You may have noticed a change in our online presence. Well, actually, its disappearance. As the Gazette announced last week, Meta has blocked both our Facebook and Instagram accounts. 

We are only the latest casualty in Meta’s fight against the Canadian government’s Online News Act. Most Canadian news organizations were banned on Meta’s platforms last August. 

The Act requires that global internet platforms pay for the news stories and images posted and shared on them. Google has agreed to pay $100 million to news organizations in Canada every year and is keeping news searchable on its platforms — but only just. (It is preparing to dispense with actual news stories and offer instead AI-generated summaries. But that is a topic for another day). 

Facebook, too, has been filtering out news on its “feeds” around the world. If you are on Facebook, there just aren’t all that many news items to share anymore. The company has found that news stories are a liability. The Canadian government is not the only one that wants to protect journalists from becoming unpaid content providers. Around the world, governments are trying to make Meta and Google pay for the news stories they circulate for free. 

Meta, for its part, is using Canada to make clear what the stakes are to governments around the world. Let us use news for free, or we will kill your news agencies by censoring them. Death by internet. It’s not a new thing, but it still hurts.

The truth is, whether news circulates on Facebook or not, it is still dying. The real issue, of course, is ad revenues. This fight is not over news, it’s over money. Google and Meta together earned 80% of the $14 billion in online ad revenues reported in 2022 in Canada. 

It’s not that people don’t want to advertise on news sites, it’s more that the market belongs to Google and Meta. Everything goes through them. Google Ads can take at least a one-third cut of all digital ads because it manages both ends: it brokers all digital advertising for buyers and sellers. 

Meanwhile, Meta siphons advertising revenue away from news agencies, as we’ve seen. It limits, downplays, and otherwise censors them. “People don’t want to read news,” it says, breezily. “They prefer inane reels. Can we help you make one?”

This is the “Duopoly.” A monopoly by two is even worse than a monopoly by one. There’s no way around it. 

We will miss being full participants in the social media ecosystem in the County. The Gazette’s Facebook page was a kind of town square, a place for public discussion of the latest news, stories in turn shared across a host of community pages and discussed some more. That kind of engagement kept us informed of what people were thinking, and it offered a place for people to talk things over. We wrote many news stories in response to these public comments and were directed to what was important by the level of response.

Some stories would go the County equivalent of viral, streaming by something like 30,000 people as they were shared, and shared again. 

That is twice the print circulation of this newspaper. Which requires a week-long effort by an eight-person team to research, write, edit, proofread, organize, design, print, bundle, pack, truck, and finally, hand-deliver to your mailbox. 

The real work behind each news story —the meeting attended, the reports read, the interview conducted, the photograph taken — is rendered completely invisible by Facebook’s instant “sharing” service, which is effortless and endless. And entirely unpaid. 

It’s as though copyright no longer exists. It is a basic point of law that if you wish to copy and distribute somebody else’s work you must pay for it. You must have permission to reproduce it.

And there’s the rub. In posting our work to Facebook, we gave that permission. We allowed 30,000 copies of a news or sports story, instantly and entirely for free, to be “shared” on Mark Zuckerberg’s global platform because of the exposure it promised. Readers. Coming to our website. Knowing about us. Gaining circulation. Clicks, likes, emojis, reactions. Adrenaline. Addictive. 

Only let us remember who is the prince in this game and who the pauper … or, really, the paper. 

We knew it was a bargain with the devil. Facebook circulation heft in exchange for the rights to tens of thousands of copies of one original news story. This is not an equal bargain. The increasing impoverishment of major and minor news organizations around the world makes that clear. 

And so, while we love the sense of a coffee shop debate that community Facebook pages offer, that we’ve been kicked off the platform is just more evidence that its price is too high.

Enough. We all need to actively seek out news from the source in a step toward clearer, more direct engagement with the world. The digital town square on Facebook, let’s face it, leaves a lot to be desired. As Taylor Swift puts it, “Say it in the street, that’s a knock-out, / But you say it in a Tweet, that’s a cop-out.”

Please keep telling us what we need to hear. We are hoping that our Letters page will grow. There is a difference between a Facebook comment and a letter. The former is often spur-of-the-moment. The latter demands some time and thought. It may seem a bit old-fashioned, but there has been a lively letters page for some 200 years in the Gazette. In the pages of the 1830s, the spirit of a Facebook thread, played out over a few weeks rather than a few minutes, can be traced. Nothing wrong with taking some time to think things over. That’s an important part of being able to consider multiple points of view. 

And it’s not all super serious. Following our kids’ lead, we have started a YouTube channel. We will offer an entertaining and often musical round-up of the stories we’re covering each week. Please come see! Just search Picton Gazette + YouTube.

And there is our newsletter, the Picton Gazette Express, which comes to your inbox rather than your mailbox. A digest of the weekly paper, it is like a fulsome table of contents that takes you to our website. It has the interesting bits we just didn’t have room for in the print edition, as well as the coming weekend’s Events and Open Houses. You can subscribe on our main page.

Please come, and share, and read, and respond. We love hearing from you.