Meta still blocks news links in Canada, but preliminary talks, a CRTC case and AI licensing offer possible paths to a deal
More than three years after the Online News Act triggered Meta’s withdrawal of news, preliminary talks and a CRTC case offer possible paths forward. Neither has produced a deal.
OTTAWA — Canadians still cannot normally view or share links from recognized news organizations on Facebook and Instagram, more than three years after Meta imposed its sweeping news blackout in response to the federal Online News Act.
This situation has dragged on for over three years, frustrating many social media users, impacting many small to large news sites in Canada. It actually means that for many people access to news is harder or at least seems harder.
There are signs of movement.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government says its door is open, federal officials have held preliminary discussions with Meta, and a group of independent television stations is trying to bring the company into bargaining through the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.
Canadian Heritage briefing notes also say Meta has shown interest in licensing Canadian journalism for its artificial-intelligence products, provided it receives an exemption and greater legal clarity.
None of those developments has restored news links, produced a public financial offer or changed Meta’s fundamental position. As of Nov. 4, the blackout remains in force and no settlement timetable has been announced.
What Meta blocks in Canada
For people accessing Facebook or Instagram from Canada, links and content posted by Canadian news publishers and broadcasters are generally unavailable. International outlets can continue posting for audiences elsewhere, but their news content is also blocked from Canadian users.
Canadians are generally prevented from posting links to domains Meta has classified as news organizations.
Meta describes the measure as ending “news availability” in Canada. Critics call it a news ban. Workarounds, including screenshots, copied text, videos and links routed through other sites, continue to appear.
The formal policy covers Facebook and Instagram. It does not mean every form of public-affairs discussion or every post containing information about current events is removed.
How the dispute began
The Liberal government introduced Bill C-18, the Online News Act, in 2022 as a response to the migration of advertising revenue from newspapers and broadcasters to large digital platforms.
The legislation received royal assent on June 22, 2023, and its regulatory framework took effect that December.
The law is intended to create bargaining power for eligible Canadian news organizations when a large search engine or social-media platform makes their journalism available.
If voluntary negotiations fail, the framework permits mandatory bargaining and final-offer arbitration overseen by the CRTC.
It does not establish a simple fee for every hyperlink. Its definition of making news available is broader, covering the reproduction of news or facilitating access through indexing, aggregation or ranking.
Ottawa argued that companies benefiting from the circulation and discovery of journalism should contribute to the cost of producing it.
Meta argued that the law misunderstood its relationship with publishers. News organizations voluntarily posted links to Facebook, the company said, and received readers and potential subscription or advertising revenue in return. Meta warned before the law passed that it would remove news rather than accept open-ended financial liability.
The company began implementing its block in August 2023, before the legislation’s regulatory provisions came into force.
Is it a matter of the federal government trying to be “Big Brother” or is it the social media giants looking to line their pockets?
It is mostly a commercial and regulatory fight, not a classic “Big Brother” censorship campaign. But both sides are exercising considerable power, and Canadian readers and smaller publishers are paying much of the price.
The federal government is trying to correct what it considers a market imbalance: Google and Meta capture a large share of digital advertising revenue, while newsrooms bear the cost of producing journalism. The Online News Act creates bargaining and arbitration rules intended to move some money back to eligible news organizations.
It does not instruct Meta which stories Canadians may read, require government approval of journalism or order Facebook to remove news. Meta made the business decision to block it.
That makes “Big Brother” an imprecise description. The stronger criticism is that Ottawa designed an intervention whose foreseeable consequence was reduced access to news. By treating the facilitation of access as a potential basis for compensation, the law gave Meta a financial incentive to stop facilitating access altogether.
Meta’s motives are also primarily economic. The company is not blocking links to collect a new fee from Canadians. It is avoiding payments, regulatory supervision and a precedent that other countries might copy. Meta maintains that publishers voluntarily posted links and received free traffic, so requiring payment reverses the normal value exchange.
That argument has some merit: Facebook did send readers to publishers. But Meta also benefited from keeping users engaged around journalism while it and Google captured much of the digital advertising market. Its ability to remove an entire category of reliable information without materially harming its Canadian business illustrates the market power Ottawa was attempting to address.
Google’s response is revealing. It negotiated a collective agreement, contributes about $100 million annually and continues carrying Canadian news. Meta decided that news was not valuable enough to justify a similar arrangement.
The fairest conclusion is:
- Ottawa is pursuing an economic and cultural-policy objective, not conventional censorship.
- The law was poorly calibrated if its goal included preserving access to journalism on major social platforms.
- Meta is protecting its profits and global bargaining position, but it also has a legitimate objection to paying for links that publishers posted voluntarily.
- Meta chose the blackout; the legislation created the incentive for that choice.
- Canadians, particularly readers of local, northern and Indigenous journalism, have absorbed the resulting loss of access.
So this is not simply government control versus corporate greed. It is a power struggle between a government trying to redistribute digital-market revenue and a dominant platform determined to prevent governments from setting the price of carrying news. Both sides can defend their principles, but neither has produced an outcome that serves Canadian readers particularly well.
Wildfires brought the consequences into focus
The timing turned the dispute into a public-safety controversy.
As wildfires forced evacuations in the Northwest Territories and British Columbia in August 2023, residents who had relied on Facebook groups could no longer share links from news organizations covering evacuation routes, road closures and emergency instructions.
Official government, emergency-service and community accounts remained available. However, newsrooms including Yellowknife-based Cabin Radio had to rely on screenshots and audience-created workarounds to circulate reporting.
The federal government accused Meta of placing corporate interests ahead of public safety. Meta maintained that Canadians could still receive emergency information directly from public authorities and community organizations.
Google chose a different route
Google initially threatened to remove Canadian news from Search, but reached an agreement with Ottawa in November 2023.
Under the resulting framework, Google makes a single annual payment to the Canadian Journalism Collective, which distributes the money among qualifying news organizations. In return, the CRTC granted Google a five-year exemption from mandatory bargaining.
Google’s initial contribution was $100 million, indexed to inflation. The fund received $102.5 million for its second year in 2026, according to the CRTC’s latest independent audit.
The arrangement demonstrates that the federal framework can accommodate one collective agreement instead of requiring a platform to negotiate separately with hundreds of outlets.
Meta has not pursued that route. Its position is that, because it has stopped making news available, Facebook and Instagram are not digital news intermediaries covered by the law.
Are Ottawa and Meta negotiating?
There has been contact, but the word “negotiating” may overstate its maturity.
In January, a spokesperson for Canadian Identity and Culture Minister Marc Miller said the government was engaged in continuing discussions with Meta and remained open to a deal. Miller characterized the contacts as “very preliminary” and said he was not personally conducting them.
An April Canadian Heritage briefing note repeated that Ottawa remained open to Meta participating constructively in the news ecosystem. It also said Meta had signalled interest in agreements with Canadian publishers for the use of journalism in AI products and potential participation in the Online News Act framework.
According to the briefing note, Meta’s interest was conditional on receiving an exemption and legal clarity about how the act applies to news used by AI systems.
That could provide a new negotiating path. Meta has already signed AI-content agreements with publishers in the United States and Europe so its chatbot can answer current-events questions using licensed reporting.
There is still no announced Canadian agreement, proposed contribution or public commitment from Meta to restore Facebook and Instagram links.
A CRTC case could change the legal picture
The Local Independent Television Stations group, or LITS, opened a second front in February by asking the CRTC to commence collective bargaining with Meta.
The stations argue that Meta has not entirely stopped making news available. Their application cites screenshots, copied material, audiovisual news, YouTube links and news links that allegedly passed through Meta’s controls.
LITS contends that the act contains no minimum-volume test: if Meta reproduces or facilitates access to qualifying news content at all, it may be subject to bargaining.
Meta told the CRTC during an earlier information-gathering process that it uses extensive monitoring to identify news outlets and prevent their content from reaching Canadians. It said occasional content that evades its controls does not transform Facebook or Instagram into regulated news intermediaries.
Canadian Heritage said Meta did not respond to the LITS application itself. The CRTC added further material to the proceeding in April, but its public docket shows no final decision as of Nov. 4.
A ruling for the stations would not automatically restore every blocked link. It could, however, require bargaining, expose Meta to regulatory consequences or prompt a court challenge over whether incomplete blocking is enough to bring the company under the act.
Trade pressure complicates the dispute
The United States has identified Canada’s Online News Act as a trade irritant affecting American digital companies.
The issue has entered the broader Canada-U.S. economic relationship and discussions surrounding the review of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement. American technology-industry groups have called for repeal of the legislation.
Ottawa has said it stands by the value of the Online News Act. Still, trade pressure gives the federal government another reason to search for a settlement that preserves financial support for Canadian journalism while allowing Meta to restore links.
No public document shows that Canada has agreed to repeal or materially weaken the act as part of trade negotiations.
The blackout changed how Canadians encounter news
A 2024 study from the Media Ecosystem Observatory at McGill University and the University of Toronto found that Canadian news outlets lost 85 per cent of their engagement on Facebook and Instagram during the first year of the blackout.
Increased activity on other platforms did not make up the difference. The researchers estimated an overall 43-per-cent decline in social-media engagement with news and approximately 11 million fewer views of original journalism each day.
The burden was not evenly distributed. Small, local, Indigenous and northern outlets often depended more heavily on Facebook to reach dispersed communities and lacked the marketing resources of national organizations.
Meta, meanwhile, had little immediate commercial incentive to reverse course. Canadians continued using its platforms, while the company had already been reducing the prominence of traditional news in favour of video, personal recommendations and entertainment.
AI creates both an opening and a new conflict
Meta’s growing need for reliable, current information may be the best opening for a settlement.
An AI assistant answering questions about elections, emergencies or public policy needs authoritative and timely material. That gives professional news organizations something Meta now wants beyond ordinary Facebook referral links.
However, AI is also generating new disagreements about consent and compensation.
This week, Meta postponed new business-account terms after publishers and open-web advocates argued that the language could permit broad scraping of their websites. Meta said the update was intended to improve advertising and product recommendations and did not change how it uses web crawlers.
The postponement does not change the Canadian news blackout. It shows why Ottawa, Meta and publishers will need to define separately what rights are being licensed for links, AI answers, model training and other uses of journalism.
What would it take to restore news?
The most plausible settlement would resemble the Google structure without necessarily copying its dollar value.
Meta could negotiate with a collective of Canadian news organizations, make a defined contribution and seek a CRTC exemption from individual bargaining. Ottawa would have to provide sufficient certainty that the agreement also resolves Meta’s potential liability for AI uses covered by the arrangement.
Other possibilities include regulatory changes, a CRTC decision that forces the bargaining question, or a wider Canada-U.S. trade compromise.
Each path carries obstacles. Meta does not appear to need news links to maintain its Canadian audience. Ottawa does not want to reward a platform for using a national blackout to escape legislation. Publishers want compensation but also need access to audiences.
The result is limited progress rather than a breakthrough: both sides are communicating, the government is publicly receptive and Meta may be interested in licensed Canadian content for AI. But Facebook and Instagram remain closed to ordinary news-link sharing, and neither party has disclosed terms capable of ending the dispute.
Sources: Online News Act, Meta’s explanation of its Canadian news restrictions, Canadian Heritage briefing on Meta and negotiations, CRTC proceeding involving Meta and independent television stations, CRTC impact report for 2025-26, Media Ecosystem Observatory study, Canadian Press report on preliminary talks, Associated Press report on Meta’s postponed business terms
