our other social media platforms if they didn’t already. And then next thing I knew, I can’t post on the regular feed, of course you can’t post stories anymore and we can’t post reels anymore. So all of those things were thrown out the window and I didn’t even get a chance to, you know, pin the post that reads where, where else readers can find us. So that it stays at the top of our feed. Luckily, that was one of the last things we posted, . But yeah, basically the way it works is we still have access to our Instagram feed. We don’t have access to our profile or to posting.

Jordan Heath Rawlings So you can see things that you, people you follow are posting, but that’s about it.

Sarah Krichel That’s right. And there are a couple of loopholes actually.

Jordan Heath Rawlings That was gonna be my next question. How are you and other outlets trying to get around this?

Sarah Krichel Well, The Breach smartly uses a VPN, which allows you to appear that you are in another country. So that means that using a VPN, they do not appear as a Canadian news outlet anymore, so they’re able to make news posts. Hmm. But now that Meta has announced that they are going ahead with this permanent Canada wide ban, like I mentioned, I don’t think that Canadian users will even be able to see that content anymore because from my experience so far, and from what I’ve gathered in the vague updates that Meta provides, it, it does kind of operate like a shadow ban. So both Canadian news outlets can’t post. But also as a user myself, I can’t see posts.

Jordan Heath Rawlings What about your readers who already subscribe or support the Tyee or just Canadian news readers in general? What will they see? Will they see a feed that’s just full of, you know, the title you mentioned with, you cannot see this because Canada News ban? Or will those posts just disappear entirely from those feeds and they’ll never know there was anything to see?

Sarah Krichel Yeah, it’s gonna be, I think just a blackout, huh. I think that those posts are gonna disappear entirely if they do manage to get posted at all. And social media users on those platforms will only see the content that comes from non news providers or is non-new related whatsoever. Because I think even if you post a news link as a user yourself, that will be shadow banned too.nSo it will be a very silent and kind of sinister blackout.

Jordan Heath Rawlings from a user’s point of view, what would you have them do? Obviously you mentioned subscribe to the Tyee directly, but I’m not even talking about just the Tyee here. You know I subscribe to a number of publications that I know and trust and can get their newsletters or go to their website. But what if I want to know the news and what’s happening right now, and as an Ontario, you know, maybe I wanna know more about the Nova Scotia flood or the sex assault allegations at the Calgary Stampede. That’s where I’d normally turn to Google. How is this gonna impact just regular Canadians who are curious?

Sarah Krichel Absolutely. I think that the tests haven’t gone for long enough for us to see the true effects of Canadians access or inaccess rather to news. And the same thing with the Australia News media bargaining code, which wasn’t in effect for long enough, or their news band wasn’t in effect for long enough to see what the long-term effects of that would be. Hmm. So it is really terrifying in that sense. If you wanna Google a story that’s going on, not only will you not know what’s going on, but you won’t know that you don’t know. Yeah. Once the long-term effects are happening, there’s questions I think I ask myself as a journalist, but also just as an individual person in Canada who is interested in the news and also has, you know, a a a vested interest and reason to, to wanna know what’s going on with, you know, wildfire issues going on, climate change, et cetera, how are we as a culture gonna change our ideas of where you find news? And in my report for the Tyee on, you know, Canadian newsrooms react to medicine, Google’s threats to block news, I spoke to a couple of journalists from Canadaland, the News Media Watchdog podcast, and a couple of them brought up really great points that, you know, this is ultimately in the long term, if it goes on the way, it is going to be a sort of battle for what does news look like in Canada. It’s a cultural issue and Annette, their managing editor, mentioned that, you know, she remembers when she was younger and in Nigeria, she, her news to her would be talking in her living room with relatives about what’s going on in the world and arguing about politics. And that’s how she got her news. Does news become long form informal YouTube videos or does it become grassroots organising? What is news going to look like? And of course, the threat there is also disinformation and, you know, unverified sources or uncredible sources being able to spread their stories and disinformation and people have kind of no way of knowing that this isn’t reliable information. So it, there’s a lot of questions in the air.

Jordan Heath Rawlings What could still change with regards to this? I know Meta made the announcement yesterday, as you mentioned. I don’t think Google has implemented it fully yet. I also know that there was a cabinet shuffle a week ago in Ottawa. Like how fluid is what the final version of these guidelines will actually look like and could either side still back down.

Sarah Krichel I think either side can back down whether they will is another question. You know, you mentioned the cabinet shuffle. So Pascale St-Onge is now the heritage minister taking over for Pablo Rodriguez, and she was previously in charge of Hockey Canada and she cut funding during the Hockey Canada sexual assault scandal and kind of forced change in that way. So I’m not sure if, you know, they have this idea that St-Onge will take this same kind of approach to this issues ongoing issue in saga with big tech. But you know, I, I think to me it says that the strategy remains the same, that they’re gonna stand their ground. That’s what they’ve been saying. But, you know, Canada did announce some updates and regulations to the bill earlier last month that said that there would be a cap to how much news outlets could receive it outlined more limitations to who qualifies as an outlet, including indigenous news outlets or small community news outlets. So there is kind of a wavering on the Canadian government’s end. And I know that Google still appears to be in negotiation around the whole bill, but Meta does not seem to be caving by putting in their permanent and official news ban before the law even goes into effect. I think that’s kind of them sending a message.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Sarah, thank you for this. a really interesting perspective and I guess good luck over the next little while. p> Sarah Krichel Thanks Jordan. I think we’re all gonna need it. ,

Jordan Heath Rawlings Sarah Krichel writing for the Tyee, where she runs, I guess, fewer social media accounts than she used to, and that was . You can find us. Oh yeah. Wherever you get your podcasts, you can give us feedback. If you wanna reach out, we’re on Twitter at fpn. You can find us via email hello at podcast.ca and you can call us and leave us a message 4 1 6 9 3 5 5 9 3 5. I’m really interested in hearing what you folks think about Bill ca 18. Is this the government’s fault? Is it those greedy tech companies, or do you just not care? And that’s actually probably the most worrisome outcome for me. I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. Thanks for listening. We’ll talk tomorrow.