Facebook's recent blocking of news content in certain countries is now reportedly proven to be negatively affecting political discussions on the platform, as found by new studies. Some studies suggest that memes are now overtaking political discussions on the platform.
One of these nations is Canada, which has emerged as the focal point of Facebook's conflict with governments that have passed or are debating legislation compelling internet behemoths, mainly Google and Meta, the owners of the social media platform, to compensate media outlets for links to stories that appear on their platforms.
Facebook claims that news has little commercial value to its company, so it has restricted news sharing in Canada rather than charging for it.
(Photo : Barefoot Communications from Unsplash) Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and Threads users complain that they have been logged out of their accounts. The unexpected outage affected global users of the Meta-owned platforms.
Two unpublished studies cited by Reuters indicate that the barring of news links has caused significant and unsettling changes in the way Canadian Facebook users interact with political material.
Memes are taking the place of news in political organizations, according to Taylor Owen, one of the researchers on the undisclosed studies. According to the study's analysts, the platform's death of news and users' growing involvement with opinion and unverified content could stifle political conversation, especially during election years.
If Canberra tries to implement the 2021 content licensing law after Facebook said that it would not renew its agreements with Australian news publishers, it is expected to take a similar action. Before the law was passed, Facebook had banned news in Australia.
As a result of Meta's ruling, Canadians will now see a box that reads, "In response to Canadian government legislation, news content can't be shared," whenever someone posts a link to a news story.
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Unreliable Facebook News Surges
According to the Media Ecosystem Observatory, a McGill University and University of Toronto project, news items on Facebook that had received between 5 million and 8 million views from Canadians each day have vanished.
Reactions to image-based messages in Canadian political Facebook groups increased to match the prior engagement with news items, despite engagement with political influencer accounts like partisan commentators, academics, and media professionals staying constant.
According to a second NewsGuard analysis done for Reuters, in the ninety days following the ban, likes, comments, and shares of sources deemed "unreliable" increased to 6.9% in Canada from 2.2% in the ninety days prior.
This is particularly concerning, according to Gordon Crovitz, co-chief executive of New York-based NewsGuard, a fact-checking organization that rates websites for accuracy.
According to Crovitz, the shift coincided with a dramatic rise in the amount of AI-generated news websites disseminating misleading information and an increasing amount of phony photographs, videos, and audio, some of which were created by adversarial nations to influence elections.
Meta vs. the Online News Act
After Canada's Senate enacted the Online News Act in 2023, which requires digital companies to compensate media outlets for the items they post, Meta initially deleted all news content from Facebook and Instagram in that country.
Meta has made no secret of the fact that it is against the Online News Act. This measure was created by Canada in response to the decline in advertising revenue that news organizations have been facing over the last few years. Publishers must reform, according to a May 2023 statement from Nick Clegg, head of global affairs at Meta.
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