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In March of 2021, a set of Facebook pages showed up in the feeds of my neighbors in Squamish, a town north of Vancouver, British Columbia, population twenty-three thousand. Squamish is picturesque and fast-growing; it’s also the site of a prospective fossil fuel export project. The pages presented as community organizations: Squamish Now, Squamish Voices, Squamish Forward. Initially, they contained mundanities—local events, reports of dog poop on the hiking trails. Over the course of a year, however, they shifted in tone, with outraged posts about the municipal council and candidates in the upcoming election.
Each group had its own focus. Squamish Now complained that the town council was blocking private development and failing to invest in public infrastructure. (There was no evidence to support those claims.) Squamish Voices, a copy of an existing community page, posted (also without evidence) that environmental groups were funding certain council members. Both pages featured unflattering headshots of politicians they targeted. Squamish Forward linked to a blog that encouraged locals to speak out against policies they disliked. The blog posts became increasingly agitated. One asked, “Is there a secret cabal conspiring against us?”
Then came fliers, a barrage of cardstock in primary colors. Some had Squamish Now branding; others, Squamish Voices. The messages were conspiratorial: “What is this change room made of?” next to a photo of a golden toilet, and “Squamish is not a tent city!” Some lambasted individual candidates. “All of a sudden, I look in my mailbox, and there’s eight-by-eight laminated mailers,” my neighbor Sarah Ellis, who is thirty-five, said. “This has evolved to a whole other level of crazy.” She and her friends sensed it was the work of an organized campaign. “Younger people have enough media literacy to know this is fishy. But we don’t really know where it’s coming from.”
In March of 2022, the National Observer, a Canadian investigative outlet focused on climate and politics, published an article highlighting Squamish among other Canadian municipalities that had recently seen “Voices” Facebook pages appear under a grassroots guise. After digging into Facebook’s logs, the Observer found that the pages were all linked to Canada Proud, a right-wing political influence group. The article quoted from a digital-campaigning scholar who described how posts can draw people in with discussion of traffic or housing “as a means to increase engagement and public trust”—and then, ahead of an election, “bombard followers with explicitly political content or smear campaigns.”
As summer turned to fall, the posts and fliers continued. Locals who speculated on Facebook about who funded Squamish Voices ended up with messages from unfamiliar accounts threatening legal action if their posts were not removed within twenty-four hours. The community’s press reported on the phenomenon, but made no connections.
Then, just over a week before the election, The Breach, a national nonprofit site, published a detailed investigation, “In this B.C. town, big money is bulldozing democracy.” The article expanded on the investigation into Squamish Voices and tied each of the two other “local” pages to different backers with financial interests in the town, identifying examples of disinformation (“an anonymous and unsubstantiated sexual assault allegation against a mayoral candidate who has refused donations and meetings from developers,” for instance) and reporting on the sums paid out for sponsored posts: as much as seventy-eight thousand dollars, in one case. (The legal spending limit for municipal elections in Canada is just over a thousand dollars.) “It was a local issue,” Dru Jay, The Breach’s publisher, told me. “But it was also the front lines of a new corporate playbook, basically for undermining democracy at the municipal level and doing so in a totally nontransparent way.” Jay said that, according to Google Analytics, the piece was viewed fifteen thousand times, and that twenty-five hundred of the hits came from Squamish. A few days later, the story was followed by another investigative report for The Tyee, a provincial nonprofit, which expanded the story’s reach.
A total of 6,718 voters cast ballots in the Squamish election, which placed turnout at 39 percent—10 percent higher than the provincial average for that round of municipal elections. The victors were the candidates who had been smeared by the disinformation campaign.
The outcome of the election, given the swirl of falsehoods that preceded it, represented a journalism triumph—albeit one that depended on social media. Facebook had been the originating source of disinformation and, paradoxically, the most effective forum for combating it. So it came as bitter news when, just under a year later, Canada’s government introduced legislation, following Australia’s lead, that would force tech giants to pay Canadian media companies for displaying their articles—a move that ultimately drove Meta, Facebook’s corporate parent, to pull out of the country’s news market. Meta, in a statement opposing the bill, argued that clicks from Facebook delivered millions of dollars in value to publishers, and that journalism amounts to just 3 percent of what Canadians see in their feeds; the company didn’t need Canadian news, in other words, so much as Canadian news needed Meta. Nevertheless, the legislation passed; the law became known as the Online News Act. Meta began removing news from Canadian feeds in July 2023; the company’s ban went into full effect that August. “An article like the one that we wrote for Squamish wouldn’t have nearly the same impact today,” Jay said, “because you can’t share it on Facebook.”
Meta’s retreat from journalism didn’t stop Canadians from seeking out news—but it did prevent them from finding information from legitimate sources. According to a report by the Media Ecosystem Observatory, a research collaboration between McGill University and the University of Toronto, in the year since the ban went into effect, Canadians have seen less reporting online, even as they continue to use Meta to read, watch, and listen to news: 70 percent of survey respondents do so on Facebook, 65 percent on Instagram. Some of that can be explained by screenshots of articles, which tripled in frequency in the four months following the ban. But the researchers also found that only 22 percent of Canadians are aware that Meta has bailed on journalism. That has turned Canadian newsgathering on social media into a game of telephone—out-of-context photos and summaries absent links to the articles from which they’ve been sourced—that few even know is being played. “It would be one thing if they made the absence clear, but they went from blocking the news to facilitating the bamboozling of the news,” David Beers, the founding editor of The Tyee, told me. “If you were an old-fashioned Orwellian dictator, you couldn’t come up with a more clever plan.”
When fall arrived, Meta’s news ban faced its first major test, in Canada’s worst wildfire season to date. In British Columbia, more than three hundred and eighty fires burned; some twenty thousand people were placed under evacuation orders. Canadian officials observed that public service announcements were failing to get around. “I find it astonishing,” David Eby, the province’s premier, said in a press conference, “that we are at this stage of the crisis and the owners of Facebook and Instagram have not come forward and said, ‘Look, we’re trying to make a point with the federal government, but it’s more important that people are safe, it’s more important that they have access to basic information through our networks, and then we can deal with our concerns with the federal government and their new laws later.’” Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, complained that Meta’s actions were “inconceivable.”
At the time, the Online News Act had been codified but not yet implemented, as the government still sought to negotiate with the tech companies that would be affected; on the basis of size, besides Meta, that left only Google. In November, Canada and Google came to an agreement: Google would not block news, and it would provide funding to a newly created Canadian Journalism Collective, which would disseminate a hundred million dollars annually to local outlets. (That is on the order of seventy million dollars less than what Google would have owed Canadian media companies annually under the letter of the law.) Meta, however, showed no signs that it would make concessions. Canadian officials, in turn, have continued to delay enforcement of the ONA—hoping against hope that Meta will come around, bearing the burdens of the news ban while reaping none of the benefits of the fines.
In Squamish, this year has brought another campaign cycle, now for a provincial election. There is news to be had, but it requires that my neighbors seek it out more intentionally than they’ve grown accustomed to. Readers who could once comment on the Facebook posts of their local news organization—generating discussion and story ideas—now have nowhere online to go; Squamish politicians have lost that line of sight to their constituents. There is a small upside: “It’s dialed down the online rhetoric and forced people to have real conversations,” Jenna Stoner, one of the Squamish council members who had been targeted by the disinformation campaign, told me. “A number of folks just got so disheartened with what they saw that they actually took themselves off of social media.” These days, she and her colleagues are increasingly focused on in-person events and meeting constituents in coffee shops. Still, pseudo-journalistic pages remain on Facebook, posting press releases and promulgating unsubstantiated claims.
News outlets have come up with a few workarounds, such as asking individual journalists on staff to post shortened URLs with screenshots of articles from their personal accounts. (Meta may soon become rigorous about removing those posts, but hasn’t yet.) Publishers have also pursued alternate paths to reach their audiences: TikTok, for one, which is still too small in Canada to run up against the ONA. Twenty independent newsrooms from across the country banded together to create Unrigged, a site that hosts links to their stories. Beers told me that The Tyee has fallen back on its email list, which over twenty years has amassed more than eighty thousand addresses. That doesn’t help him, or anyone, reach new readers, though. “This is not a great election for communicating political news, because Meta is blocking it,” he said. “But in ten years, will there be anybody who started up a new publication to serve local communities?”
A few outlets have taken a rather desperate measure: paying Meta to feature their reporting. Though Meta has blocked the pages of news outlets from the view of Canadians, on the back end, publishers can still get in, enter their credit card information, and blast paid posts into the feeds of targeted audiences. “It is ironic, of course, that we find ourselves buying ads on the very Meta who has blocked our stories,” Linda Solomon Wood, the publisher of the National Observer, told me. “But we are aiming only a small part of our ad budget their way. We are placing the bulk of our ad revenue with Google, who chose to work out a deal with Canada.” IndigiNews, a small publication operated by Indigenous women that debuted in 2020, lost half its traffic overnight after Meta’s ban. Eden Fineday, the publisher, told me that she ran the numbers: paying Meta for “boosted” posts to feature every IndigiNews story for a year would cost between fifteen and twenty thousand dollars. To her, that’s worth it; no alternative form of distribution would reach Indigenous, often remote, communities as well as Facebook does. “It’s fine, I guess, if we have the budget and we can keep fundraising for it,” she said. “But what happens if we can’t?”
Assuming the ONA is eventually enforced, paid posts that make news available will subject Meta to fines. The money news publishers pay for the privilege of sharing their coverage, then, becomes like a tax, a means to offset a cost that the Canadian government imposed with the intention of protecting the country’s media. Public officials have caught wind of that problem. But no one I spoke to said there were plans in the works to rethink the law. Pascale St-Onge—the Canadian Heritage minister, who helped write the legislation—called the ONA transparent and durable. “Tech giants will be contributing their fair share,” she vowed. In spite of everything, Solomon Wood remains a supporter. “I think it is right to demand that Meta and Google—who have never paid taxes in Canada, but who have made billions in revenue by cornering the ad business in Canada and taking it away from the nation’s media—give back to Canada,” she told me. The legislation “wasn’t without flaws,” she said, “but it was the right idea.”
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