If Part 1 was about journalism throwing itself at gadgets, Part 2 is about something more intimate: journalism throwing itself at a platform. For a decade and a half, news organisations treated Facebook as both a distribution pipeline and a civic partner. Facebook was going to rebuild community, reconnect audiences, and, eventually, help \u201csave local news.\u201d It poured hundreds of millions into journalism programs, accelerators, and prestige events. Then, when it became inconvenient, it simply turned the news off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2017 Facebook launched the Facebook Journalism Project, promising deeper collaboration with newsrooms \u201cin the Facebook product development process.\u201d It funded accelerator programs to help publishers grow subscriptions and memberships, dangling workshops and six\u2011figure payouts in front of struggling outlets. In Canada, the Canadian Journalism Foundation happily partnered on Facebook\u2011branded awards for \u201cdigital news innovation\u201d and news literacy; the J\u2011Talk series put tech executives and editors on the same stage to discuss how platforms and journalism would shape the future together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I went to one of those J\u2011Talks. Years later, when I went looking for it on the CJF site, it had vanished. I had to use the Wayback Machine just to prove the event had actually happened. The present tense pages still boast about J\u2011Talks and sponsors, but the Facebook\u2011branded moment, the one that presented itself as so inevitable at the time, has been quietly edited out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The partnership wasn\u2019t just about money and visibility. Facebook positioned itself as a guardian of truth. During the Covid era, it rolled out aggressive \u201cmisinformation\u201d policies, leaning on third\u2011party fact\u2011checkers to flag or throttle content. Public\u2011interest groups praised platforms for fighting disinformation; academics mapped the new ecosystem of fact\u2011checking and platform governance. On paper, it sounded like a civic upgrade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In practice, the system behaved like a blunt instrument. Rigorous investigations, including those from scientific journals, were wrongly labelled \u201cmissing context\u201d or \u201cfalse\u201d by overzealous partners. Posts from Oxford University, who was recruiting volunteers to test the AstraZeneca vaccine, Facebook flagged and blocked it. Posted memes about red and black ants locked in a jar, a metaphor about how elites shake the container and then watch the insects blame each other, Facebook flagged it as \u201cmisinformation.\u201d It wasn\u2019t a factual claim. It was a metaphor. No matter: the machine said no.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n That was the tell. Journalism had outsourced part of its epistemology to a platform whose first loyalty was never to truth, but to risk management and reputation. The \u201cfact\u2011checking\u201d frame made it easier for news organisations to ignore the asymmetry: journalists were lending their credibility to Facebook; Facebook was lending its infrastructure to whoever fit its current definition of safe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then came the Online News Act.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2023, Canada passed Bill C\u201118, requiring platforms like Google and Meta to compensate news outlets for the use of their content. Meta\u2019s response was not to negotiate, but to flip a switch. It \u201cbegan the process of ending news availability permanently in Canada\u201d on Facebook and Instagram: no news links, no news pages, no sharing news articles at all. Millions of Canadians simply stopped seeing journalism in their feeds. Publishers lost huge amounts of traffic and revenue; some estimates suggest that the ban reshaped the country\u2019s media landscape and deepened the crisis in local news.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The same company that had spent years funding accelerators, co\u2011sponsoring J\u2011Talks, and handing out \u201cdigital innovation\u201d awards to Canadian newsrooms walked away from Canadian news entirely the first time the billable hours stopped making sense. Ottawa and Meta are still \u201cin talks\u201d to restore news, but the message was clear: for Facebook, journalism is a toggle, not a pillar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is what a \u201cfuture that didn\u2019t happen\u201d looks like up close. Journalism imagined Facebook as a partner in truth, a distribution backbone, even a source of funding for innovation. Facebook imagined journalism as content, prestige, and, in a pinch, expendable. When their interests aligned, there were awards, J\u2011Talks, and PowerPoints about engagement. When they diverged, Canadians couldn\u2019t even share Canadian news in their own feeds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The lesson isn\u2019t that platforms are evil and newsrooms are pure. That is hardly the case. It\u2019s that journalism repeatedly misreads power. It keeps confusing a business relationship for a shared mission, and then acts shocked when the logic of the platform asserts itself. The same industry that once treated Facebook as a civic partner now treats AI vendors as either oracles or omens. It is making the same category error: mistaking someone else\u2019s product roadmap for its own future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If Part 1 was about journalism throwing itself at gadgets, Part 2 is about something more intimate: journalism throwing itself at a platform. For a decade and a half, news organisations treated Facebook as both a distribution pipeline and a civic partner. 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