India’s foreign ministry on Thursday incorrectly claimed that Canada had blocked the social media handles of Australian news website The Australia Today.
External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal, during a press briefing on November 7, appeared to have been referring to the Facebook account of the website. However, in reality, Meta – the parent company of social media website Facebook – blocks all news outlets for users in Canada, not just The Australia Today.
The news portal describes itself as a website that is “focussed on multicultural communities and the Indian subcontinent”.
During the press briefing, a journalist asked Jaiswal if it was true that the social media pages of The Australia Today had been banned in Canada. To this, the spokesperson told the journalist that he had “heard it correctly”.
Jaiswal claimed this happened just a few hours after the social media handle posted content about a press conference of External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar with his Australian counterpart Penny Wong.
“What I will say [is] that these are actions which yet again highlight the hypocrisy of Canada towards freedom of speech,” the external affairs ministry spokesperson had said.
Several media outlets amplified the claim, without noting that Meta has blocked all news outlets for Canadian users.
On November 8, Jitarth Jai Bharadwaj, the managing editor of The Australia Today, thanked news outlets that “stood by us during a challenging time”. In a post on X, he claimed that the ban on the website’s social media handles had been implemented “under orders from the Canadian government”.
The post on The Australia Today’s X handle included a partial screenshot of its blocked Facebook page. The screenshot shows a message that reads: “People in Canada can’t see this content.”
However, according to The Wire, a portion of the screenshot that has been cropped out reads: “In response to Canadian government legislation, news content can’t be viewed in Canada”.
The message is followed by a link that says “Learn More”, which leads to a Facebook news update. The news update dated June 1, 2023 is titled “Changes to News Availability on Our Platforms in Canada”.
The article’s first paragraph said that Meta, in order to comply with Canada’s Online News Act, had begun the process of ending news availability in the country.
“News publishers and broadcasters outside of Canada will continue to be able to post news links and content, however, that content will not be viewable by people in Canada,” the update further read.
Canada’s Online News Act requires tech giants such as Meta and Google to pay news outlets for articles shared on their platforms. The law seeks to ensure that social media giants share a part of the advertising revenue they generate with media outlets whose links are posted on their platforms.
In November last year, Google signed an agreement with the Canadian government, under which it would distribute 100 million Canadian dollars, or over Rs 606 crore, to news outlets every year.
Meta, however, has objected to the law and has claimed that it does not “benefit unfairly” from users sharing links to news content on our platform. Since it has not signed an agreement with the Canadian government on paying money annually to media organisations, it blocks all news outlets on its platforms in the country.