The blackout has officially begun.
Meta, the internet giant that owns Facebook and Instagram, is doing exactly what it promised: blocking news content from the eyes of all Canadian users. If Northern Ontario Business hasn’t disappeared from your social media feeds just yet, it will at any moment.
Instead of our trusted business journalism, users will encounter this brief message if they visit Northern Ontario Business on Facebook: “People in Canada can’t see this content. In response to Canadian government legislation, news content can’t be viewed in Canada.”
That legislation, of course, is Bill C-18, a Liberal government law designed to force Big Tech (ie. Meta and Google) to compensate media outlets for “stealing” our content and selling lucrative ads all around it. To be clear, Village Media (which operates Northern Ontario Business) has never supported this deeply flawed bill — nor the prevailing wisdom behind it.
Born digital, our growing roster of news and business websites has thrived in the era of Facebook and Google, leveraging the massive reach of these platforms to help deliver the high-quality journalism you’ve come to expect. Does Meta “steal” our content? Absolutely not. The truth is we happily post it there, knowing full well that every click of a Facebook link leads right back to Northern Ontario Business.
Not anymore. Rather than pay up, Meta is wiping away any trace of legitimate news from the feeds of Canadian users. No more links to Northern Ontario Business headlines. No more sharing articles. And nobody — not the Trudeau government, and not the media outlets that lobbied hard for C-18 — can pretend to be surprised. Facebook gave us all plenty of advanced warning.
Truth be told, Village Media has seen this day coming for quite awhile. Although you may not have noticed, the amount of journalism appearing in your Facebook feed has slowly dwindled in recent years, so much so that we’ve been busy working on our own in-house version of a social media platform. It’s exciting stuff, but more on that later.
In the meantime, let me be absolutely clear on one thing: Northern Ontario Business is not going anywhere. Facebook or no Facebook, we are as committed as ever to being your go-to source for industry news and information, free of charge and accessible to all.
No matter what happens, you can always find us right here: www.northernontariobusiness.com.
Thank you for reading. We appreciate your loyalty and support.
Michael Friscolanti is Editor-in-Chief of Village Media
