An Uninformed Society Is Ripe --It's Time to End Bill C-18

 Researched and Written by ChatGPT with my prompts.

If I were a journalist who relies on readership, I'd be pissed by Bill C-18

Remember when you could share a news article on Facebook?

That wasn’t some trivial convenience — it was one of the last remaining public squares for organic information exchange. Then came Bill C-18, Canada’s so-called Online News Act. Ostensibly created to make Big Tech “pay their fair share,” it ended up doing something else entirely: it made Canadians less informed.

When Meta pulled the plug on news sharing in Canada, the government shrugged. The public barely noticed. But the ripple effects have been brutal.

The Numbers They Don’t Want to Talk About

Since the ban:

• Engagement with Canadian news on Facebook and Instagram has plummeted by 43 % overall.

• Local outlets — the ones that actually matter for community awareness — saw a 58 % drop in engagement.

• National outlets dropped 24 %, losing millions of eyes per day.

• Canadians using Facebook as a news source fell from 29 % to 16 % in less than a year.

That’s not just a dip — it’s a collapse.
Roughly 11 million fewer news article views per day vanished the moment Meta hit the kill switch.

The Real Casualty

The hardest hit are the small, local, independent publishers — the same ones already bleeding from corporate consolidation and government dependency. When you cut off the public’s access to local stories, you don’t just shrink ad revenue — you shrink awareness.

And an unaware public? That’s gold for anyone who thrives on apathy and confusion.
A society cut off from current, local, and independent reporting becomes ripe — for manipulation, for propaganda, for whatever the next “official narrative” happens to be.

Censorship Wrapped in Legislation

Bill C-18 wasn’t about saving journalism. If it were, we’d have seen real support for investigative outlets, not policy that drives the few remaining ones into extinction. It was a corporate standoff dressed up as virtue — and in the process, it gutted the last lifeline of free, shareable information.

Now, many Canadians simply don’t know what’s happening in their own towns.
They aren’t seeing investigative stories on housing policy, environmental scandals, or government mismanagement. And Meta — with its global reach — doesn’t care. The government doesn’t seem to either.

The Great Quiet

Most Canadians don’t even realize what’s been done. According to surveys, fewer than one in four know that Facebook and Instagram banned news links altogether.
That’s the definition of silent control: when the lights go out, and most people don’t even notice the darkness.

So What Now?

If we want a society that thinks critically, we have to reclaim the flow of information — not wait for government-approved intermediaries to feed it back to us.
Start bookmarking independent sites. Subscribe to newsletters. Support journalists who aren’t owned by billionaires or politicians.
Because once the collective mind goes quiet, it doesn’t take long for someone else to start thinking for it.

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Sources

1. Media Ecosystem Observatory, “How Meta’s News Ban Reshaped Canadian Media” — Digital Content Next, Sept 2024. Link

2. The Hub, “Local Canadian News Has Lost 58 Percent of Online Engagement” — Aug 2024. Link

3. Librarianship.ca, “Old News, New Reality,” 2024. Link

4. Media in Canada, “How Canadians Are Getting Their News Without Meta,” May 2024. Link

5. Nieman Lab, “Screenshots Are One Big Winner of Meta’s News Ban in Canada,” May 2024. Link

6. The Fix Media, “Canadian Publishers Are Still Adapting Two Years After Meta’s News Ban,” Aug 2025. Link

7. On the Record News, “How Meta’s News Block Could Reshape Voter Awareness in the Next Federal Election,” 2024. Link