It has been one year since Meta, the parent company of Facebook, decided to stop carrying the links to Canadian news stories because it does not want to pay royalties to news outlets as required by the new federal Online News Act. News services, including The Review have had to adjust to not being able to share the links to our stories on our Facebook page. And yes, any Facebook user who goes to The Review’s official Facebook page will see it is dormant. As an alternative, we did establish the auxiliary VankleekHill.ca Facebook page to share announcements and notices, advertisements, and some news headlines, without the full story or links to our website. Meta does not appear to be interested in reaching a settlement with the federal government anytime soon about royalties to news outlets.
As a small news outlet, receiving royalties would be fantastic for The Review, but realistically, how much of them could we anticipate receiving, and how timely would they arrive? The concept is great and good public policy, but the implementation has been a disappointment. The federal government should have established a negotiating relationship with social media companies to hopefully reach a royalty agreement. It adopted the Online News Act rather than adopting legislation, and then the companies reacted by blocking content. Google has reached a settlement with the federal government, but there is no indication of when—or how much of that producers of news content will see. Hopefully, small outlets receive a respectable amount and are not put at a disadvantage to larger outlets.
The inability to share reliable news on Facebook and other social media platforms has made it more difficult for news outlets to get factual, accurate information to an online audience, and draw traffic to their websites. It has also continued to make it easier for people to post rumours and poorly informed opinions about local news events and issues on Facebook and have them accepted by others as fact. Far too often, we hear rumours presented as fact by those who say their source was Facebook.
Consumers need to understand the significance of the word social in social media. It is social in the sense of socializing among friends, family and neighbours. Mark Zuckerberg and his fraternity brothers at Harvard did not invent Facebook as a way for news outlets to disseminate their stories. It was invented as a way of socially connecting college students for social activities they would have in person. Facebook was initially a way of presenting sources of information and was not to be the source itself.
News outlets, large and small, need to remember what it was like to not have social media as a way of getting their stories to the public. We need to convince the consumers in the communities we serve that we are in the business of presenting reliable, factual news from reputable sources that no Facebook group can come close to achieving in a professional way.
