ECREA 2024 / AANZCA 2024

Facebook without the News: Link-Sharing Patterns during Meta’s Australian and Canadian News Bans

Axel Bruns, Dan Angus, Laura Vodden, Ashwin Nagappa, and Klaus Gröbner

• 27 Sep. 2024 – ECREA 2024 conference, Ljubljana
• 26 Nov. 2024 – AANZCA 2024 conference, Melbourne

Presentation Slides

Abstract

Several governments have recently sought to redirect digital advertising revenues flowing to online intermediary platforms (search engines and social media platforms) towards news publishers; they argue that news content contributes substantially to the popular appeal of such platforms. In February 2021, Australia was the first major jurisdiction to pass a law, the News Media Bargaining Code, implementing a mandatory bargaining process between news media and platforms to facilitate such revenue-sharing; largely following the Australian model, Canada’s Online News Act was passed in June 2023.

While Google reached a settlement relatively swiftly, despite vocal earlier protests against these initiatives, Meta, as parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms, took a substantially more aggressive stance, in both countries acting on its earlier threats to ban news from its platforms altogether. Consequently, the circulation of news (i.e. posting, passing on, or accessing links to news sites) on Facebook in Australia was blocked completely from 18 to 25 Feb. 2021; in Canada, similar restrictions commenced in late July 2023, and (at the time of writing in September 2024) remain in place.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia in 2021, and during a severe wildfire season in Canada in 2023, these unprecedented restrictions to the flow of vital news and information on a leading social media platform resulted in considerable public condemnation (also because overreach in the bans' scope resulted in the blocking of official meteorological services, government health departments, and even news satire sites). Meta, however, argued that news engagement accounts only for a very small proportion of overall Facebook activity, and that citizens could find sufficient news updates elsewhere.

Drawing on the comprehensive Facebook URL Shares dataset, this paper tests this claim by investigating link-sharing patterns on Facebook before, during, and (at least in the Australian case) after these news bans. The dataset provides anonymised information on link-sharing for all of Facebook (importantly also including non-public personal profiles); filtering it for Australian and Canadian users, respectively, we examine the volume of overall link-sharing activity in each country during each period, as well as the sharing of links to an extensive selection of major news outlets; this provides new insight into the proportion of link-sharing on Facebook that is actually engaged with news.

We also test for an increase in circumvention techniques (e.g. URL shorteners or other link target obfuscation tools) or in the use of alternative sources not covered by Facebook’s bans, and (for Australia as well as for Canada, should the ban there be rescinded in time) examine whether news-sharing patterns return to pre-ban levels after the conclusion of the ban, or whether the service disruption appears to have permanently altered users’ news engagement practices.

Our detailed analysis of link-sharing patterns during these exceptional interventions in Facebook’s operation by parent company Meta therefore offers a unique insight into how platform users cope with such a major, deliberate disruption of service. It can also inform future policy-making initiatives in this space, including those being considered by European nation states and the European Union.