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Canada’s News Block on Meta Has Minimal Impact on User Engagement

By  |  August 29, 2023

Meta’s decision to block news links on its Canadian platform has had almost no effect on the engagement of Canadian users, according to a recent study. Daily active users of Facebook and time spent on the app in Canada have stayed roughly unchanged since Meta took the step to remove news links at the start of August.

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    Links to news articles make up less than three percent of the content on its Facebook feeds and have no economic value to the company, according to Meta. Reuters recently reported that even before Meta pulled the plug on news links in Canada, Facebook referrals to a sampling of popular news sites in Canada were down by around 35 percent year-over-year in July, and over 70 percent since 2020.

    Read more: Meta To Pull News From Facebook Over Canada’s Online News Act

    “Links to news articles make up less than 3% of the content on its Facebook feeds and have no economic value to the company,” Meta stated.

    Reuters added: “Even before Meta pulled the plug on news links in Canada, Facebook referrals to a sampling of popular news sites in Canada were already down about 35% year-over-year in July and about 74% since 2020.”

    For now, it seems that Meta’s decision to block news links from its Canadian platform has, so far, failed to have much of an impact on the Canadian users of the popular social media app.

    Source: Reuters