A threat from Facebook parent Meta that it might cut off links to news articles on Canadians’ feeds if the federal government passes a bill requiring large digital platforms to negotiate payments to Canadian journalism companies is posturing, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez said.

“We continue to have constructive conversations with Facebook, as recently as a couple weeks ago, yet they continue to pull from their playbook used in Australia,” he told The Logic through a spokesperson.

The threat: In Australia in February 2021, as that country worked on the legislation the Canadian Liberals have used as their model, Meta stopped allowing links to Australian news sites. The company made similar complaints as in Canada: that the bill “fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content,” that news makes up little of the content on Facebook and that publishers benefit from posts on Facebook more than Facebook does.

The Canadian version: A Meta Canada spokesperson could not say what a ban would look like: “If we were forced to make that transition, we would want to work with users, government and others including news organizations to make sure it was transparent and predictable,” Lisa Laventure wrote in an email.

The consequences: In Australia, Meta created some unintentional ones. Some emergency services were affected, for instance, along with other government entities, charities and small businesses. Facebook restored links to those sites over a period of hours; Laventure called it a “technical error.”

The BBC and the Australian Associated Press observed that without news in the mix, searches turned up lower-quality content during the blackout—more conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine material when users searched for “COVID-19,” for instance.

A study by Jean-Hugues Roy of the Université du Québec à Montréal looked at French-language posts on Facebook in 2020 and tried to simulate what content would look like without news. Roy found personal posts dominated talk about current events amid a lot of celebrity gossip, recipes, astrology and religion. 

The mutual blink: After a week of no-news Facebook in Australia, following talks between Mark Zuckerberg and Australia’s treasurer, Meta restored news links for users. The Australian government amended its bill to allow exemptions for platforms that made substantial enough contributions to journalism to satisfy the government.

Facebook and Google have struck many funding agreements and have not yet been ordered into arbitration with any outlet.

The next steps in Canada: Bill C-18 remains in the hands of the House of Commons heritage committee, whose next move is to decide whether to call more witnesses or to begin clause-by-clause consideration of amendments.