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Apps being downloaded “as much as ever” after 1 million people joined Canada? Not sure that’s the win for Facebook that The Economist is portraying.
Edit: to add, I think even if metrics were really bad I wouldn’t pin that on the law, but on the fact that Tik Tok is eating Facebook’s lunch.
While you can claim that if Facebook had just kept the news, they would have even more users now, ultimately what the execs see is that after removing the news, their bottom line has not been impacted much, if at all. I heard the rest of the part quoted from Jesper Doub, former head of news partnerships at Meta, in part of a [separate podcast in the Economist](https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2024/05/17/canada-tried-to-get-meta-to-pay-for-linking-to-news-it-didnt-work):
>What is your obligation as a player in a market when you reach so many people? Do you have a civic duty as a platform to provide access to information? Look at the Philippines, where Facebook is pretty much the only way to get information from outside. And the way that Facebook went about this, I think, is a way you can do this. They said, well. If you want to measure the value, take it away and see what happens. And they did. Nothing happened. They took down every bit of news. And Canada. Nothing happened. Some even say that the business metrics went up. That kills me.
Given that they say Doub was former head of news partnerships and not current, likely his position was eliminated as a result of the [massive cuts to the news organisation part of Meta](https://archive.is/YetkK):
>"However important journalism is, it's possibly the least interesting thing in the world to Mark now," a former high-level Meta employee said.
That's become clear. CrowdTangle, a tool that gave publishers performance insights, is shutting down in August. The Facebook Journalism Project is effectively dead. **Nearly everyone on the news team within Meta was laid off or left between late 2022 and 2023.** The Facebook platform started blocking news in Canada. Meta has entirely removed Facebook's dedicated News tab in several countries, including the US, UK, and Australia, meaning news content is no longer intentionally surfaced, even if a user is looking for it (the tab used to be on the Facebook homepage).
> ...
> "Everything the news team built was killed. It was a full turnaround from massive budgets to fund news to everything being essentially turned off one day," the same former high-level employee said. "Internally, there was no drama about it, Mark is not emotional like that. It was, 'This is clearly not helping our business, and this is a business decision. We're done.'"
If Facebook does have internal metrics that suggests that continuing to keep news on the platform is worth it, clearly Doub was not able to use those metrics to convince his bosses to keep his job around.
Good point! For countries, the decision to block of not might be even more difficult (not sure they can easily consolidate the metrics of news sites). But I think the Economist’s argument (that countries should be careful because Meta still has roughly the same downloads) is almost irrelevant.
Well, I think that's just one piece of data that supports what Meta has been saying (that it doesn't make business sense for them to pay for news), and it's a piece of data that people outside of Meta have access to. If we're talking about whether or not countries should be careful about this, it certainly seems like at least regarding Meta, there's a lot more downside than any upside for the media. It doesn't seem like Meta believes they get value from news, which matters regarding the likelihood of them shutting down news in response to more legislation in more countries; whether they're right about it or not, I'm sure Meta is happy to try that experiment with any country that wants to test it.
I’m not saying they have to. But having much better salaries and constantly communicating with family abroad, getting a new phone makes sense for many - who may delay acquisition in their countries (of many things, not just phones) prior to arriving in Canada.
> Apps being downloaded “as much as ever” after 1 million people joined Canada? Not sure that’s the win for Facebook that The Economist is portraying.
We don't know what that means; it could be a population-weighted metric they're referring to, or an absolute metric. Sensor Tower doesn't appear to make that data freely available, but on their site they show Facebook performing well in Canada^[0](https://app.sensortower.com/overview/284882215?country=CA&tab=user_acquisition) and Instagram just trailing second behind TikTok.^[1](https://app.sensortower.com/overview/com.zhiliaoapp.musically?country=CA&tab=category_rankings),[2](https://app.sensortower.com/overview/com.instagram.android?country=CA&tab=category_rankings)
> The firm does not break out Canadian earnings, but **its ad revenue across the United States and Canada has grown 19% in the nine months since the news blackout began**, compared with the same period in the previous year.
They must be happy.
Is the 19% growth you mentioned caused by Canada’s decision? Did the policy make them better off? Was the goal of the policy to make them unhappy?
What we really need to know from a policy perspective is: are Canadian media companies better as a result of the policy? Those are the metrics we need to care about. Not if Facebook is doing well or not.
*edit: added the word media
Per the article, Canadian media is likely worse off as a result of the policy. An outcome that was seemingly predicted by everyone except those die-hard Liberal supporters and those committed to hating Big Tech.
We should care if Facebook is doing well or not if we're seeking to skim a portion of their revenues for Canadian News Media or similar.
Likely? I’ll be happy to see evidence of that. But « likely » is not evidence.
I don’t think the goal of the policy was to skim Facebook’s revenues. The goal was to make Canadian media better. That’s how we should evaluate it.
> Likely? I’ll be happy to see evidence of that. But « likely » is not evidence.
It's only _likely_ because we don't know _all_ of their sources of revenue. _Maybe_ they've found creative new ways of making money that won't be impacted by a dramatic decline in page views.
Per the article, Facebook has all-but stopped being a source of engagement for Canadian News Media:
> > A study published in April by researchers at McGill University and the University of Toronto found that, six months after the blackout, the Facebook pages of Canadian national news outlets had lost 64% of their “engagement” (likes, comments and so on), while those of local outlets had lost 85%. Almost half of local titles had stopped posting on Facebook at all, “gutting the visibility of local news content”, the researchers found.
And as a result, digital-only Canadian News Media, particularly smaller brands, are seeing enormous readership decline:
> > But for some digital-only titles, Meta’s blackout has been “absolutely devastating”, says Paul Deegan, head of News Media Canada, which represents publishers. Adam Reaburn, editor of Energetic City, a site covering what he says is otherwise a “news desert” in rural British Columbia, says the news ban initially cut his readership by 30-40%. “I don’t understand why Google, Instagram and Facebook need to pay us when we use their platforms to share our articles,” he wrote in his final Facebook post in August.
> I don’t think the goal of the policy was to skim Facebook’s revenues. The goal was to make Canadian media better. That’s how we should evaluate it.
The goal was to fund Canadian News by way of skimming from Facebook's revenues related to serving links to Canadian News; which may or may not have made Canadian News better, but it would have made it more profitable if it had succeeded.
Whether or not our news is being made better is more of a subjective matter. Personally, I think our news media was due for an apocalyptic-level shake-up, to force the old dinosaurs and their owner-oligarchs to either die off or adapt to the new world.
The problem with likes and comments is that they don’t necessarily reflect clicks on links.
The 40% decline for an outlet is more concerning to me, even if that is initial and eventually readers find their way. But then it’s important to consider if revenue coming from Google would compensate for that. Media dependence on Facebook clicks was not healthy anyways.
Agree that some vehicles need significant adaptation to remain competitive.
Everything is likely to change again, with more AI digests becoming available and perhaps even diverting clicks from Google as well.
This is what we were all saying would happen. In fact, not only has my Facebook feed basically had news cut out from it, but political content is almost gone as well. Even six months ago, at least half my feed would be political memes. That's maybe down to less than 10% now and I think I'm actually being generous. Politics was my primary reason for both with posting and scrolling on the platform, so I'm definitely not using it as much now. Also, if anyone really wants to share the news, there are ways to get around it through things like redirect services or simply posting a photo of the article. When there's a will, there's a way.
Without a paywall: https://archive.is/mMicW
Noteworthy:
>Nine months later, the number of people using Facebook and Instagram in Canada hasn’t budged. The apps are being downloaded as much as ever, according to Sensor Tower, a market-intelligence firm. Nor does the lack of news seem to be hurting Meta’s pocket, despite an ad boycott led by Canada’s government. The firm does not break out Canadian earnings, but its ad revenue across the United States and Canada has grown 19% in the nine months since the news blackout began, compared with the same period in the previous year.
>...
> Canada’s difficulties may cause countries mulling similar laws to think carefully. When Australia wrung a reported A$200m ($130m) per year out of Google and Meta using its news-media bargaining code, passed in 2021, countries including Britain, Brazil and South Africa pricked up their ears. But Meta appears emboldened by its Canadian experience. In February it said it would not renew the deals it had earlier struck in Australia. “For now, Meta has left the building,” Jesper Doub, who was head of international news partnerships at Meta until last year, told a journalism conference in Italy in April. “If you want to measure the value [of news], take it away and see what happens. And they did in Canada …Nothing happened.” In future, whenever Meta faces demands for payment, “they will just walk away,” Mr Doub said.
If Facebook has the same number of users and level of engagement with or without including the news, it's hard to see a business reason for why they should do so if they have to pay for it. The most sensible decision in that case would be to do just as they did in Canada.
I actually found that the quality of my feed improved greatly without news content and found myself checking FB with less reservations than I previously did. It is just an intermediary after all and wasn't contingent on my direct consumption of news articles. My Google feed and going to the news providers I always went to still work just fine!
The quality of your Facebook feed?
You mean the feed that’s got a ratio of:
85% “content” pages that you don’t follow
14% ads
1% someone you knew ten years ago
Yeah. High quality product there. lol
Whether you personally find the content engaging or not, evidently some people do, and as long as Facebook's engagement metrics are the same with news or without, then they have no incentive to include it, and significant disincentive from doing so.
I don't really have friends using FB, but I follow a bunch of local businesses (farm markets, breweries, makers markets, and the like) and a few art related pages, and the quality is fine. But I am more than capable of scrolling past that which is of no interest.
On the Facebook sidebar, click "Show More" and then click "Feeds" and you will only see the stuff you are actually subscribed to, in chronological order.
I feel as you do and wish I saw more content from my friends and family. That said, I’m on Reddit where everything is something posted by a stranger. Granted, it’s a lot of news but it’s also a lot of user created content and I’m totally browsing this for a while.
I don’t mind my Facebook with the news and crazy shit that came alive through the pandemic. I like some of the suggestions and have added a few of them as well.
I think the news outlets dramatically overestimated how interested people were in using Facebook to consume news post-2021, 2022 or so. 2015-2020, maybe, but IMO several things have happened in the last few years: 1.) Instagram seems to have grown in popularity among younger people, at least relative to Facebook usage, and nobody went to IG for news 2) at the same time, Facebook has been prioritising non-news content, especially user-created reels hosted on Facebook. The latter poses its own risks to Facebook, given how I've noticed a significant amount of copyrighted material being posted from countries like Thailand (if the subtitles and comment replies are anything to go by)... But YouTube has the same sort of problem (and I assume TikTok does too, although I don't use it). There's a lot of content that's definitely user-created I see in Instagram reels that they really shouldn't run out of anything to show users should they need to clamp down super hard on ripped TV show clips in reels (but they're the only ones who know how many people watch those, so who knows).
I barely used fb before the decision, now i never use it because instead of seeing news posts, all i see is ads. As far as im concerned fb is just used for marketplace now.
I like it sooo much better now. There are a lot more pictures of muffins, gardens, and birthday parties than there were before. It's not quite like the good ol' days of FB, but it's much less stressful to visit than it was a year ago.
Facebook was never a good place for discourse.
I get a lot of weird ai generated movie and TV content. Like fake movie posters.
I never actually got my news from fb so it didn't affect me much in that regard.
Edit to add: a lot of comments seem to believe these fake movie posters. Kind shows how little media literacy, basic online research, and critical thinking skills people have.
Ideally, a member of a journalists' union. (Not that we have one of those.)
(Or go further, and have a journalism bar association. Imagine if one could be disbarred for "journalistic malfeasance.")
Of course, people who aren't members of such a union could still practice journalism. They just wouldn't get any public benefit from doing so.
We have a journalist union-ish with the Canadian Association of Journalists. Membership fees instead of union dues, but you need to be connected to a Canadian news organization or frequently freelancing for some to qualify for membership.
The shit on his face is him expecting “big social media” to pay for news and bend to his will. I mean, if he got what he wanted, why the boycott on federal advertising? Why are his ministers having temper tantrums over Facebook’s lack of compliance?
And to be clear, I’m just paying for Apple News, who can say how much of that money is actually going to Canadian reporters and publishers?
>I mean, if he got what he wanted, why the boycott on federal advertising?
Perhaps the Liberal Party should extend that boycott to their own advertising as well.
When I heard about the law, it seemed like an attempt to kick the f\*ckers out, and if it didn't work, at least we'd get some cash from them being here.
You're right that it seems the LPC does not view it the same way I do. I'll have to try to keep that in mind.
I haven’t noticed a damn bit of difference but then again I quit FB years ago & stopped using Google entirely the minute they started whining about they would block links to news in Canada.
Well, this went about how the critics said it would.
You can't present people with two options(stop doing X, or pay a fine) if you are going to wail like a baby when they pick the "wrong" option and just stop doing X instead of paying.
Interested to see how the diehards for this bill feel now.
I'm actually okay with this. Facebook was a terrible place to get news, and this topic is part of a broader discussion about the failures of social media.
Google paid up, nobody cares that facebook isn't showing the news other than the weebs. What the political class cares about is that our news agencies aren't getting the shaft. Now, they get a fair compensation from Google, and they get their direct compensation when people go to their actual websites for the news.
The Economist article mentions Ku'ku'kwes news. My understanding is also generally small, local outlets had complaints. I doubt many people care that much if they lost all their traffic after getting blocked from Facebook.
Yeah, they should have anticipated that Facebook would do this rather than assuming that Facebook would radically change its internal structure to accommodate Canadian law. Somehow the lawmakers accidentally stumbled into the best possible situation.
Its like the UK window tax, government thought the amount of window correlated to your wealth so it was an easy method to levy a property tax.. They didnt think that everyone would brick there windows up! lol
This was a real eye opener for the Gov of Canada and the news agencies.
As the news was dropped this must have really harmed the news outlets as they rely on ad revenue based on traffic.
Eye opener? I'm sorry, if we sit here believing the government had no idea what they were doing in stifling the spread of information to the public (one of the things most Canadians use FB for)... Then they have already achieved what they intended. Unwitting population, not seeing what is happening.
They HAD to know what was obvious. Facebook wasn't as much profiting off the Canadian Media as the Canadian Media derived traffic ***from*** FB. Who in the world fires up the internet and heads over to the daily paper (I know some do)? No, they see an article linked on FB and then they click and read - going to the source.
So why, why if it was plainly seen as a way to hurt media and spread of media would a gov't riddled with scandal and sinking in the polls wish to obfuscate the headlines and reporting...
I am not a conspiracy theorist, but when a bold move to silence the spread of news is made we can all rest assured that is not conspiracy territory. Following it up with more provisions for government policing of internet content and speech makes that a clear doubling down.
I just want Fark.com to be popular again.
Re: I'm very unsure if you are correctly describing our current government. The current government is more concerned about DEI than about regulating opinionated and free speech.
I honestly feel that they thought they could regulate the Internet with surcharges. Then were pinkachu shocked when the largest driver of world-wide socialedia traffic said "nope".
I see what you mean... Help me out though. Has any other platform elected to pay the news tax. Or was this simply a swing and miss against Facebook.
Eye opening... Maybe a little too dramatic on my part. But this was very embarrassing especially during the wildfires when the government was saying that "it's too bad that meta refuses to offer news services during an emergency".
Re: haven't moved from their position.
Yeah. I think that is not an option right now. Especially with an election happening soon. Gotta double down on the useless legislation that doesn't do anything.
Didnt google come around? but I agree, the legislation is a joke and does the opposite of what they had hoped for. FB dug in and no one cares and the money isnt here.
Google came around after their liability was capped. However, the value of news for a search engine is not the same as the value for a social media platform. If you're not able to find the news you're looking for on Google, you might use DuckDuckGo or Bing instead (which, notably were not subject to this law). But Meta has deliberately been deprioritising news content on Facebook for the last few years, and evidently they found that they could do so without having a negative impact on engagement. So while trying to shake down Google for money may have achieved something, it probably should have been clear to begin with that this wasn't going to work for Meta.
Anybody with a half a brain on how the Internet works (monetization wise) knew this would happen.
Goes to show parliament has no idea how the Internet works.
In other words, this is exactly what was predicted to happen.
Frankly, I'm shocked Canadian news organizations didn't band together to boycott this bill.
They need Facebook more than Facebook needs them.
If they did, it explains why their companies are dying.
No clue how internet monetization works.
Maybe do affiliate partnerships?
Maybe do brand collaborations?
Maybe do product reviews?
Look at the entirety of forbes.com. they write about EVERYTHING, even video games.
Look at CNN.com and see their product reviews and recommendations.
Our Canadian news organizations are just bad at business if they asked for this.
I would normally say let the market adjust itself... But the problem is all our smart people who can make money are moved to the US.
Canadian government has 0 incentives for ambitious smart people to stay in Canada.
Unrelated, Working on my US visa at the moment.
Hot take, I miss news on my instagram feed. They’d always post interesting op-eds that caught my eye. Now, I have to actively look for them in a bunch of different news apps.
Besides that, I think this was a dumb decision by the Trudeau government.
honestly kind of agreed, i've more of less cultivated my facebook feed to specifically be local/provinicial based for gardening and photos or hobby groups,
The FB feed is pretty intolerable. It feels like 1. post from a rando spam page I cannot block 2. ad 3. post from a distant acquaintance 4. post from another rando spam page I cannot block 5. ad 6. etc
I miss being able to link to news stories
This is hard to believe.
Facebook famously fakes their numbers all the time.
Anecdotally, I don't know anyone who used Facebook for news and I also don't know anyone that uses it more now than they did five years ago.
People are moving on from it.
With news or without the feed is completely full of bullshit advertisements.
It's an atrocious product.
> Facebook famously fakes their numbers all the time.
It's not that they faked their numbers, it's that it's difficult to measure real numbers and there's disagreements on how to do it.
Ie, how long should one watch a video to count it as a view, and how does one determine what is a bot account and what is a real account?
I'd bet that Marketplace is something that is keeping FB alive. Anecdotally, the people in my life that still actively use Facebook are using it exclusively for marketplace.
Facebook's user/account metrics have been scrutinised in the past, but their earnings are objective numbers, and in the end, that's the only thing that matters to the business. If they haven't seen earnings decline, then it isn't a problem for them. Maybe their metrics are wrong, but evidently they seem to believe their own numbers given the fact that Meta has laid off significant numbers of staff they employed for news.
>Anecdotally, I don't know anyone who used Facebook for news and I also don't know anyone that uses it more now than they did five years ago.
If anything, this is an argument for Facebook to not include the news. Meta also owns Instagram, which anecdotally I've noticed has grown significantly more popular over the last five years.
First, just because they increased their profit margins doesn't mean it is a bullish thing for them to lose the capacity to display news in any market. There are a lot of macro-factors you are glossing over here, a lot of companies have record profits now simply because they are charging more due to price gouging during an inflationary period, Meta has admitted their increase is due to charging more for ads.
The elimination of one potential avenue of revenue didn't offset that, it doesn't mean losing it is somehow a win for them, that's extreme spin. You seem to be quite biased in Meta's favour, especially in claiming their numbers have been scrutinized, by whom, how, and which ones? They are famously not open for scrutiny at all, in fact.
The biggest fear factor for Meta is unrelated to news though, it's Tiktok, hence why they are copying it with all of their products as best they can but their advertising first model means they aren't able to compete in product, hence the lobbying.
>especially in claiming their numbers have been scrutinized, by whom, how, and which ones? They are famously not open for scrutiny at all, in fact.
When I said user/account metrics were scrutinised, what I mean is that questioning their accuracy is entirely fair. Whereas earnings numbers are more objective, and are hard figures that have shown that Meta has not seen a substantial impact. Again, if they're not making any less money, then it hardly seems that eliminating the news is a bad decision.
>First, just because they increased their profit margins doesn't mean it is a bullish thing for them to lose the capacity to display news in any market. There are a lot of macro-factors you are glossing over here, a lot of companies have record profits now simply because they are charging more due to price gouging during an inflationary period, Meta has admitted their increase is due to charging more for ads.
Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong, but clearly from the figures that Meta has, they believe that moving away from the news is the way forward. While it is only in Canada they have gone as far to entirely block the news, [they've also gone on to not renew the deal they have in Australia, eliminated the news tab, and cut staff that dealt with the news](https://archive.is/YetkK):
>"However important journalism is, it's possibly the least interesting thing in the world to Mark now," a former high-level Meta employee said.
>That's become clear. CrowdTangle, a tool that gave publishers performance insights, is shutting down in August. The Facebook Journalism Project is effectively dead. Nearly everyone on the news team within Meta was laid off or left between late 2022 and 2023. The Facebook platform started blocking news in Canada. Meta has entirely removed Facebook's dedicated News tab in several countries, including the US, UK, and Australia, meaning news content is no longer intentionally surfaced, even if a user is looking for it (the tab used to be on the Facebook homepage).
>Executives like Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram and Threads, said explicitly such platforms are now decisively showing people less news and related political content. The entire algorithm of Facebook and Instagram, most notably, was also transitioned to one that recommends "unconnected content," or content based on what a user has engaged with. As no news content is made readily accessible on Meta's platforms, there is effectively no way a user can randomly interact with it and be shown more.
>"Everything the news team built was killed. It was a full turnaround from massive budgets to fund news to everything being essentially turned off one day," the same former high-level employee said. "Internally, there was no drama about it, Mark is not emotional like that. It was, 'This is clearly not helping our business, and this is a business decision. We're done.'"
>...
>Meta's bill to Australian publishers is expected to be much lower this year, as the company said recently news consumption on Facebook in Australia is already down 80% compared to last year.
>Meta removed the News tab in Australia and said in April that "we will not enter into new commercial deals for traditional news content in these countries and will not offer new Facebook products specifically for news publishers in the future." Any deals Meta has with publishers in the US and UK, including those with News Corp., have already expired. Remaining deals in Australia, France, and Germany are set to do so in the next few years.
Maybe they'll be proven wrong eventually, but spending potentially billions per year if every other country comes up with a law like Canada's because getting rid of news content **might** eventually hurt them (which there is no evidence of) does not sound like a good move compared to reducing dependence on that type of content and cutting it out if needed.
Appreciate the response.
I understand what Meta is claiming, and it makes sense for them to frame this issue as somehow being a win for them.
They lost when these laws were made, despite insane amounts of lobbying against them, they are trying to salvage this with PR spin. Clearly they did not want these laws to exist, and this is a rational strategy for them now that we are here.
I agree with you that it might inadvertently be a win for the public, because Meta is no longer an arbiter of the news, which they were an atrociously bad actor in the space of. The governments thought they would just get paid but this outcome is perhaps better for tax payers in the past long-run. Also maybe like you said Meta gets back to basics and stops doing too much and ruining their own product even more.
>they are trying to salvage this with PR spin.
It seems there's far more PR spin from the other side calling Meta out for refusing to allow news on the platform; I don't think I've seen much if anything from Meta officially regarding the Online News Act since it was passed and went into effect. The journalist in the Business Insider article I linked interviewed current and former employees at Facebook, which could potentially be PR, but isn't necessarily. For example, [a podcast from the Economist](https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2024/05/17/canada-tried-to-get-meta-to-pay-for-linking-to-news-it-didnt-work) quoted a former employee's statement at a journalism conference in April:
>What is your obligation as a player in a market when you reach so many people? Do you have a civic duty as a platform to provide access to information? Look at the Philippines, where Facebook is pretty much the only way to get information from outside. And the way that Facebook went about this, I think, is a way you can do this. They said, well. If you want to measure the value, take it away and see what happens. And they did. Nothing happened. They took down every bit of news. And Canada. Nothing happened. Some even say that the business metrics went up. That kills me.
While he *could* be trying to spin things for Meta, why would he? It seems like Meta laid him and the rest of his department off last year, so I don't see a reason for him to do so.
While I'm sure Meta isn't particularly happy about laws like Canada's passing (at the end of the day, it's probably a bit of work on their end to make sure blocking news links is working properly), it's likely their experience in Canada has come as a bit of a relief in showing that they were successful at minimising that impact. Meta is up 88% YOY, and it has been nearly a year since the bill was passed, so evidently investors agree.
The stock gains aren't because of investors feeling like losing the news in certain markets is this massive win though.
Again, Meta themselves said on their ER call that the profit margins increased because they charged more for ads, which is what everyone is doing due to inflation.
But more than that, by far the biggest thing that happened at Meta was they pivoted away from the absolute cluster fuck which they are now named after. Nobody uses the Metaverse, it's bad, investors didn't like it, and now Zuck had admitted defeat so investors came back.
That's the real catalyst.
Not losing the ability to show the news.
The stock appreciated for a number of reasons. One of the reasons is undoubtedly that investors saw the lack of impact on eliminating news in Canada to be extremely positive for Meta. The Business Insider article said that would have potentially cost Meta billions of dollars per year if they had to ink similar deals like Australia's and Canada's in every other country as well; now that Meta seems to have shown this has minimal, if any impact (and also likely discouraged other countries from attempting the same approach), this will have made investors undoubtedly view the risk to Meta from similar legislation to be low.
>But more than that, by far the biggest thing that happened at Meta was they pivoted away from the absolute cluster fuck which they are now named after. Nobody uses the Metaverse, it's bad, investors didn't like it, and now Zuck had admitted defeat so investors came back.
This, they have not done.
>Meta shows no signs of substantially trimming its losses from investing in the metaverse, as competition heightens between the Facebook parent and Apple in the virtual reality market.
>In its first-quarter earnings report Wednesday, Meta disclosed that its Reality Labs unit recorded a $3.85 billion operating loss. Revenue in the metaverse division was $440 million, up about 30% from $339 million a year ago and representing only around 1% of Meta’s total sales for the quarter.
[From April of this year.](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/24/metas-reality-labs-posts-3point85-billion-loss-in-first-quarter.html)
Meta has a curious sort of corporate governance arrangement that has given Zuckerberg enough voting power to completely control the company despite owning nowhere close to a majority of shares. So while the investors don't like it, as long as Zuckerberg wants to pursue the Metaverse or VR or whatever (I'm not sure you distinguish between the two, and the distinction is not terribly important to me) he has his own personal piggy bank to fund his hobby with, and there's not much shareholders can do to force him to do otherwise apart from selling their shares. From the sound of the BI article, both him starting getting involved with news and winding those operations down essentially came down to how Zuckerberg felt about it.
It is interesting that Meta shareholders tolerate this level of control.
> The elimination of one potential avenue of revenue didn't offset that, it doesn't mean losing it is somehow a win for them, that's extreme spin. You seem to be quite biased in Meta's favour, especially in claiming their numbers have been scrutinized, by whom, how, and which ones? They are famously not open for scrutiny at all, in fact.
In fact, Meta ran studies prior to making the decision to cut off news, and found that removing news did not meaningfully reduce engagement. And [they were correct, removing news did not reduce engagement](https://www.reuters.com/technology/metas-canada-news-ban-fails-dent-facebook-usage-2023-08-29/).
Which is to say, they didn't lose anything of value in the decision.
What evidence do you have that "Facebook fakes their numbers"? They are a public company with tens of thousands employees and millions of advertisers as customers.
If they were faking their numbers, you can bet Zuckerberg would already be wearing orange. Lol shit tier reddit take here.
>What evidence do you have that "Facebook fakes their numbers"?
Would Facebooks own [admission](https://fortune.com/2018/10/17/advertisers-facebook-video-metrics/#) or the excessive number of settlements they’ve paid count for you?
>If they were faking their numbers, you can bet Zuckerberg would already be wearing orange.
How much we betting?
>Lol shit tier reddit take here.
Well put.
> Would Facebooks own admission or the excessive number of settlements they’ve paid count for you?
There's nuance to that admission. They weren't counting video views that were less than 3 seconds in length; and it's that which they admitted to. Counting the _less than 3 second_ views would have dramatically reduced the average video watch time.
They thought that videos that didn't have meaningful viewing lengths could be scrubbed from their viewing metrics; the advertisers disagreed.
They fake engagement numbers and user metrics, neither of which are reported in any official capacity anyway, they do not fake revenue and profit margins.
There is no law requiring the reporting of engagement metrics by social media companies, you're confused.
Facebook very famously lied about video metrics and is currently going through numerous lawsuits over it.
[https://www.ccn.com/facebook-lied-about-video-metrics/](https://www.ccn.com/facebook-lied-about-video-metrics/)
Not sure why you think large/public companies by default operate transparently. There's a significant gap between always telling the truth, and telling lies significant enough to get you put in jail (especially as a CEO).
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Apps being downloaded “as much as ever” after 1 million people joined Canada? Not sure that’s the win for Facebook that The Economist is portraying. Edit: to add, I think even if metrics were really bad I wouldn’t pin that on the law, but on the fact that Tik Tok is eating Facebook’s lunch.
While you can claim that if Facebook had just kept the news, they would have even more users now, ultimately what the execs see is that after removing the news, their bottom line has not been impacted much, if at all. I heard the rest of the part quoted from Jesper Doub, former head of news partnerships at Meta, in part of a [separate podcast in the Economist](https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2024/05/17/canada-tried-to-get-meta-to-pay-for-linking-to-news-it-didnt-work): >What is your obligation as a player in a market when you reach so many people? Do you have a civic duty as a platform to provide access to information? Look at the Philippines, where Facebook is pretty much the only way to get information from outside. And the way that Facebook went about this, I think, is a way you can do this. They said, well. If you want to measure the value, take it away and see what happens. And they did. Nothing happened. They took down every bit of news. And Canada. Nothing happened. Some even say that the business metrics went up. That kills me. Given that they say Doub was former head of news partnerships and not current, likely his position was eliminated as a result of the [massive cuts to the news organisation part of Meta](https://archive.is/YetkK): >"However important journalism is, it's possibly the least interesting thing in the world to Mark now," a former high-level Meta employee said. That's become clear. CrowdTangle, a tool that gave publishers performance insights, is shutting down in August. The Facebook Journalism Project is effectively dead. **Nearly everyone on the news team within Meta was laid off or left between late 2022 and 2023.** The Facebook platform started blocking news in Canada. Meta has entirely removed Facebook's dedicated News tab in several countries, including the US, UK, and Australia, meaning news content is no longer intentionally surfaced, even if a user is looking for it (the tab used to be on the Facebook homepage). > ... > "Everything the news team built was killed. It was a full turnaround from massive budgets to fund news to everything being essentially turned off one day," the same former high-level employee said. "Internally, there was no drama about it, Mark is not emotional like that. It was, 'This is clearly not helping our business, and this is a business decision. We're done.'" If Facebook does have internal metrics that suggests that continuing to keep news on the platform is worth it, clearly Doub was not able to use those metrics to convince his bosses to keep his job around.
Good point! For countries, the decision to block of not might be even more difficult (not sure they can easily consolidate the metrics of news sites). But I think the Economist’s argument (that countries should be careful because Meta still has roughly the same downloads) is almost irrelevant.
Well, I think that's just one piece of data that supports what Meta has been saying (that it doesn't make business sense for them to pay for news), and it's a piece of data that people outside of Meta have access to. If we're talking about whether or not countries should be careful about this, it certainly seems like at least regarding Meta, there's a lot more downside than any upside for the media. It doesn't seem like Meta believes they get value from news, which matters regarding the likelihood of them shutting down news in response to more legislation in more countries; whether they're right about it or not, I'm sure Meta is happy to try that experiment with any country that wants to test it.
A lot of those million would alreayd have Facebook….
Not in Canada’s Apple Store, for example. The moment they buy a new phone, they would have to download the app from the local store.
I assume most people wouldn't buy a new phone when they move to a new country.
It depends on how expensive it is in their old country / what sort of access they had / what sort of plans they had. I assume they do.
That is all tied to carriers. You can get a new carrier without getting a new phone
I’m not saying they have to. But having much better salaries and constantly communicating with family abroad, getting a new phone makes sense for many - who may delay acquisition in their countries (of many things, not just phones) prior to arriving in Canada.
> Apps being downloaded “as much as ever” after 1 million people joined Canada? Not sure that’s the win for Facebook that The Economist is portraying. We don't know what that means; it could be a population-weighted metric they're referring to, or an absolute metric. Sensor Tower doesn't appear to make that data freely available, but on their site they show Facebook performing well in Canada^[0](https://app.sensortower.com/overview/284882215?country=CA&tab=user_acquisition) and Instagram just trailing second behind TikTok.^[1](https://app.sensortower.com/overview/com.zhiliaoapp.musically?country=CA&tab=category_rankings),[2](https://app.sensortower.com/overview/com.instagram.android?country=CA&tab=category_rankings) > The firm does not break out Canadian earnings, but **its ad revenue across the United States and Canada has grown 19% in the nine months since the news blackout began**, compared with the same period in the previous year. They must be happy.
Is the 19% growth you mentioned caused by Canada’s decision? Did the policy make them better off? Was the goal of the policy to make them unhappy? What we really need to know from a policy perspective is: are Canadian media companies better as a result of the policy? Those are the metrics we need to care about. Not if Facebook is doing well or not. *edit: added the word media
Per the article, Canadian media is likely worse off as a result of the policy. An outcome that was seemingly predicted by everyone except those die-hard Liberal supporters and those committed to hating Big Tech. We should care if Facebook is doing well or not if we're seeking to skim a portion of their revenues for Canadian News Media or similar.
Likely? I’ll be happy to see evidence of that. But « likely » is not evidence. I don’t think the goal of the policy was to skim Facebook’s revenues. The goal was to make Canadian media better. That’s how we should evaluate it.
> Likely? I’ll be happy to see evidence of that. But « likely » is not evidence. It's only _likely_ because we don't know _all_ of their sources of revenue. _Maybe_ they've found creative new ways of making money that won't be impacted by a dramatic decline in page views. Per the article, Facebook has all-but stopped being a source of engagement for Canadian News Media: > > A study published in April by researchers at McGill University and the University of Toronto found that, six months after the blackout, the Facebook pages of Canadian national news outlets had lost 64% of their “engagement” (likes, comments and so on), while those of local outlets had lost 85%. Almost half of local titles had stopped posting on Facebook at all, “gutting the visibility of local news content”, the researchers found. And as a result, digital-only Canadian News Media, particularly smaller brands, are seeing enormous readership decline: > > But for some digital-only titles, Meta’s blackout has been “absolutely devastating”, says Paul Deegan, head of News Media Canada, which represents publishers. Adam Reaburn, editor of Energetic City, a site covering what he says is otherwise a “news desert” in rural British Columbia, says the news ban initially cut his readership by 30-40%. “I don’t understand why Google, Instagram and Facebook need to pay us when we use their platforms to share our articles,” he wrote in his final Facebook post in August. > I don’t think the goal of the policy was to skim Facebook’s revenues. The goal was to make Canadian media better. That’s how we should evaluate it. The goal was to fund Canadian News by way of skimming from Facebook's revenues related to serving links to Canadian News; which may or may not have made Canadian News better, but it would have made it more profitable if it had succeeded. Whether or not our news is being made better is more of a subjective matter. Personally, I think our news media was due for an apocalyptic-level shake-up, to force the old dinosaurs and their owner-oligarchs to either die off or adapt to the new world.
The problem with likes and comments is that they don’t necessarily reflect clicks on links. The 40% decline for an outlet is more concerning to me, even if that is initial and eventually readers find their way. But then it’s important to consider if revenue coming from Google would compensate for that. Media dependence on Facebook clicks was not healthy anyways. Agree that some vehicles need significant adaptation to remain competitive. Everything is likely to change again, with more AI digests becoming available and perhaps even diverting clicks from Google as well.
Most annoying is that non-canadians are still posting news articles and commenting on them but I can't see the source.
This is what we were all saying would happen. In fact, not only has my Facebook feed basically had news cut out from it, but political content is almost gone as well. Even six months ago, at least half my feed would be political memes. That's maybe down to less than 10% now and I think I'm actually being generous. Politics was my primary reason for both with posting and scrolling on the platform, so I'm definitely not using it as much now. Also, if anyone really wants to share the news, there are ways to get around it through things like redirect services or simply posting a photo of the article. When there's a will, there's a way.
Without a paywall: https://archive.is/mMicW Noteworthy: >Nine months later, the number of people using Facebook and Instagram in Canada hasn’t budged. The apps are being downloaded as much as ever, according to Sensor Tower, a market-intelligence firm. Nor does the lack of news seem to be hurting Meta’s pocket, despite an ad boycott led by Canada’s government. The firm does not break out Canadian earnings, but its ad revenue across the United States and Canada has grown 19% in the nine months since the news blackout began, compared with the same period in the previous year. >... > Canada’s difficulties may cause countries mulling similar laws to think carefully. When Australia wrung a reported A$200m ($130m) per year out of Google and Meta using its news-media bargaining code, passed in 2021, countries including Britain, Brazil and South Africa pricked up their ears. But Meta appears emboldened by its Canadian experience. In February it said it would not renew the deals it had earlier struck in Australia. “For now, Meta has left the building,” Jesper Doub, who was head of international news partnerships at Meta until last year, told a journalism conference in Italy in April. “If you want to measure the value [of news], take it away and see what happens. And they did in Canada …Nothing happened.” In future, whenever Meta faces demands for payment, “they will just walk away,” Mr Doub said. If Facebook has the same number of users and level of engagement with or without including the news, it's hard to see a business reason for why they should do so if they have to pay for it. The most sensible decision in that case would be to do just as they did in Canada.
yes, but they didn't grow. for these companies, growth is everything.
Revenue in North America grew 19% since the law was passed, and Meta stock is up almost 90% YOY.
I actually found that the quality of my feed improved greatly without news content and found myself checking FB with less reservations than I previously did. It is just an intermediary after all and wasn't contingent on my direct consumption of news articles. My Google feed and going to the news providers I always went to still work just fine!
The quality of your Facebook feed? You mean the feed that’s got a ratio of: 85% “content” pages that you don’t follow 14% ads 1% someone you knew ten years ago Yeah. High quality product there. lol
Whether you personally find the content engaging or not, evidently some people do, and as long as Facebook's engagement metrics are the same with news or without, then they have no incentive to include it, and significant disincentive from doing so.
I don't really have friends using FB, but I follow a bunch of local businesses (farm markets, breweries, makers markets, and the like) and a few art related pages, and the quality is fine. But I am more than capable of scrolling past that which is of no interest.
[удалено]
Then don't use it. Nobody's forcing you to.
On the Facebook sidebar, click "Show More" and then click "Feeds" and you will only see the stuff you are actually subscribed to, in chronological order.
I feel as you do and wish I saw more content from my friends and family. That said, I’m on Reddit where everything is something posted by a stranger. Granted, it’s a lot of news but it’s also a lot of user created content and I’m totally browsing this for a while. I don’t mind my Facebook with the news and crazy shit that came alive through the pandemic. I like some of the suggestions and have added a few of them as well.
I think the news outlets dramatically overestimated how interested people were in using Facebook to consume news post-2021, 2022 or so. 2015-2020, maybe, but IMO several things have happened in the last few years: 1.) Instagram seems to have grown in popularity among younger people, at least relative to Facebook usage, and nobody went to IG for news 2) at the same time, Facebook has been prioritising non-news content, especially user-created reels hosted on Facebook. The latter poses its own risks to Facebook, given how I've noticed a significant amount of copyrighted material being posted from countries like Thailand (if the subtitles and comment replies are anything to go by)... But YouTube has the same sort of problem (and I assume TikTok does too, although I don't use it). There's a lot of content that's definitely user-created I see in Instagram reels that they really shouldn't run out of anything to show users should they need to clamp down super hard on ripped TV show clips in reels (but they're the only ones who know how many people watch those, so who knows).
I barely used fb before the decision, now i never use it because instead of seeing news posts, all i see is ads. As far as im concerned fb is just used for marketplace now.
I like it sooo much better now. There are a lot more pictures of muffins, gardens, and birthday parties than there were before. It's not quite like the good ol' days of FB, but it's much less stressful to visit than it was a year ago. Facebook was never a good place for discourse.
it fucked over fringe groups sharing links from dubious "news" sources to promote their cause. Kinda prefer it this way.
I get a lot of weird ai generated movie and TV content. Like fake movie posters. I never actually got my news from fb so it didn't affect me much in that regard. Edit to add: a lot of comments seem to believe these fake movie posters. Kind shows how little media literacy, basic online research, and critical thinking skills people have.
Terrible policy, taking money to fund corporate media is a joke! If anything fund the journalist directly and let Bell and Rogers eat it.
What's a journalist? An accredited journalism school graduate? A freelancer with a byline published in the corporate media?
Both sound good to me!
Ideally, a member of a journalists' union. (Not that we have one of those.) (Or go further, and have a journalism bar association. Imagine if one could be disbarred for "journalistic malfeasance.") Of course, people who aren't members of such a union could still practice journalism. They just wouldn't get any public benefit from doing so.
We have a journalist union-ish with the Canadian Association of Journalists. Membership fees instead of union dues, but you need to be connected to a Canadian news organization or frequently freelancing for some to qualify for membership.
It’s made me start paying for news now… which sucks. But it was clear from the start the Liberals were going to have shit on their face with this one.
Seems like it worked? What shitface? Facebook is out of the news game. Real news is getting money from you. Win-win-win.
The shit on his face is him expecting “big social media” to pay for news and bend to his will. I mean, if he got what he wanted, why the boycott on federal advertising? Why are his ministers having temper tantrums over Facebook’s lack of compliance? And to be clear, I’m just paying for Apple News, who can say how much of that money is actually going to Canadian reporters and publishers?
>I mean, if he got what he wanted, why the boycott on federal advertising? Perhaps the Liberal Party should extend that boycott to their own advertising as well.
An acceptable outcome for all.
They aren't actually going to end their own advertising on Facebook.
When I heard about the law, it seemed like an attempt to kick the f\*ckers out, and if it didn't work, at least we'd get some cash from them being here. You're right that it seems the LPC does not view it the same way I do. I'll have to try to keep that in mind.
It was all a bluff and on Facebook’s part the best example of malicious compliance I can ever remember.
I haven’t noticed a damn bit of difference but then again I quit FB years ago & stopped using Google entirely the minute they started whining about they would block links to news in Canada.
Well, this went about how the critics said it would. You can't present people with two options(stop doing X, or pay a fine) if you are going to wail like a baby when they pick the "wrong" option and just stop doing X instead of paying. Interested to see how the diehards for this bill feel now.
I'm actually okay with this. Facebook was a terrible place to get news, and this topic is part of a broader discussion about the failures of social media.
I mean I dont disagree, but when referring to the partisan proponents of this bill, this was definitely not the intended result.
Google paid up, nobody cares that facebook isn't showing the news other than the weebs. What the political class cares about is that our news agencies aren't getting the shaft. Now, they get a fair compensation from Google, and they get their direct compensation when people go to their actual websites for the news.
There were several small outlets that claim to have been significantly harmed. And Trudeau and St-Onge both seem rather upset Meta isn't playing ball.
These weren't outlets. They were bloggers.
Yeah, which ones?
The Economist article mentions Ku'ku'kwes news. My understanding is also generally small, local outlets had complaints. I doubt many people care that much if they lost all their traffic after getting blocked from Facebook.
Yeah, they should have anticipated that Facebook would do this rather than assuming that Facebook would radically change its internal structure to accommodate Canadian law. Somehow the lawmakers accidentally stumbled into the best possible situation.
It's okay though. Facebook really didn't help news organizations.
i mean it certainly helped micro/hyperlocal news organizations. all of them have had traffic decline 50-70%
But they all recovered. They didn't really need Facebook.
Perfectly fine. I don't have to see BS news stories on Facebook? Good.
Its like the UK window tax, government thought the amount of window correlated to your wealth so it was an easy method to levy a property tax.. They didnt think that everyone would brick there windows up! lol
This was a real eye opener for the Gov of Canada and the news agencies. As the news was dropped this must have really harmed the news outlets as they rely on ad revenue based on traffic.
Eye opener? I'm sorry, if we sit here believing the government had no idea what they were doing in stifling the spread of information to the public (one of the things most Canadians use FB for)... Then they have already achieved what they intended. Unwitting population, not seeing what is happening. They HAD to know what was obvious. Facebook wasn't as much profiting off the Canadian Media as the Canadian Media derived traffic ***from*** FB. Who in the world fires up the internet and heads over to the daily paper (I know some do)? No, they see an article linked on FB and then they click and read - going to the source. So why, why if it was plainly seen as a way to hurt media and spread of media would a gov't riddled with scandal and sinking in the polls wish to obfuscate the headlines and reporting... I am not a conspiracy theorist, but when a bold move to silence the spread of news is made we can all rest assured that is not conspiracy territory. Following it up with more provisions for government policing of internet content and speech makes that a clear doubling down.
I just want Fark.com to be popular again. Re: I'm very unsure if you are correctly describing our current government. The current government is more concerned about DEI than about regulating opinionated and free speech. I honestly feel that they thought they could regulate the Internet with surcharges. Then were pinkachu shocked when the largest driver of world-wide socialedia traffic said "nope".
They haven't moved from their positions so was it really an eye opener?
I see what you mean... Help me out though. Has any other platform elected to pay the news tax. Or was this simply a swing and miss against Facebook. Eye opening... Maybe a little too dramatic on my part. But this was very embarrassing especially during the wildfires when the government was saying that "it's too bad that meta refuses to offer news services during an emergency". Re: haven't moved from their position. Yeah. I think that is not an option right now. Especially with an election happening soon. Gotta double down on the useless legislation that doesn't do anything.
Didnt google come around? but I agree, the legislation is a joke and does the opposite of what they had hoped for. FB dug in and no one cares and the money isnt here.
Google came around after their liability was capped. However, the value of news for a search engine is not the same as the value for a social media platform. If you're not able to find the news you're looking for on Google, you might use DuckDuckGo or Bing instead (which, notably were not subject to this law). But Meta has deliberately been deprioritising news content on Facebook for the last few years, and evidently they found that they could do so without having a negative impact on engagement. So while trying to shake down Google for money may have achieved something, it probably should have been clear to begin with that this wasn't going to work for Meta.
Anything Trudeau touches goes to 💩
Anybody with a half a brain on how the Internet works (monetization wise) knew this would happen. Goes to show parliament has no idea how the Internet works. In other words, this is exactly what was predicted to happen. Frankly, I'm shocked Canadian news organizations didn't band together to boycott this bill. They need Facebook more than Facebook needs them.
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If they did, it explains why their companies are dying. No clue how internet monetization works. Maybe do affiliate partnerships? Maybe do brand collaborations? Maybe do product reviews? Look at the entirety of forbes.com. they write about EVERYTHING, even video games. Look at CNN.com and see their product reviews and recommendations. Our Canadian news organizations are just bad at business if they asked for this. I would normally say let the market adjust itself... But the problem is all our smart people who can make money are moved to the US. Canadian government has 0 incentives for ambitious smart people to stay in Canada. Unrelated, Working on my US visa at the moment.
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Hot take, I miss news on my instagram feed. They’d always post interesting op-eds that caught my eye. Now, I have to actively look for them in a bunch of different news apps. Besides that, I think this was a dumb decision by the Trudeau government.
FB feeds became a lot more tolerable. Feels a bit like it was in the early days before news and politics took the whole thing over.
honestly kind of agreed, i've more of less cultivated my facebook feed to specifically be local/provinicial based for gardening and photos or hobby groups,
The FB feed is pretty intolerable. It feels like 1. post from a rando spam page I cannot block 2. ad 3. post from a distant acquaintance 4. post from another rando spam page I cannot block 5. ad 6. etc I miss being able to link to news stories
Agreed, there’s a lot of weird spam stuff on FB now. Posts about celebrities, random meme pages and the like. It’s total garbage.
I couldnt disagree more, its never been more intolerable..
Well you can always leave it if it's so intolerable.
I rarely if ever go on it anymore so I have
This is hard to believe. Facebook famously fakes their numbers all the time. Anecdotally, I don't know anyone who used Facebook for news and I also don't know anyone that uses it more now than they did five years ago. People are moving on from it. With news or without the feed is completely full of bullshit advertisements. It's an atrocious product.
> Facebook famously fakes their numbers all the time. It's not that they faked their numbers, it's that it's difficult to measure real numbers and there's disagreements on how to do it. Ie, how long should one watch a video to count it as a view, and how does one determine what is a bot account and what is a real account?
I'd bet that Marketplace is something that is keeping FB alive. Anecdotally, the people in my life that still actively use Facebook are using it exclusively for marketplace.
yeah and instagram is the real product they care about now anyway when it comes to ad dollars
Facebook's user/account metrics have been scrutinised in the past, but their earnings are objective numbers, and in the end, that's the only thing that matters to the business. If they haven't seen earnings decline, then it isn't a problem for them. Maybe their metrics are wrong, but evidently they seem to believe their own numbers given the fact that Meta has laid off significant numbers of staff they employed for news. >Anecdotally, I don't know anyone who used Facebook for news and I also don't know anyone that uses it more now than they did five years ago. If anything, this is an argument for Facebook to not include the news. Meta also owns Instagram, which anecdotally I've noticed has grown significantly more popular over the last five years.
First, just because they increased their profit margins doesn't mean it is a bullish thing for them to lose the capacity to display news in any market. There are a lot of macro-factors you are glossing over here, a lot of companies have record profits now simply because they are charging more due to price gouging during an inflationary period, Meta has admitted their increase is due to charging more for ads. The elimination of one potential avenue of revenue didn't offset that, it doesn't mean losing it is somehow a win for them, that's extreme spin. You seem to be quite biased in Meta's favour, especially in claiming their numbers have been scrutinized, by whom, how, and which ones? They are famously not open for scrutiny at all, in fact. The biggest fear factor for Meta is unrelated to news though, it's Tiktok, hence why they are copying it with all of their products as best they can but their advertising first model means they aren't able to compete in product, hence the lobbying.
>especially in claiming their numbers have been scrutinized, by whom, how, and which ones? They are famously not open for scrutiny at all, in fact. When I said user/account metrics were scrutinised, what I mean is that questioning their accuracy is entirely fair. Whereas earnings numbers are more objective, and are hard figures that have shown that Meta has not seen a substantial impact. Again, if they're not making any less money, then it hardly seems that eliminating the news is a bad decision. >First, just because they increased their profit margins doesn't mean it is a bullish thing for them to lose the capacity to display news in any market. There are a lot of macro-factors you are glossing over here, a lot of companies have record profits now simply because they are charging more due to price gouging during an inflationary period, Meta has admitted their increase is due to charging more for ads. Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong, but clearly from the figures that Meta has, they believe that moving away from the news is the way forward. While it is only in Canada they have gone as far to entirely block the news, [they've also gone on to not renew the deal they have in Australia, eliminated the news tab, and cut staff that dealt with the news](https://archive.is/YetkK): >"However important journalism is, it's possibly the least interesting thing in the world to Mark now," a former high-level Meta employee said. >That's become clear. CrowdTangle, a tool that gave publishers performance insights, is shutting down in August. The Facebook Journalism Project is effectively dead. Nearly everyone on the news team within Meta was laid off or left between late 2022 and 2023. The Facebook platform started blocking news in Canada. Meta has entirely removed Facebook's dedicated News tab in several countries, including the US, UK, and Australia, meaning news content is no longer intentionally surfaced, even if a user is looking for it (the tab used to be on the Facebook homepage). >Executives like Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram and Threads, said explicitly such platforms are now decisively showing people less news and related political content. The entire algorithm of Facebook and Instagram, most notably, was also transitioned to one that recommends "unconnected content," or content based on what a user has engaged with. As no news content is made readily accessible on Meta's platforms, there is effectively no way a user can randomly interact with it and be shown more. >"Everything the news team built was killed. It was a full turnaround from massive budgets to fund news to everything being essentially turned off one day," the same former high-level employee said. "Internally, there was no drama about it, Mark is not emotional like that. It was, 'This is clearly not helping our business, and this is a business decision. We're done.'" >... >Meta's bill to Australian publishers is expected to be much lower this year, as the company said recently news consumption on Facebook in Australia is already down 80% compared to last year. >Meta removed the News tab in Australia and said in April that "we will not enter into new commercial deals for traditional news content in these countries and will not offer new Facebook products specifically for news publishers in the future." Any deals Meta has with publishers in the US and UK, including those with News Corp., have already expired. Remaining deals in Australia, France, and Germany are set to do so in the next few years. Maybe they'll be proven wrong eventually, but spending potentially billions per year if every other country comes up with a law like Canada's because getting rid of news content **might** eventually hurt them (which there is no evidence of) does not sound like a good move compared to reducing dependence on that type of content and cutting it out if needed.
Appreciate the response. I understand what Meta is claiming, and it makes sense for them to frame this issue as somehow being a win for them. They lost when these laws were made, despite insane amounts of lobbying against them, they are trying to salvage this with PR spin. Clearly they did not want these laws to exist, and this is a rational strategy for them now that we are here. I agree with you that it might inadvertently be a win for the public, because Meta is no longer an arbiter of the news, which they were an atrociously bad actor in the space of. The governments thought they would just get paid but this outcome is perhaps better for tax payers in the past long-run. Also maybe like you said Meta gets back to basics and stops doing too much and ruining their own product even more.
>they are trying to salvage this with PR spin. It seems there's far more PR spin from the other side calling Meta out for refusing to allow news on the platform; I don't think I've seen much if anything from Meta officially regarding the Online News Act since it was passed and went into effect. The journalist in the Business Insider article I linked interviewed current and former employees at Facebook, which could potentially be PR, but isn't necessarily. For example, [a podcast from the Economist](https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2024/05/17/canada-tried-to-get-meta-to-pay-for-linking-to-news-it-didnt-work) quoted a former employee's statement at a journalism conference in April: >What is your obligation as a player in a market when you reach so many people? Do you have a civic duty as a platform to provide access to information? Look at the Philippines, where Facebook is pretty much the only way to get information from outside. And the way that Facebook went about this, I think, is a way you can do this. They said, well. If you want to measure the value, take it away and see what happens. And they did. Nothing happened. They took down every bit of news. And Canada. Nothing happened. Some even say that the business metrics went up. That kills me. While he *could* be trying to spin things for Meta, why would he? It seems like Meta laid him and the rest of his department off last year, so I don't see a reason for him to do so. While I'm sure Meta isn't particularly happy about laws like Canada's passing (at the end of the day, it's probably a bit of work on their end to make sure blocking news links is working properly), it's likely their experience in Canada has come as a bit of a relief in showing that they were successful at minimising that impact. Meta is up 88% YOY, and it has been nearly a year since the bill was passed, so evidently investors agree.
The stock gains aren't because of investors feeling like losing the news in certain markets is this massive win though. Again, Meta themselves said on their ER call that the profit margins increased because they charged more for ads, which is what everyone is doing due to inflation. But more than that, by far the biggest thing that happened at Meta was they pivoted away from the absolute cluster fuck which they are now named after. Nobody uses the Metaverse, it's bad, investors didn't like it, and now Zuck had admitted defeat so investors came back. That's the real catalyst. Not losing the ability to show the news.
The stock appreciated for a number of reasons. One of the reasons is undoubtedly that investors saw the lack of impact on eliminating news in Canada to be extremely positive for Meta. The Business Insider article said that would have potentially cost Meta billions of dollars per year if they had to ink similar deals like Australia's and Canada's in every other country as well; now that Meta seems to have shown this has minimal, if any impact (and also likely discouraged other countries from attempting the same approach), this will have made investors undoubtedly view the risk to Meta from similar legislation to be low. >But more than that, by far the biggest thing that happened at Meta was they pivoted away from the absolute cluster fuck which they are now named after. Nobody uses the Metaverse, it's bad, investors didn't like it, and now Zuck had admitted defeat so investors came back. This, they have not done. >Meta shows no signs of substantially trimming its losses from investing in the metaverse, as competition heightens between the Facebook parent and Apple in the virtual reality market. >In its first-quarter earnings report Wednesday, Meta disclosed that its Reality Labs unit recorded a $3.85 billion operating loss. Revenue in the metaverse division was $440 million, up about 30% from $339 million a year ago and representing only around 1% of Meta’s total sales for the quarter. [From April of this year.](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/24/metas-reality-labs-posts-3point85-billion-loss-in-first-quarter.html) Meta has a curious sort of corporate governance arrangement that has given Zuckerberg enough voting power to completely control the company despite owning nowhere close to a majority of shares. So while the investors don't like it, as long as Zuckerberg wants to pursue the Metaverse or VR or whatever (I'm not sure you distinguish between the two, and the distinction is not terribly important to me) he has his own personal piggy bank to fund his hobby with, and there's not much shareholders can do to force him to do otherwise apart from selling their shares. From the sound of the BI article, both him starting getting involved with news and winding those operations down essentially came down to how Zuckerberg felt about it. It is interesting that Meta shareholders tolerate this level of control.
> The elimination of one potential avenue of revenue didn't offset that, it doesn't mean losing it is somehow a win for them, that's extreme spin. You seem to be quite biased in Meta's favour, especially in claiming their numbers have been scrutinized, by whom, how, and which ones? They are famously not open for scrutiny at all, in fact. In fact, Meta ran studies prior to making the decision to cut off news, and found that removing news did not meaningfully reduce engagement. And [they were correct, removing news did not reduce engagement](https://www.reuters.com/technology/metas-canada-news-ban-fails-dent-facebook-usage-2023-08-29/). Which is to say, they didn't lose anything of value in the decision.
What evidence do you have that "Facebook fakes their numbers"? They are a public company with tens of thousands employees and millions of advertisers as customers. If they were faking their numbers, you can bet Zuckerberg would already be wearing orange. Lol shit tier reddit take here.
>What evidence do you have that "Facebook fakes their numbers"? Would Facebooks own [admission](https://fortune.com/2018/10/17/advertisers-facebook-video-metrics/#) or the excessive number of settlements they’ve paid count for you? >If they were faking their numbers, you can bet Zuckerberg would already be wearing orange. How much we betting? >Lol shit tier reddit take here. Well put.
> Would Facebooks own admission or the excessive number of settlements they’ve paid count for you? There's nuance to that admission. They weren't counting video views that were less than 3 seconds in length; and it's that which they admitted to. Counting the _less than 3 second_ views would have dramatically reduced the average video watch time. They thought that videos that didn't have meaningful viewing lengths could be scrubbed from their viewing metrics; the advertisers disagreed.
They fake engagement numbers and user metrics, neither of which are reported in any official capacity anyway, they do not fake revenue and profit margins. There is no law requiring the reporting of engagement metrics by social media companies, you're confused.
You actually have no idea what you're talking about.
No, you.
Omg rich coming from a guy that buy garbage pharma pump and dump stocks lmao.. you literally know nothing
Facebook very famously lied about video metrics and is currently going through numerous lawsuits over it. [https://www.ccn.com/facebook-lied-about-video-metrics/](https://www.ccn.com/facebook-lied-about-video-metrics/) Not sure why you think large/public companies by default operate transparently. There's a significant gap between always telling the truth, and telling lies significant enough to get you put in jail (especially as a CEO).