Meta executives reiterate plan to remove news from Facebook, Instagram if online news act passes

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OTTAWA — Executives from Meta, owners of Facebook and Instagram, said they are working on plans to remove news content from their pages if Parliament passes legislation requiring them to pay news publishers.

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The House of Commons Standing committee on Heritage had asked for Nicholas Clegg, the company’s president of global affairs, and a former U.K. deputy prime minister, but Clegg failed to show up on Monday after initially pledging to appear.

Kevin Chan, Meta’s Global Policy Director, said Clegg decided not to appear, because of the title of the committee; Tech giants’ current and ongoing use of intimidation and subversion tactics to evade regulation in Canada and across the world.

Chan said they wanted to come to speak on the government’s bill to force them to pay publishers.

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“The hearing was changed to a much more confrontational one, one that seemingly had nothing to do at all with the online news act,” he said.

The committee voted to issue another summons to have Clegg appear agreeing to change the name of the committee’s study.

The online news act, C-18, passed through the House of Commons and is currently in the Senate. It would require Facebook and Google to negotiate deals with news publishers to compensate publishers for content.

Chan read a statement on Clegg’s behalf opposing the online news act arguing that Meta shouldn’t be forced to subsidize publishers who post links on their page.

“We’ve taken the difficult decision that if this flawed legislation is passed we will have to end the availability of news content on Facebook and Instagram in Canada,” he said. “Asking a social media company in 2023 to subsidize news publishers for content that isn’t that important to our users is like asking email providers to pay the postal service for people because people don’t send letters anymore.”

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Similar legislation to C-18 passed in Australia in 2021, requiring the firms to pay publishers. Meta removed news content in response to the Australian law, before ultimately coming to an agreement with the government.

When removing news content in Australia however, the company took down emergency notices and other vital information.

Rachel Curran, the company’s head of public policy in Canada, said they aim to do better if they are forced to remove content in Canada.

“I can confirm that the way Australia unfolded was not ideal,” she said. “There were some technical errors made in the way that we removed news from our platform.”

Curren said taking news content off the platform isn’t something they want to do, but she said it is something they have to prepare for because they fundamentally disagree with the idea of the legislation.

“We believe that news has real social value. The problem is that it doesn’t have much of an economic value to Meta,” she said. This is a business decision that we’re being forced to make by this legislation. We wish we were not in this position. We don’t want to have to make this decision.

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