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Meta’s news ban in Canada has led to a media disaster. What does that mean for US efforts to wrangle big tech platforms?
It’s been a year since Meta yanked Canadian news from its platforms – Facebook, Instagram, and Threads – in response to a government bill that would see tech giants pay news outlets for linking to their online content. The Online News Act, which is similar to legislation passed in Australia, led to threats from both Meta and Google that they would pull news content originating in Canada. Google eventually struck a deal with media outlets; Meta did not, and it shows no sign of changing course a year later.
The full effects of Meta’s news ban are just coming to light. A report released this month by the Media Ecosystem Observatory finds that nearly half of online news media engagement has dropped in the last year, including 85% on Facebook and Instagram, a loss that “has not been compensated by increases on other social media platforms.”
It also finds that nearly a third of local news outlets that were active on social media are now dormant. What’s more, a whopping 75% of the public is unaware of the ban that has led to Canadians consuming less news – and more disinformation – than ever before.
“Canadians continue to learn about politics and current events through Facebook and Instagram,” the report summarizes, “but through a more biased and less factual lens than before, and many Canadians do not even realize the shift has occurred. They do not appear to be seeking news elsewhere.”
It’s a worst-of-all-worlds scenario in Canada as a struggling media industry and a growing online disinformation problem collide, depriving outlets of much-needed views and shares, and readers of access to reliable, high-quality journalism. In an ironic twist, a law meant to preserve news media by filling the coffers of news outlets, allowing them to keep staff and grow coverage, is contributing to its demise.
Will the Liberals stand up for their law?
The Liberal government isn’t backing down in the face of this new data, though. Ottawa is now saying Meta may still indeed be regulated by way of the Online News Act since some news is still sneaking through the block, which looks like a technicality but speaks to the government’s intention to double down on the law.
Moreover, there’s big money at stake. Google has signed a CA$100 million dollar deal to fund journalism. That money will be managed by small independent outlets focused on digital journalism. It’s too early to say what effect the money will have on news media in Canada, since the program is just starting to roll out, and there’s plenty still to be determined. But you know what they say – tens of millions here, tens of millions there, it eventually starts to add up to real money.
Graeme Thompson, a senior analyst with Eurasia Group’s global macro-geopolitics practice, says “The de-platforming of Canadian news content is probably not what the government expected when they launched their Online News Act, and it’s having the perverse effect that now Canadians are less exposed to quality, reliable journalism and reporting on social media platforms.”
But he doesn’t expect Canada will back down “unless there’s a change in government.”
By the next federal election in 2025, there may be one as the Conservatives are up in the polls. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has criticized the legislation and suggested it was “like 1984,” claiming it’s censorship and expressing concern that the government was trying to ban Canadians from seeing the news. That tone suggests he may be inclined to rescind the law, or at least change it.
US efforts to extract media payments from platforms are moving … slowly
Canada isn’t the only country working on securing payments from the tech sector to offset the harmful effect their advertising market dominance has on news media. But the Canadian experience may serve as a warning, or at least a lesson, for US lawmakers.
A bill before Congress, the Journalism Competition Act of 2023, would set a process for collective negotiation between news media and online platforms for payments to the former in exchange for access to their content. Introduced in 2021, in the last Congress, by Sen. Amy Klobuchar and again in 2023 for the current one, the bill is going nowhere fast. It has seen no movement since it was placed on the Senate’s legislative calendar in July 2023.
The state of California is considering a similar bill. Meta has threatened to block news there if the bill, which enjoys bipartisan support, passes. The California Journalism Preservation Act passed the state assembly 46-6 and is now in the Senate, where it’s working its way through committee in the face of opposition from tech giants who claim the bill won’t support local journalism, but rather act as a giveaway to hedge funds and big media companies.
A 2023 white paper found that Google and Meta made billions from linking to news – $21 billion and $4 billion respectively – and “owed” $10-12 billion and $1.9 billion annually to publishers as payment for the profit they make from news media content.
Scott Bade, a senior analyst with Eurasia Group’s geo-technology unit, expects the US won’t rush to emulate Canada’s approach. He notes that a divided Congress and looming election means lawmakers won’t be keen to make headway on a controversial tech regulation bill. The latest data from Canada won’t exactly spur action, either.
When it comes to California, where Democrats have control of the state legislature, the chances of a bill passing may be higher, he notes, but they still face intense lobbying from the tech industry, and it’s not a given that Gov. Gavin Newsom would even sign it.
A matter of life and death
The consequences of news bans are real. They suppress the capacity of media organizations to get factual, reported information to the public – and thus put media, particularly local outlets, at further risk of folding. They also facilitate the flow of unreliable information. The consequences of this dynamic can be quite literally a matter of life and death.
The recent far-right, anti-immigrant riots in the United Kingdom were violent and included fires being lit at hotels in which asylum-seekers were staying. There have been hundreds of arrests so far after online misinformation and disinformation spread, claiming that a Muslim immigrant was responsible for the stabbing deaths of three youths in Southport – in fact, the suspect is a non-Muslim who was born in Cardiff.
As Time reports, the riots were brutal as “[f]ar-right groups were seen looting, attacking police and locals, and performing Nazi salutes in the street. As the mobs chanted ‘send them home’ and ‘Islam out,’ they also destroyed mosques, libraries, and graffitied racial slurs on homes.”
Ahead of the upcoming US presidential election and 2025 Canadian federal election, there is worry that online disinformation will pose a serious, even “unprecedented” threat, which could lead to harassment, intimidation, and even violence.
The next war
Governments are trying to extract funds from well-heeled tech platforms and struggling to keep media outlets afloat while fighting to displace misinformation and disinformation with more reliable sources of news. But track records are spotty, and the future is uncertain.
In some ways, the media funding battle is the “last war,” says Bade, and a new struggle is increasingly emerging over artificial intelligence and the “bigger threat” of content stripping.
“If media companies are going to have collective negotiation with tech companies,” Bade says, “it probably should be over that.”
Welcome to your AI video fever dream
Generative AI lets people craft sprawling essays, create detailed images, and even clone their own voice with remarkable precision. But taking an AI-generated video service for a spin made me realize that the technology is still far from creating convincing or cinematic video. In fact, the entire experience was surreal.
Luma AI’s Dream Machine, a free text-to-video service, warns users that they’re limited to 10 videos per day, and 30 videos per month, due to high demand — unless they pay at least $29.99 a month for the starting subscription tier. But I only needed to wait a couple of minutes to get my first prompts turned into … very, very strange videos.
I started with a simple request: Can you generate a video of a baseball player hitting a ball out of the park?
The results were astonishingly bizarre. Instead of a smooth, realistic depiction of a home run, what I got was a fever dream. The video featured an old man contorting his body in impossible ways, simultaneously attempting to swing a bat and prepare to throw (or catch?) a ball. While the stadium background looked reasonably accurate, the player’s movements were distorted, his jersey number blurred, and his face twisted unnaturally as he moved. Meanwhile, the bat morphed in size as he swung, and the words on the stadium signs were incoherent.
Determined to achieve a more precise outcome, I decided to try a prompt generated by ChatGPT. Sometimes the robots are best at talking to other robots.
The prompt described a sunny afternoon at a modern baseball stadium filled with cheering fans, detailing vibrant team colors and the batter’s white uniform with blue pinstripes. I requested a pitcher in a dark blue uniform throwing a fastball, a batter’s level swing, a monster home run, and the crowd’s roaring applause.
The result was even more disconcerting. The batter appeared to be hugging himself while morphing into a strange creature. Fans inexplicably sat near home plate, which transformed into an arch shape with some strange object on top. The batter was facing the wrong direction — or was that the catcher?
Given the perennial fear of deepfake videos and misinformation, I prompted the model to give me videos of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Pope Francis, and Barack Obama giving speeches — but it refused. It did, however, agree to create a video of basketball star Michael Jordan giving a speech in a school gym.
The video showed a figure who kind of looked like Jordan for a split second before inexplicably morphing into a completely different-looking person. Meanwhile, another figure shuffled by like a zombie in ill-fitting pants. The gym setting was almost right, except for a riser cutting off someone’s legs, incorrect basketball markings on the floor, and a basketball hoop seemingly painted on the wall.
My editor Matt Kendrick, an Emmy-nominated TV producer in a former life, also gave it a try. His first effort to work up a thrilling historical drama set in medieval Mongolia resulted in a somewhat disturbing reverse-centaur situation.
But maybe the software is designed for the format of a proper Hollywood script, something like, say, the 2004 Kal Penn/John Cho opus “Harold and Kumar go to White Castle.” Alas, pasting in that finely crafted script resulted in nothing more than a clip of a man taking a phone call in an indecipherable language while sitting at a desk spruced up with the flag of the Belarusian democratic movement and some rather phallic decorations.
Text-to-video models like Luma AI or OpenAI’s still-under-wraps model, Sora, promise to make lifelike scenes — but the technical challenges we saw in our initial test suggest that this technology is still a ways away. The glitchiness, blurriness, and jarring incoherence were not evidence of a model that could confuse anyone — at least not without serious improvement. So Hollywood shouldn’t be worried just yet.
The bar for success is high but not impossible — and regulators should plan ahead. If video generation technology is cheap and powerful, it could be used to scam people, deceive them, and even disrupt elections. Earlier this year, an employee at a bank in Hong Kong was defrauded into paying over $25 million by deepfakes of the company’s chief financial official on a video call. And AI-generated recordings, photos, avatars, and text have played a role in influencing politics this year — so it’s only a matter of time before AI-generated video causes a stir.
Nick Reiners, senior analyst for geotechnology at Eurasia Group, says that while regulators haven’t cracked down on text-to-video models, a major global focus is transparency – “so you know you’re looking at deepfakes,” he said. That’s a principle of the European Union’s AI Act, the G7’s Hiroshima Process, and the Biden administration’s executive order on AI.
Reiners sees hesitation from major AI companies in releasing models and chalks it up more to the negative societal externalities than the products being technically underwhelming. “You look at the amount of progress that image generators have had in recent years, and you'd assume we see a similar improvement curve with video,” he said.
The two big issues, in Reiners’ view, are disinformation and sexual abuse material, and he thinks the latter might be addressed first: “There’s a big push on both sides of the aisle to protect children.” When video models improve, it may be deepfake of obscene or indecent nature that causes a ruckus before it can help throw an election one way or another.
HARD NUMBERS: Gaza hospitals in critical condition, trust in US media plummets (again), Mexican cops ambushed, autoworker strike expands, revisiting Grenada 40 years later
23: After more than two weeks of siege and airstrikes by Israel, only 23 of the Gaza Strip’s 35 hospitals are still functioning, according to the World Bank. The enclave’s five main health facilities are filled beyond capacity. Gaza authorities report at least 5,700 dead in Israel’s retaliation for the Oct. 7 rampage by Hamas in southern Israel.
32: Only 32% of Americans trust the mass media, matching the historic low reached in 2016, according to a new Gallup poll. A historic high of 39% say they don’t trust mass media “at all.” Note that the survey was conducted before a number of mainstream media organizations initially misreported the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital bombing in Gaza. From a historical perspective, the highest level of trust ever recorded was 72%, back in ... 1976.
13: Gunmen in the Mexican state of Guerrero killed at least 13 law enforcement officials, including a local police chief, in an ambush on Tuesday. Overall, Mexico’s homicide rate has been gradually falling after reaching record highs during the pandemic. But Guerrero, which lies about 100 miles south of Mexico City and is home to the famous resort of Acapulco, has seen a surge of violence as drug cartels vie for turf. It’s now the second deadliest state for Mexican police.
5,000: The United Auto Workers union expanded their ongoing strike against the big three US carmakers on Tuesday, calling on some 5,000 employees at a GM plant in Texas to stop work. The plant, in Arlington, is one of GM’s most profitable. There are now some 45,000 workers on strike at facilities belonging to GM, Ford, and Stellantis. GM said Sunday the current work stoppage would cost it some $200 million per week.
40: Exactly 40 years ago, in one of the more lopsided conflicts of the Cold War, the US led an invasion of the tiny Caribbean island nation of Grenada, where a pro-Soviet regime had been in power since 1979. In the days before the invasion, Grenada’s Marxist PM Maurice Bishop was executed by a rival faction within his government. On the pretext of protecting US students in Grenada from deepening unrest, Ronald Reagan sent in several thousand Marines and special forces. Cynics noted that the invasion immediately drew US media attention away from the scene in Beirut, where two days earlier a suicide bomber had killed hundreds of US Marines in an attack that Washington blamed on Hezbollah. The Grenadian Marxist regime was overthrown after a few weeks of fighting, and elections were held several months later. Bishop’s body was never found.
Was CNN's Town Hall with Trump a mistake?
"The media is not the enemy. The media is the people. And yet that messaging's gone so awry." Media journalist and former CNN host Brian Stelter expresses such a basic thought in the latest episode of GZERO World, and yet it's one about which so many Americans disagree. Stelter joined media historian Nicole Hemmer for a special panel interview on the current state of our hyper-fragmented media landscape and to look ahead at how news outlets can recapture voters' trust ahead of the 2023 election.
A big part of that mission, says Stelter, is to do more listening. "We need to hear so much more from voters and, frankly, so much less from these politicians that are pandering to them."
Watch this episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer: "Politics, trust & the media in the age of misinformation"
Watch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld or on US public television. Check local listings.
When did people stop trusting the media?
There was a time, not so long ago, when people trusted the media, and not just their specific corners of it. Walter Cronkite. Edward R. Murrow. Dan Rather. These were people all Americans relied on to understand the world, and they did so without suspicion. Today, we live in a different reality (or multiple realities, in fact). But according to media historian Nicole Hemmer, the war on trust began decades ago.
Starting back in the 1970s, Hemmer says, "...it was advantageous to the Republican Party to try to create an alternative to the mainstream media, an alternative to the Walter Cronkites...We see that with Fox News in the '90s, but also with the rise of talk radio, and then to some extent, the rise of alternative social networks that's happening now."
Hemmer joined media journalist and former CNN host Brian Stelter on a special panel interview for GZERO World with Ian Bremmer. The two discussed how the hyper-fragmented media landscape in which we find ourself has actually been decades in the making. And they look ahead to the 2024 election and consider how media companies can rebuild trust with Americans during such a crucial time for democracy.
Watch this episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer: "Politics, trust & the media in the age of misinformation"
Watch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld or on US public television. Check local listings.
Podcast: The past, present and future of political media
Listen: Trust in journalism is rapidly eroding. At the same time, partisanship is skyrocketing.
Ahead of the 2024 US election, the GZERO World Podcast takes a look at the media’s role in politics and democracy itself. What lessons has the press learned since 2020 and how will the first election in the age of generative AI play out? Donald Trump’s presidency and role in contesting the 2020 election was a unique challenge for journalists. How do you reliably cover the US president and leader of the free world while he regularly repeats misinformation? And how to you challenge a politician whose entire brand is premised on the idea he’s being attacked by the press?
There's also the issue of covering some of the more extreme elements in both political parties. Politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. traffic in conspiracy theories and often, outright lies. But they have a growing constellation of media platforms, from NewsMax to Joe Rogan, to reach an increasingly fragmented audience distrustful of mainstream news sources.
What lessons did journalists and the media take away from 2016 and 2020? And how will generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney impact the upcoming US presidential election in 2024?
Media experts Brian Stelter, journalist and former CNN anchor, as well as Nicole Hemmer, a political historian specializing in partisan media break down the current media landscape in a conversation with host Ian Bremmer.
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