The Government of Canada has announced that it will suspend all advertising on Facebook and Instagram.
The decision – which involves a $7.5 million annual advertising investment (about 6.9 million euros) – comes after the Meta and Google blocked Canadian news in response to a government-passed law requiring tech platforms to pay media outlets for content shared on the platforms.
“We have decided to take the necessary decision to suspend all Government of Canada advertising on Facebook,” Canadian Minister Pablo Rodriguez said in a tweet, adding that “we can’t keep paying for ads on Meta as they refuse to pay their fair share to Canadian media“.
The law project Online News Act, approved last month, is being finalized. The objective is to establish rules so that technological platforms – like Meta or Google – negotiate commercial agreements and share the dividends with Canadian media for their content.
According to the bill, Google and Meta currently capture 80% of all digital ad revenue in Canada“money that used to be invested in the country’s media, which provided local and regional news,” Pablo Rodriguez said in another Twitter post.
The government of the North American country is convinced that negotiations are still possible – as also mentioned by Minister Rodriguez, stating that “we believe that there is a way and we are ready to continue talking with these platforms” .
However, Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, shows no signs of backing down. In an interview on Wednesday, Trudeau said that “it’s not just a fight for publicity, it’s a fight for democracyadding that “it goes to the heart of a free and informed society capable of making responsible decisions in a democracy”, as quoted by the MediaPost.
The government’s goal is to balance the sharing of advertising revenues in the digital environment, which have been gradually absorbed by platforms to the detriment of newspapers and publications producing content.
Although it has yet to comment on recent developments, Meta has previously said that news in Canada represents very little economic value to the company and that it believes the country’s media benefits from the publicity that they receive on Facebook and Instagram, specifies MediaPost.
The same media also adds that Quebecor and Cogeco Communications, two of the main media, have already announced that they will also suspend advertising on Meta’s platforms.
Since 2008, more than 450 media outlets have closed in Canada, including 64 in the past two years, according to Reuters.
A similar situation also occurred in Australia, with the approval of the The News Media Code of Negotiation for a week, by the Australian government, a law designed to force major tech platforms operating in the country to pay local media for their content. This action led Meta to completely ban Australian media from its platforms, so that it would not have to pay for the content. The boycott lasted a week.
Meta thus forced a renegotiation of the terms of the law. Later, after the negotiations were completed, the Australian government considered the law a success, highlighting the approximately 30 business deals reached between Google and Meta and the Australian media. Today, approximately 200 million dollars (nearly 125 million euros) are distributed annually by the local media.
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