Studies reveal the political risks that arise when Facebook blocks news in the Americas

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Meta’s Decision to Block News Links in Canada Leads to Surge in Clicks for Right-Wing Pages

Since Meta blocked links to news in Canada last August to avoid paying fees to media companies, right-wing meme producer Jeff Ballingall says he has seen a surge in clicks for his Canada Proud Facebook page.

“Our numbers are growing and we’re reaching more and more people every day,” said Ballingall, who publishes up to 10 posts a day and has some 540,000 followers.

“Media is just going to get more tribal and more niche,” he added. “This is just igniting it further.”

The blocking of news links has led to profound and disturbing changes in the way Canadian Facebook users engage with information about politics, two unpublished studies shared with Reuters found.

“The news being talked about in political groups is being replaced by memes,” said Taylor Owen, founding director of McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, who worked on one of the studies.

The lack of news on the platform and increased user engagement with opinion and non-verified content has the potential to undermine political discourse, particularly in election years, the studies’ researchers say. Both Canada and Australia go to the polls in 2025.

Other jurisdictions including California and Britain are also considering legislation to force internet giants to pay for news content. Indonesia introduced a similar law this year.

In practice, Meta’s decision means that when someone makes a post with a link to a news article, Canadians will see a box with the message: “In response to Canadian government legislation, news content can’t be shared.”

Although engagement with political influencer accounts such as partisan commentators, academics, and media professionals was unchanged, reactions to image-based posts in Canadian political Facebook groups tripled to match the previous engagement with news posts, the study also found.

A Meta spokesperson said the research confirmed the company’s view that people still come “to Facebook and Instagram even without news on the platform.”

Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge called Meta’s blocking of news an “unfortunate and reckless choice” that had left “disinformation and misinformation to spread on their platform … during need-to-know situations like wildfires, emergencies, local elections, and other critical times”.

Facebook remains the most popular social media platform for current affairs content in Canada, where 51 percent obtained news on the platform in 2023, according to the Media Ecosystem Observatory.